Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion 9780674978720

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I N D I A N S I N T H E FA M I LY



Indians in the Family ADOPTION AND THE POLITICS OF A N T E B E L LU M E X PA N S I O N



Dawn Peterson

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2017

Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Peterson, Dawn, 1977– author. Title: Indians in the family : adoption and the politics of antebellum expansion / Dawn Peterson. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016041940 | ISBN 9780674737556 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Indians of North America—Cultural assimilation— Southern States—History—19th century. | Indians, Treatment of— Southern States—History—19th century. | Indians of North America— Southern States—Politics and government—19th century. | Adoption— Southern States—History—19th century. | Imperialism. | Slaveholders— Southern States—History—19th century. | Southern States—Politics and government—1775–1865. | United States—Politics and government. Classification: LCC E78.S65 P48 2017 | DDC 975.004/97—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016041940

For Davin

Contents

Introduction: Unusual Sympathies

1

1.

Adopting Indians into the Early U.S. Republic

10

2.

American Indians and the Post-Revolutionary Era

43

3.

Domestic Fronts on the Eve of 1812

81

4.

A Choctaw Mother in Slave Country

107

5.

Adoption in Andrew Jackson’s Empire

139

6.

Defending “Civilization”

173

7.

Adoption and Diplomacy

208

8.

Choctaw Schooling

234

9.

Adoption and the Politics of Indian Removal

272

Epilogue: The Limits of Sympathy

303

Appendix

315

Notes

317

Acknowledgments

401

Index

407

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Introduction Unusual Sympathies

In 1811 a prominent Choctaw woman named Molly McDonald placed her eleven-year-old son in the home of Silas Dinsmoor, an unpopular U.S. government official who had just established a sprawling plantation in her homelands in what is now the state of Mississippi. Dinsmoor—who served as federal liaison between the Choctaw Nation and the U.S. government—was openly disdainful of Choctaw people, politics, and sovereignty, viewing his slaveholding household as superior to the household arrangements of the Choctaw communities that surrounded him. Nonetheless, he eagerly incorporated McDonald’s son into his family. Why would McDonald and Dinsmoor, whose interests appeared to be at odds, share a stake in McDonald’s son? That question lies at the heart of this book. For as it turns out, the transfer of McDonald’s son to Dinsmoor’s care was not unique. In the decades following the U.S. Revolution, a number of American Indian women and men and elite U.S. whites supported the placement of Native children into “white” households throughout the existing United States. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, a small group of American Indians in the Southeast from the Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw Nations became particularly interested in sending their children— especially their sons—to live in slaveholding households in the U.S. South. U.S. slaveholders proved more than 

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eager to oblige, enfolding Indian children into their domestic spaces and the white and black worlds that shaped them. Most of the children who lived in U.S. homes spent only short periods of time there, receiving educations in English language and literacy skills as well as in numeracy, literature, and Western philosophical and religious traditions. Those incorporated into U.S. plantation households learned other lessons still as they watched white guardians try to assert mastery over the African and African American women, men, and children they enslaved. These U.S.-educated youth then returned to their tribal nations— and their families—where many took up prominent leadership positions. Despite the brief nature of the majority of these domestic arrangements, those who housed and schooled Indian boys and girls understood their actions as a form of adoption. They saw themselves as absorbing Native children into their white families—however temporarily— and framed their actions as part of a broader initiative on the part of their new republic to assimilate Indian people into its expanding territorial borders. White adopters took their cue from some of the most influential governing officials of their day. As the United States aggressively pushed into Indian territories east of the Mississippi River between 1790 and 1830, a wide range of governing elites declared the importance of assimilating Indian people into the U.S. body politic, which they described as a free white national family. Rather than emphasizing the various forms of violence required to dispossess Native people of their ancestral territories, government officials turned U.S. imperialism into a family story, one supposedly capacious enough to include American Indian people—but not blacks—within “white” kinship systems, the foundational familial frameworks that shaped the rights of citizenship. A number of established and would-be government officials themselves incorporated Indian children into their family spaces. Andrew Jackson— perhaps the most infamous figure in nineteenth-century U.S. history for his assaults on Indian sovereignty and Indian lives— embraced the discourse of adoption as he and other U.S. slaveholders worked to acquire Southeast Indian territories for the U.S. plantation economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. After invading Creek territories in what is now Alabama in 1813 and ordering the destruction of a Creek village— and the massacre of the women, children, and men who lived there—Jackson pronounced an “unusual sympathy” for a Creek infant orphaned by his troops. The Southern general sent the child home to be adopted into his plantation household in Nashville, Tennessee.

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In current times, the term “adoption” relates to a specific liberal familial and reproductive arrangement whereby an individual or a two-parent couple legally asserts exclusive parentage rights over a child or children who are not immediate offspring. Within this framework, adopted children are by law full members of their adoptive families, with no fewer rights than children born into these kinship units. The vast majority of the U.S. whites incorporating American Indian children into their homes during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries did not see their roles in these legalistic terms, nor is there any evidence that the Indian children living within these domestic spaces believed themselves to be similar in status to the household’s white children. Further, not all white guardians used the term “adoption” per se when it came to defining their relationships with the Indian children in their care. At this time, adoption had not yet been formally codified in the United States. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, adoption was a rather unpopular practice among U.S. whites due to common beliefs that only “blood” relations should inherit family property as well as to the continued availability of other forms of voluntary and involuntary child transfer, such as wardship and indenture. These prevailing guardianship practices at times left both birth parents and surrogate caretakers with some form of legal authority over the children in question, which could lead to conflicts over parental rights and responsibilities. Those who did formally adopt children during this era typically legitimated their parental status and their adopted children’s inheritance rights through specific legislative acts. Massachusetts would pass “the first modern adoption law in history” in 1851, setting a precedent for, in the words of legal historian Jamil S. Zainaldin, “the judicially monitored transfer of rights with due regard for the welfare of the child and the parental qualifications of the adopters.” This book’s use of the term “adoption” more flexibly denotes an array of practices focused on the assimilation of Indian youths that were held together by declared desires on the part of U.S. whites to situate Indian people as members of the U.S. body politic. Within this framework, Indian people were supposed to enjoy liberty in the United States, but were also to remain socially and politically subservient to U.S. whites. Unlike people of African descent, whose identities became synonymous with slavery—a status that denied black people the very rights or recognition of kinship—Indians were described as free people who could potentially be incorporated into the U.S. national family, a process that in turn mandated that Indians adopt the social, economic, and familial values associated with white U.S. society. Desires to

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adopt Indians into the United States reflected ambitions to position Indian people as at once on an equal footing to whites yet simulta neously pliable to white demands. Indians were to be assimilated as free children within the white national family, yet they were also supposed to remain permanent youth whose social, political, and intellectual maturity was constantly deferred. Those who believed they could incorporate Indian people into the United States on their own terms quickly came to confront Native resistance strategies that they had not expected. A number of American Indian communities saw significant utility in placing their children among U.S. whites for schooling. In the North, those whose lands stood in close proximity to U.S. settlements were especially keen on acquiring for both young girls and boys English language and literacy skills as well as a facility in technical arts— particularly spinning, for women—in order to better position themselves economically and politically with respect to their acquisitive white neighbors. Native families’ placement of young children within U.S. homes was not a sign of their subservience to the United States but quite the opposite. The forms of knowledge their children could obtain in the midst of empire would better allow these youths and their extended families to oppose it. American Indian nations throughout North America had their own indigenous definitions of captivity, slavery, and adoption, ones that evolved over time and, particularly in the Southeast, took on increasingly racialized characteristics in concert with European and U.S. colonial invasions into their homelands. These shifting understandings of warfare, race, labor, and kinship directly shaped Native decisions to place their children in U.S. homes. Among the Southeast Indians who sent their children away, most appear to have at least entertained ambitions to hold people of African descent as slaves, if they were not already engaging in the practice of racial slavery. Rather than viewing white guardians as the permanent adoptive parents of their children, most of these families sent their children to live in U.S. households with the full expectation that their youth would return home and use the skills they had acquired in U.S. homes in the ser vice of self-determination. And their children did return. Although Andrew Jackson’s adopted son—who came to be called Lyncoya—was an exception, many of the Southeast Indian men schooled within the United States used their educations in dramatically different ways than their adopters intended. After learning the ideas and practices forwarded by their U.S. mentors—including those revolving around antiblack racism and plantation

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slavery—they drew upon their knowledge and experiences to oppose U.S. Southerners seeking to dispossess tribal nations of their homelands. While the number of Indian children living in U.S. households was relatively small, the study of their lives and their migrations is illuminating. The political and familial commitments of white adopters, American Indian parents, and adopted Indian children offer a unique vantage point into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nation building on the part of the early U.S. republic and those American Indian nations forced to contend with it. The expansionist visions of U.S. settlers and the complex forms of resistance engaged in by American Indian women and men in the decades before the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Indian people living east of the Mississippi River to the trans-Mississippi West reveal how a subset of whites and Southeast Indians used adoption, kinship, and slavery to impose and resist U.S. imperial rule. For white adopters, incorporating Indian children into their homes supported U.S. settler expansion. For the select group of American Indian women and men who placed their girls and boys in U.S. homes, acquiring the forms of knowledge valued within the settler societies in their midst was a crucial step in assuring political, economic, and territorial sovereignty. By the early 1800s a small but powerful class of Southeast Indian elites saw white slaveholders’ interest in incorporating Native children into their plantation homes as particularly useful. With U.S. planters invading the Southeast at unprecedented rates, these Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw women and men sent sons to acquire the racialized educations that increasingly supported political and economic authority in the slaveholding South. U.S. expansionists would come head-to-head with these Native strategists in the 1820s. Through their selective engagement with some of the colonial logics and practices that drove U.S. settler expansion in general, and the plantation economy in particular, adopted Southeast Indian sons effectively thwarted state and federal claims to their lands, so much so that Southern slaveholders advocated for the forced removal of Southeast Indian nations west of the Mississippi River in 1830. Indians’ access to U.S. domestic regimes proved more threatening than most U.S. imperialists had anticipated. Instead of being solely an imperial practice of assimilation, adoption proved a Native-driven strategy of infiltration, allowing elite Indian men privileged access to and knowledge about powerful and influential spaces within an expanding U.S. empire.

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The transfer of American Indian children into foreign homes and institutions during the post-Revolutionary period reflects both a continuity in European and Euro-American relationships with Indian people and a distinct moment in North American history. On the one hand, the practice existed prior to the formation of the United States and would endure long after the forcible relocation of American Indian nations during the 1830s. Well before Molly McDonald sent her son to live in a Mississippi plantation household or Andrew Jackson raided the Creek Nation, American Indian people found themselves living in European and Euro-American homes. Christopher Columbus enslaved Native people from the Caribbean after his first voyages to the Americas, inaugurating a practice that persisted among the French, Spanish, and British empires and within some U.S. settlements well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1561 Spanish adventurers took a young man—who some believe was probably a member of the Chiskiak tribe—from the Chesapeake region. Dubbed Don Luis de Velasco, he was trained in the Spanish language and Christian religion in Mexico and then sailed back to the Chesapeake on two Spanish colonization expeditions to serve as a guide and interpreter. (Much to Spanish dismay, Don Luis apparently sabotaged both expeditions, eventually returning to his people in 1570). In 1584 English explorers attempting to establish their empire’s first colonies in North America carried two Algonquian-speaking Indians from the Chesapeake region back with them to England. One was Manteo, the son of the leader of the Croatoan polity, and the other was Wanchese, who hailed from the Secotans. These young men’s voyage appears to have been more voluntary than those migrations previously orchestrated by the Spanish, as the English left two of their own men in exchange for their Native travelers. Manteo and Wanchese, however, would develop very different impressions of their European hosts during their stay in London, which would influence their relationships with British colonists upon their later return to their homelands in what would become known as Virginia. Manteo declared himself fairly treated and developed a lasting alliance with British colonists, one that he undoubtedly hoped would better conditions for his own people. Wanchese, on the other hand, did not trust the British empire and, once back in his own community, worked to unseat the unwelcome settlers who proved to be disloyal and treacherous in their treatments of Indian people. The Roanoke settlement that threatened Wanchese’s community disappeared within a matter of years. However, the Jamestown settlement that

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would arise in its wake also circulated Indian people through the British metropole, most famously in the case of Amonute, who would become known to the British by her nickname, Pocahontas. Initially held hostage by Jamestown settlers, Amonute eventually married into the British community and traveled to London with her husband and their infant son. Like Manteo, she made the journey to improve conditions for her Native polity— in this case the powerful confederacy built up by her father, Powhatan—as the English took more and more territory by force. Her death in London from illness cut short her attempts at diplomacy and the promotion of coexistence between the two polities. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as British colonists claimed territories in what would become known as New England, as well as in the mid-Atlantic and in the South, other Indian people would choose to enter into English households— and, later, into English-run schools—in order to learn the English language and understand the spiritual beliefs that they believed might help them to better navigate British settlement and the devastation it wrought. Others still found themselves held in colonial households by force. Indeed, European settlers’ desires for Indian slaves and indentured servants put countless Indian people— particularly women and children—in Euro-American homes, dramatically reshaping Native politics, communities, and even nations in the process. Jumping forward to the close of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century, the U.S. federal government endorsed the forced relocation of American Indian children into boarding schools, hoping to erase a new generation’s indigenous cultural and kinship ties and, by extension, their claims to their homelands. Here, too, Indian children went into the households of U.S. whites as families “adopted out” from boarding schools, a practice that often translated into the indenture of Indian girls and boys as laborers on U.S. farms and in white homes. Throughout the twentieth and into the present century, American Indian families have faced ongoing struggles to protect their children from U.S. adoption and fostering practices. State and federal agencies and private adoption ser vices continue to undermine both the familial and national rights of indigenous people by transferring children away from their Native kin and tribal communities to wealthier— and most often white—families, despite existing laws aimed to protect Indian families and nations from precisely these kinds of predatory processes. In the words of Muscogee legal scholar Sarah Deer, such ongoing forms of child removal have “sent a variety of messages to tribal communities, particularly

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to mothers. The dominant society disapproved of the way Native people parented.” Like their predecessors and their later counterparts, white adopters in the Revolutionary and early national period believed themselves to be superior to American Indian people and drew upon this sense of entitlement as they encouraged the separation of Native children from their families and into white-controlled spaces. They believed the right to have children and to control the upbringing of young people was the privilege of white settlers and not of those whose lands they invaded. Settler colonialism revolves around the foreign settlement of indigenous land and the subsequent declaration on the part of colonists of their own nativity to indigenous space, a move that correspondingly defines indigenous people as foreigners in, or alien to, their own homelands. Within this formulation, indigenous people are not only positioned as unworthy of reproducing their own communities as they see fit but are actively prevented from doing so. The goal of settlers is to circumscribe or eliminate both the power and the populations of indigenous people so as to make lands and resources available to colonizers. Within the context of British and U.S. settlement of North America, when settlers encouraged—or even demanded—the migration of American Indian children into their homes, they were hoping to erase or severely limit autonomous Native futures outside of the purview of the British colonies or the United States. During the early national period, U.S. officials were formulating expansionist policies oriented around the geopolitics of racial slavery and in direct response to specific American Indian resistance strategies developed to thwart U.S. imperial ambitions. In this particular historical moment, the politics of adoption took on singular importance, becoming a means to define citizenship within a slaveholding republic and to undermine indigenous resistance struggles based upon pan-Indian unity movements and transatlantic commercial, trade, and military alliances with European empires. Adoption signaled who could be incorporated into a free white national family—and who could not— and structured imperial policies aimed at assimilating American Indian people and the nations to which they belonged into a U.S. “domestic” economy. As Indians’ powerful international connections began to crumble in the face of U.S. policies and shifting European geopolitical interests by the first decades of the nineteenth century, however, adoption also became a way for Native people to defend themselves against exploitative

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U.S. international agendas and economic systems, especially as the possibilities for military defense evaporated. Racial slavery— and the ideas about “blackness,” “whiteness,” and “Indianness” it helped to engender— sat at the heart of U.S. contests over human beings and territory. It determined who would—or could— occupy specific household and territorial spaces, shaped economic relationships and political governance across U.S. settlements, and calibrated the kinship systems informing how individual women, children, and men were able to labor, live, and love. With plantation slavery directly driving U.S. colonization of the Southeast—the region that would become known as the “Deep South”—and a small but influential group of Southeast Indian women and men themselves beginning to hold black people as property, chattel slavery came to shape decisions by a number of mothers, fathers, uncles, and aunts to send children to live in the United States. The women and men who placed their children within U.S. slaveholding households acted in ways to better position themselves— and often their tribal nations more broadly—within rapidly changing imperial worlds. Yet they also subjugated people of African descent, a move that distinguished them from the vast majority of the individuals living within their Native nations, not to mention in American Indian nations across the continent. It lent them their own unusual sympathies with the very slaveholders who sought to dispossess them of their homelands. By following a series of families and the ways in which the lives of the individuals who composed them intersected across nations and empires, the stories told in the following chapters seek to provide an intimate glimpse into the history of nation building— and of attempts to destroy indigenous nations—in post-Revolutionary North America. Adoption, expansion, and slavery would serve as important and intertwined practices in these familial, national, and imperial stories, shaping the daily lives of people of American Indian, African, and European descent and influencing U.S. and Southeast Indian political governance. Ideas about kinship and race became central in competing claims to land, labor, and citizenship in the post-Revolutionary era. They directly informed imperial policy decisions and articulations of selfdetermination, structuring a diverse range of struggles for individual and collective sovereignty and freedom in the process.

1 Adopting Indians into the Early U.S. Republic

The adoption of american indian youths by U.S. whites in the decades following the U.S. Revolution took place in both the North and the South. Some who engaged in the practice did so for only a few years, while others declared their intentions to adopt these children permanently as part of their families. Isaac and Hannah Jackson, members of the Society of Friends in Philadelphia, housed Mary Peters and Margery Jacobs, two young Stockbridge Indian girls, between 1797 and 1801. In 1811 Silas Dinsmoor, a slaveholding federal Indian agent from New England, brought a young Choctaw man named James Lawrence McDonald to his Washington, Mississippi, household, raising him for two and a half years before taking him to Washington, DC, for further schooling. Thomas McKenney, the U.S. superintendent of Indian trade, would declare his intention to incorporate McDonald into his own home several years later, keeping the young man in his Georgetown mansion for three years. Major John Donly of Nashville, Tennessee, housed and educated Greenwood Leflore, a future Choctaw chief, for five years beginning in 1812, while Peter Pitchlynn, another Choctaw leader, spent several years of his childhood in the Alabama home of John Terrill. Others, like then–Tennessee general Andrew Jackson, developed long-term relation

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ships with Indian youths. After ordering the invasion and destruction of Upper Creek towns, Jackson sent an infant survivor home to be adopted into his family. Lydia Carter, a widowed plantation mistress in Natchez, made plans to raise a young Osage girl within her slaveholding household, though a white missionary couple working in Cherokee territories ended up adopting the child into their family instead. Such collective actions on the part of a diverse group of white men and women reveal that adopting Indians became a common-sense practice in the decades after the Revolution. Individual adopters drew upon personal ambitions and desires as they incorporated American Indian children into their middle- and upper-class households. However, collective behaviors on the part of these U.S. whites shed light on a broader political project that drew upon adoption— and the ideas about reproduction that underpin it— to legitimate and even advance the forms of dispossession required to push U.S. territorial boundaries beyond the Atlantic settlements that comprised the thirteen original colonies. Far from being incidental or accidental, ideas about reproduction and kinship— and the lived practices that emerged out of them—both justified and sustained inequality in post-Revolutionary Anglo-America. Shared beliefs on the part of Euro-Americans about women’s varying capacities for childbirth, child-rearing, and nuclear-oriented family life shaped social identity, political organization, and economic opportunity within an expanding slaveholding republic. Ubiquitous characterizations of “black,” “white,” and “Indian” women’s physical attributes and social and cultural practices with regard to bearing and raising children undergirded ideas about racial difference, national citizenship, and territorial sovereignty, undermining African Americans’ claims to freedom and indigenous people’s rights to their own national territories. Such characterizations set the parameters for who had the right to exercise individual and collective self-governance, profoundly influencing daily realities within a rapidly changing North American landscape. The practice of adopting Indians was a form of reproduction—in this case a transnational mode of acquiring and rearing young people—that gave meaning and shape to U.S. territorial expansion and the government policies that supported it. Those who sought to integrate western lands into the United States had to take into consideration both the physical presence and the political power of the American Indian nations already claiming North American territories as their own. Unable and at times morally reticent to

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defeat Indian people through outright military invasion, governing officials looked to alternative ways to achieve and justify territorial acquisition. Arguing that their visions of pushing U.S. settlements and racial slavery into Indian territories were not unjust, they described their project as supporting the propagation of the white male–headed household, a space that they asserted most effectively and benevolently governed human populations, most productively organized family and property relations, and most efficiently multiplied human life. Through various forms of adoption and assimilation, Indians were to be pulled into this U.S. “domestic” orbit and, over time, learn how to mirror “white” family models. This had moral, practical, and political implications. Declaring their mission a form of philanthropy, influential government administrators argued that they were teaching American Indian people how to multiply their populations as effectively as white people multiplied their own. While adoption and other forms of incorporation were tied to assertions that U.S. reproductive values would buttress Native populations, these practices worked to limit the defense of Native homelands. Th rough federal policies aimed at the assimilation—or “civilization”—of American Indian people, government officials sought to draw Native men, women, and children into U.S. commercial networks and coercive economic relationships in order to force Native nations to relinquish territory. When white men and women incorporated Indian youths into their homes, they were engaging in a logical extension of federal “civilization” programs. Seeking children whose lands stood within the crosshairs of empire, they began to use their households as racial laboratories in order to support, bolster, and sometimes even challenge U.S. policy. They often did so to seek power and influence in the emerging U.S. republic. However, as they brought boys and girls into their intimate household spaces, they simultaneously entered into political movements in which American Indian women and men used adoption to their own ends. For those Native people who experienced U.S. invasions of their homelands, sending children to live in U.S. homes became a way of engaging with and challenging U.S. colonization. A history of Revolutionary and early U.S. imperialism reveals the complex political terrain that helped to shape ideas about race, reproduction, and sovereignty within the U.S. republic. As rebel colonists and, later, federal administrators sought to wrest Indian lands for U.S. settlement and racial slavery within an Atlantic world theater, adoption became a mode of repro-

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duction intended to metaphorically and literally contain Indian bodies within expanding territorial borders. By the 1790s the idea that Indians were incorporable into a free white national family became formal U.S. policy, spawning a series of fictions about Indian economies and identities that would shape individual encounters between white adopters and Indian children, not to mention international relations between the early U.S. republic and Indian nations more broadly.

Empire In December 1780, during the height of the Revolutionary War, Virginia planter and rebel leader Thomas Jefferson wrote to militia officer George Rogers Clark with new military commands. Clark’s job was not to battle British soldiers within current Anglo-American colonial boundaries, but rather “a very extensive combination of British and Indian” fighters in the “hostile country beyond the Ohio.” Once there, Clark’s militia should lay siege to “the British post of Detroit” and take “possession of Lake Erie.” By putting these allied forces in the Ohio River Valley “on the defensive,” Jefferson argued, Revolutionaries could “reserve as much of our militia as possible” to counter British and Indian “enemies in the south.” Victory over western and southern “frontiers” was crucial for the colonies. In Jefferson’s eyes it was the very foundation for a future “Empire of liberty.” By defeating British and Indian troops, rebelling Anglo-American colonists would be able to “rescue” their “eastern Country from subjugation” and, at the same time, add “an extensive and fertile Country” to their boundaries. Jefferson believed his was a benevolent vision. By establishing revolutionary governance within the British colonies and then extending it outward, he would also expand upon new forms of freedom that he implied both Indians and whites were bound to enjoy. Indians within neighboring territories would be converted from “dangerous Enemies into valuable friends,” apparently celebrating the values of the new and gracious nation in their midst. Jefferson’s letter to Clark highlighted the expansionist visions that would come to characterize U.S. politics and practices, as well as the benevolent cast these visions would take. During the Revolution and in the decades after the establishment of an independent constitutional government, federal administrators such as Jefferson would argue that their nation had a right to foreign land. By the 1790s they had formulated and popularized a narrative

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in which the United States brought prosperity, liberty, and, most especially, human fecundity to the North American continent, positioning their expanding proslavery republic as a force that would generously sustain large human populations across great swaths of territory. While Thomas Jefferson would famously articulate the ideologies used to justify U.S. imperialism, his quest for territory was hardly new or unique. He grew up in an era when the acquisition of western regions served a key role in British colonial life. Long before the Revolution, British elites throughout the colonies worked to obtain lands west of their colonial boundaries in order to resell them at tremendous profit to other white settlers. For those with fewer resources, western Indian country presented an opportunity to claim land as their own, either by taking advantage of the relatively lower prices western territories fetched in open markets or by simply squatting on lands held by Native people. In the decade before the Revolutionary War, unbridled expansion for rich and poor alike appeared a likely prospect. After battling Native nations and their French allies in the continental interior over the course of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), Britain forced France to withdraw claims to lands east of the Mississippi. Settlers and speculators from across the British colonies initially rejoiced, believing that their empire would support a continued invasion of Native territories to their west. Indeed, one map from 1765 reflects an imperial vision in which Southern states would extend their territories—and the plantation economies within them—from the littoral shores of the Atlantic to the banks of the Mississippi (Fig. 1–1). Thwarted economic ambitions involving indigenous lands proved a major factor in sparking colonists’ calls for political independence from Great Britain. Rising elites such as Jefferson had grown up in households made prosperous by speculation schemes and, as these young men matured, they expected to follow in their families’ footsteps. North American geopolitics, however, soon reshaped the futures of these wealthy colonists. Britain may have forced France to surrender in 1763, but the American Indian people who claimed the continental interior had little cause to welcome British settlement. They had spent decades organizing against Anglo-American encroachment on their homelands by allying themselves with rival European powers, and particularly with France and its extended trade empire, as well as with one another in pan-Indian unity movements prepared to collaboratively defend indigenous territory. They did not see a British victory

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figure 1–1. “Cantonment of the forces in North America 11th. Octr. 1765,” Courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, DC, https://lccn.loc.gov/gm72002043.

over France as a victory over their own communities. Drawing on the prophetic teachings of Delaware spiritual leader Neolin, people from farranging and widely diverse nations in the Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region rose up against British occupation after the close of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, attacking thirteen British military posts stationed in their homelands. British colonial administrators were hardly known for their diplomacy with respect to Indian people. However, Native military and political strategies, combined with rampant speculation schemes, forced them to recognize the implications of continued expansion: colonial warfare and, in the end, the potential loss of control of far-flung settlements. To address these concerns, British administrators placed a temporary halt to settler migration beyond the Appalachian Mountains in their Proclamation

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of 1763, a move that profoundly affected white elites. While poorer colonists continued to invade Indian territories in the postwar years, ignoring what amounted to a line drawn on a piece of paper, speculators suddenly found themselves unable to gain the recognition they required from the British empire to make Indian territories legally salable. By 1774 the twenty-sevenyear-old Jefferson would rise to political prominence among the landed Virginia gentry through eloquent denunciations of British policies, among them Britain’s refusal to allow its colonists’ pursuit of “new habitations” in Indian territories. During the Revolutionary War and early national period, settlers— elite and poor alike— committed their emerging nation to expansion. While many Indian communities aligned themselves with the British, others remained divided over whether or not to take sides in what they viewed as a British civil war, and some even allied themselves with the colonists. Nonetheless, Anglo-American rebel militias ubiquitously positioned Indians as enemies to be destroyed, using the war as an opportunity to assault Indian communities, burn crops, and raze villages. For those who did not already have their sights on Indian territories, Revolutionary warfare redirected their gaze. Campaigns against Native people revealed verdant western lands upon which Indian women produced rich agricultural surpluses, sustaining their communities in many instances more effectively than did British colonists. Upon the war’s end, Revolutionary soldiers would seek ways to make these western territories their own. Representatives in the Continental Congress expressed similar desires to incorporate new lands into existing colonial settlements. In 1776 Benjamin Franklin proposed a peace agreement with England that granted the Bahamas, Bermuda, East and West Florida, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and St. John’s to the rebel colonies, and the 1781 Articles of Confederation likewise acknowledged that U.S. territorial ambitions included Canada. Peace terms did not ultimately include these regions. However, in the years after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, early leaders continued to believe that their nation’s territorial reach would grow. By 1787 Jefferson himself imagined that Indian lands in the Great Lakes region and the Ohio River Valley would eventually leave Indian hands, yielding nine new states for the Union. Racial slavery proved pivotal in the expansionist visions of elites such as Jefferson. In response to abolitionist pressures, he asserted that his imagined new states would join the nation as “free” ones, a move that effectively pro-

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hibited the expansion of racial slavery above the Ohio River. Yet as one of many Southern slaveholders leading the early national government, Jefferson fought to ensure the expansion of slavery south of the river’s banks and west to the eastern edges of the Mississippi. Along with the federal purchase and sale of Indian territories, slavery proved a financial buoy to the early republic in the tumultuous world of transatlantic commerce, as slave-produced agriculture made up a substantial bulk of the nation’s exports. By extending slavery west of existing Southern states, expansionists could secure control over an even larger slave-driven export economy and, at the same time, maintain the national loyalty of the slaveholding settlers who were already moving westward out of established Southern settlements. Indeed, by the 1780s slaveholding whites already occupied Indian lands in what would become known as Kentucky and Tennessee. Spain claimed navigation rights over the network of southerly flowing rivers that served as a transportation system for cash crops within these landlocked regions to global port cities along the Gulf of Mexico. Federal administrators believed that by bringing these Southern waters and their surrounding territories squarely into U.S. control, they could thwart U.S. settlers’ potential alignments with competing European empires. White Northerners’ financial investments in the Southern slave economy, combined with their fears that emancipated slaves would set up independent households in their own states, merged with federal financial and national security interests to help establish a ruling vision for the Southeast—including Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, Shawnee, and Seminole lands—as future slave country. Ideas about race and reproduction both shaped and legitimated the dispossession of American Indian people and the continued exploitation of people of African descent. Using language relating to kinship and human population, post-Revolutionary whites commonly argued that Europeandescended people exhibited more superior familial arrangements, child-rearing practices, and land use patterns than did people of American Indian and African descent. Indeed, they asserted that male-headed Euro-American farming families supported the most number of people on North American lands, positioning the men who oversaw these kinship units as the most deserving proprietors of the continent. Within such formulations, both black and Indian people would benefit from U.S. “domestic” governance, so much so that their own populations would thrive under it. Revolutionary-era colonists had significant material to work with as they generated these fantasies.

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For well over a century, Europeans and Euro-Americans had utilized intersecting conceptualizations concerning family, childbirth, and race to assert imperial claims over human beings and territories across the Atlantic world. Forged out of European “discovery” narratives and honed through violence over nearly three centuries of European colonialism, Anglo-American ideas about race and social and political identity drew upon comparative representations of European, American Indian, and African women’s attributed physical abilities when it came to bearing children. In other words, through differential descriptions of women’s reproducing bodies, European travelers, settlers, and philosophers made distinctions between “whiteness,” “blackness,” and “Indianness” to classify human populations into racial categories and, by extension, justify vastly unequal property and labor relations. From the earliest moments of British imperial contact with people in Africa and the Americas, early travel writers described African and American Indian women’s sexual characteristics as at once both morally inferior and physiologically superior to those of European women. Characterizing African and Indian women’s sexual lives as licentious and describing their experiences in childbirth as painless, European travelers set these women apart from their European counterparts, whose putative chastity and difficult childbirths firmly situated them within the Christian realm of Eve’s curse. While early imperial portrayals of African and Indian women drew upon similar tropes concerning women’s reproductive bodies, characterizations of women from Africa and the Americas were not always interchangeable. As the transatlantic trade in African people solidified and expanded across the Atlantic world over the course of the seventeenth century, European writers described women of African descent as sexually and physically monstrous— or “savage”— a representation that supported claims about their robust fitness for both strenuous labor and childbirth and thus their ideal constitution for the harsh conditions of chattel slavery. In contrast to women of African descent, Indian women garnered a certain representational flexibility; they could suddenly transform from “savage” to “noble” based on changing colonial scenarios. If colonists sought to position themselves as superior to other European empires, they highlighted their competitors’ poor treatment of indigenous people, even as they themselves alternately allied with, battled, and enslaved their indigenous neighbors. In these moments, Native women could suddenly take on the exulted traits assigned to Eu ropean women. These representational fluctuations, however, did not put Native women— or men—on an equal footing with Europeans. Whether portrayed as irra-

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tionally violent, hypersexual, and physically robust, or as gentle, sexually dignified, and even physically fragile, American Indian women, like those of African descent, stood outside of what were deemed to be normal sexual economies and childbirth and child-rearing customs. In this way, ideas about women’s reproducing bodies made conceptualizations of racial difference appear “natural,” accommodating European desires to own people in servitude and to govern over and claim possession of lands that were not their own. Interwoven with these formulations concerning race and reproduction were notions of kinship and household. British Enlightenment-era ideologies framed only propertied European and Euro-American men as having both the reasoning capacities and the historical knowledge base to organize nuclear families—including wives and children—within private maleheaded spaces. And this kin-based arrangement alone was believed to create stable conditions for a market-based society, while supporting political order more broadly. “By design,” scholar Carole Shammas writes, “the English household head relieved the state of many governing functions” because he ruled over those deemed dependent upon him. This accorded him both the authority to represent those within his “private” household within the “public” marketplace and in politics, as well as rights to govern over those who lived on—and as—his property. Male-headed household structures also played an impor tant symbolic function in British rule, in which a patriarchal figure asserted political governance rights over his collected subjects. As this idealized British kinship and property arrangement came to represent social and political harmony, it transformed those whose familial patterns and governance systems departed from this household model into deviant and disorderly subjects who needed patriarchal discipline. With the onset of colonialism in Africa and the Americas, women in these regions came to stand out for their divergence from British kinship norms. By asserting that women outside of European “civilization” also existed outside of a patriarchal capitalistic and familial order, British and other European colonists positioned them—and by extension their entire communities—as available to European masculine intervention and authority, even as many colonists simultaneously considered African and Indian women as undeserving of any patriarchal protections. During the Revolution, former British colonists drew upon and modified these racial classifications to suit personal and national ambitions, intertwining long-standing beliefs about race, childbirth, and kinship with

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contemporaneous economic considerations, entrepreneurial aspirations, and geopolitical exigencies. While many of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century frontier settlers who fought Indian people for land frequently characterized Indians as innately fierce and cruel, influential figures positioned farther from territorial clashes simultaneously emphasized more benign depictions of Native people. The validity of the new nation relied upon concerted declarations of intimacy with indigenous Americans. Revolutionary claims to North America stemmed from assertions that colonialera settlers had legally bought their lands from Indian nations, according England no governance rights over these acquired territories. The fair purchase of North American land would be delegitimized if its indigenous sellers lacked the intellectual capacity to act as rational market actors. Just as importantly, Revolutionary settlers wanted to make their own indigenous claims to the continent. They believed close affiliations with Native people could help them do so. From their vantage points in London, British cartoonists illuminated Revolutionary attempts to assert indigenousness to North American lands, or at the very least a kind of natural solidarity with Native people. Drawing upon Enlightenment traditions that represented indigenous women as continental territory, these artists connected rebelling colonists socially, politically, and sexually to Native women’s bodies. In “The Female Combatants” (Fig. 1–2), published in January 1776, a young, light-skinned, and half-naked Indian woman fights a richly dressed and aristocratic British woman, representing colonists’ battles for independence from a British “mother” country. The draftsperson relied upon popular Anglo-American assumptions that Indian women did not share European and Euro-American women’s sense of shame over sexual relationships. However, rather than demonizing the Indian combatant’s presumed sexual freedoms, the cartoonist used them to represent colonial rights to self-governance and independent rule. By directing a punch at the Indian woman’s bare breast, the British matron targets the sexual—read as political—liberties of the colonists. In another wartime cartoon (Fig. 1–3), a British man stuffs his Boston Port Bill in the form of a teapot down an Indian woman’s throat while another looks under a loose cloth covering her legs. Again the struggles of rebelling colonists get framed through the lens of indigenousness, indicating a need to protect both Native women and themselves from the predaceous and rapacious British empire. The implication of these images was that re-

figure 1–2. “The Female Combatants, or, Who Shall,” Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, http://images.library.yale.edu/walpoleweb/oneitem .asp?imageId=lwlpr04040. Also reprinted in Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 30.

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figure 1–3. “The Able Doctor, or America Swallowing the Bitter Draught,” Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, http://images.library.yale.edu /walpoleweb/oneitemg.asp?itemid =lwlpr03826. Also reprinted in Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 31.

belling settlers asserted their place as new natives in North America and, as such, insisted that they knew how to treat Indian women—and govern Indian land—better than did the British. While on the surface these British cartoons and the Revolutionary discourses they highlighted appeared to celebrate both the strengths and international vulnerabilities of Indian women, they reflected a broader impulse to undermine Native autonomy. Because white men’s sexual and colonial desires drove their claims to solidarity, Indian women—and the communities from which they hailed— became symbols of Revolutionary ideals, rather than real people who had a stake and say in self-governance or the future of their homelands. In stark contrast to their representations of American Indian women, Anglo-Americans portrayed people of African descent as childlike subjects whose laboring bodies needed permanent paternal oversight within white male-headed households. Commitments to both perpetuating and expanding racial slavery supported these ideas about black inferiority, with infantilized characterizations of people of African descent serving to render

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them as the domestic dependents of white male slaveholders. Forced indenture of many free blacks in the North supported connections between racial blackness and domestic servitude, as did limited access to wage employment associated with autonomous masculine labor. Native people, too, experienced indenture in the U.S. republic during this early national period, particularly in New England. Yet this enduring form of servitude was largely concealed through a number of mechanisms: white household heads gave Native servants their own European names; governing officials highlighted the partial African ancestry of many indentured Indians to erase their indigenous histories; or they simply failed to record Indian indentures at all. The resulting effects of this concealment were both the exaltation of indigeneity—at the expense of actual Indian people—and the denigration of people of African descent. As scholar Tiya Miles asserts in her study of black evangelist John Marrant, just as Indians began to occupy an “elevated space” in the national imaginary, people of African descent came to signify and represent civic abjection. “[E]ntering the sphere of the cleric, citizen, and culture hero that is strictly reserved for white men in the transatlantic Enlightenment milieu,” Miles argues, “[meant] distancing oneself from blacks and drawing nearer to Indians.” As in the British empire, ideas relating to kinship, childbirth, and household helped to make these Revolutionary-era racial formations appear to be part of a natural order. In order to justify white masculine authority, popular consensus positioned white women and children and all enslaved people of African descent in various states of domestic dependency. Celebrations of Republican motherhood forwarded the notion that white women lacked the mental acuity to run households or governments, while granting them the emotional capacity to effectively raise and govern children. John Adams would counsel his son in 1799 that a stable and well-governed society was only possible when there was “a marked subordination of mother and children to the father.” Believing only white men had the qualifications for governance, he asserted that only such a gender- and age-based hierarchy would prevent social and political chaos. According to post-Revolutionary logics, people of African descent were likewise in need of patriarchal authority, lacking both the mental acuity of white men as well as the emotional maturity of white women. This meant that they required guidance as slaves within white homes. American Indians sat in a kind of liminal space within this “natural” order. Their kinship, gender, and labor systems were

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characterized as inferior to those of U.S. whites, a move that conveniently delegitimated their cultural, political, and territorial sovereignty. Yet at the same time, they were considered to have racial proclivities that would allow them to eventually live in patriarchal families of their own. Early U.S. federal administrators both illuminated and expanded upon Revolutionary characterizations of people of American Indian and African descent. In a 1785 publication Jefferson himself most famously and explicitly revealed popular ideas about race and reproduction in the early national period. Outlining the procreative possibilities that he believed U.S. territorial expansion would enable for black, white, and Indian people, he emphasized Indians’ adoptability as free white citizens within the social and spatial confines of the United States while relegating people of African descent beyond the margins of civic life. Early Secretary of War Henry Knox would eventually lean on the racial ideologies popularized by Jefferson in highly influential policies aimed at assimilating Native people within a U.S. national “family” while working to expand U.S. settlement and black servitude across huge swaths of the continent. Native people’s political, commercial, and military power directly shaped both men’s emphasis on Indians’ adoption and assimilation into U.S. “domestic” spheres. And as the eighteenth century came to a close, American Indian nations’ ongoing assertions of sovereignty, combined with Jefferson and Knox’s attempts to undercut it, helped give rise to an era in which prominent whites began to adopt Indian children into their households.

Notes on the State of Reproduction Thomas Jefferson’s now infamous 1785 publication, Notes on the State of Virginia, both delineated and popularized the racial ideologies— and the reproductive frameworks that underpinned them—that came to shape federal governance and everyday life in the early U.S. republic. In this booklength account of the people and environment of North America, Jefferson detailed his ideas about human beings’ social and physical development. Drawing upon Scottish Enlightenment philosophers, he asserted that all people belonged to a single species, yet nonetheless reflected different temporal manifestations of human culture. That is, the world’s inhabitants did not necessarily differ from each other in their inherent potentials, only in their cultural behaviors, which signified various moments in an imagined

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history of European cultural evolution. In this teleological framework, the earliest moment in history was “nature” (or what was popularly understood as a hunting and gathering stage), followed by the abandonment of a pure reliance upon the “natural” environment for the pastoral state, in which people developed basic forms of animal husbandry and subsistence farming. Upon completion of these cultural cycles and with the emergence of rudimentary market practices, semi-barbarism ensued. In Jefferson’s scheme, the white citizens of the U.S. frontier exemplified this stage. “Civilization” was the most advanced moment in cultural time, which Jefferson associated with contemporary white European and Euro-American commercial society. In other words, anyone who did not engage in Anglo-Atlantic commerce was living in a European temporal past, while the commercially minded, propertied white man represented the apotheosis of human history. Despite its claims about the universal nature of humanity, Jefferson’s Notes simultaneously drew upon elite ideas about race, reproduction, and kinship to articulate powerful constructions of human difference. To Jefferson, racial attributes existed as a set of related and inheritable physical characteristics and behavioral proclivities having to do with sexual ardor and emotional and mental capacity. Indeed, he compared the putative sexual desires of Indians and whites with those he attributed to people of African descent, who, to him, embodied racial inferiority. “Negroes . . . [were] more ardent” than whites and Indians, Jefferson asserted, implying that such apparent sexual ardor led to a kind of permanent and volatile state that prevented African-descended people from forming “civilized” nuclear families or engaging in rational thought. As he proffered in his text, “I advance it . . . as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. . . . [Their] unfortunate difference in colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”  Using people of African descent as the ultimate signifier of sexual and thus racial inferiority, Jefferson opined that Indian men had been found wanting when it came to sexual virility. And just as too much ardor signaled a lack of mental acuity, too little ardor was not a good thing, either, as it indicated an unfitness for the physical and mental rigors of modern society and a lack of emotional wisdom for effective child-rearing. Unlike people of African descent, however, in Jefferson’s schema Indians could be made to

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match white men, whose desires were apparently in a state of harmonious equilibrium when it came to sexual wants. His claims were in part a response to French naturalist Comte de Buffon, who wrote disparagingly of New World social and economic potential by emphasizing that the environment had engendered a dearth of sexual desire on the part of Indian men. By countering Buffon’s claims, Jefferson defended North America’s suitability for economic development and, in turn, its ability to support virile Euro-American men in a transatlantic economy. “I am able to say,” Jefferson countered in his armchair analysis, “that [the Indian man] is neither more defective in ardor, nor more impotent with his female, than the white reduced to the same diet and exercise. . . . [H]e is affectionate to his children, careful of them, and indulgent in the extreme . . . his vivacity and activity of mind is equal to ours [white men’s] in the same situation.”  But Jefferson’s claims were not simply a rebuttal proving Euro-American prowess. In his descriptions of Indian men, sexual desire, and the environment, Jefferson simultaneously forwarded what would become a central assertion in early national policies with respect to Indian people: that Indians had a cultural relationship to land, gender, sex, and labor that was inferior to those of whites, but could be changed if they were taught to use their resources differently. Such changes would invigorate Indian men’s sexual potency to match those of white men’s and, by extension, shepherd them out of an earlier state of human existence into social and political maturity. In Jefferson’s worldview— one that was shared by and also influenced that of other prominent men of his day—the successful upbringing of large numbers of children gauged human prosperity. And, as he saw it, Indians’ cultural habits within the North American landscape created an environment that kept them dangerously unfulfilled in their reproductive potential. These habits left Indian men with limited sexual ardor, which, by extension, precluded their progress through the steps of human development. This in turn left Indian women to survive in an economy that slowed their abilities to bear and raise children. “They raise fewer children than we do,” he declared. “The causes of this are to be found, not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance.” Fictionally characterizing all Indian people as engaging in a state of “nature”— characterized by a hunter-gatherer economy—Jefferson claimed that Indian men’s migratory hunting patterns created harsh conditions unsuitable for pregnancy and nurturing. Indian women had to survive “through a certain part of every year, on the gleanings of the forest: that is,

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they experience a famine once a year,” he insisted. As “[w]ith all animals,” he crudely continued, “if the female be badly fed, or not fed at all, her young perish: and if both male and female be reduced to like want, generation becomes less active, less productive.” Peripatetic customs attributed to Indian men supposedly created such severe conditions that Indian women even elected to end their pregnancies. “The women very frequently attending their men in their parties of war and of hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them. It is said, therefore, that they have learnt the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a considerable time after.”  If left alone in such conditions, he warned, Indians would cease to reproduce altogether. Yet if brought into the social, political, and historical time he associated with white men’s commercial present, they could survive. In other words, incorporating Indians into the Euro-American household economy would save them from extinction. Jefferson’s articulation of Indians’ innate capacity for becoming “white” was no small matter; it supported a kind of immediate ethical urgency to save them as a population on the North American continent. Jefferson looked to specific colonial scenarios to prove his point about environment and population. Indian women married to white men and Indian women enslaved within white households, he argued, raised as many children as did white and black women in similar circumstances. He insisted that, when kept “stationary” and when “exempt[ed] . . . from excessive drudgery,” Indian women had been known to rear up to “a dozen children.” In dissociating the hardships Indian women supposedly experienced with Indian men from the practices of Euro-American slavery, Jefferson both magnified the extreme conditions he presumed women endured in their Native societies and sanctioned the overall practice of human bondage. If higher birthrates among Indians signaled a more complete fulfillment of their human potential, a central question remained. How were colonists such as Jefferson to inspire Indians to transform their economic and, hence, reproductive practices? While Jefferson believed that slavery brought about improved birthrates, Indians’ racial malleability would render their servitude in white households immoral. In fact, Jefferson deemed the enslavement of Indians an “inhuman practice” inaugurated by Spanish colonists (failing to mention Anglo-Americans’ historical role in the Indian slave trade or the persistence of Native indentured servants). Educating Indian men and

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women rather than enslaving them, he argued, was the best way to improve reproductive conditions for Indian societies. If the corrective was male-headed farming, what he deemed to be the foundation of “civilization,” an education in these gender-based labor practices would inspire future Indian patriarchs to free women from the “unjust drudgery” that typifies “every barbarous people,” for whom “force is law.” As he wrote, “It is civilization alone which replaces women in the enjoyment of their natural equality.” Jefferson’s racialized conclusions about “black,” “white,” and “Indian” men aligned with the transatlantic economies that shaped human experiences in the early U.S. republic. As a prominent slaveholder and popular apologist for the persistence— and even expansion—of racial slavery in his new empire of liberty, Jefferson situated people of African descent as permanently incapable of handling the responsibilities of economic autonomy, which included the ability to properly oversee a particular set of kin-based property relationships. Free men had the duty to comprehensively manage the household spaces that supposedly sheltered and protected wives and children. The innate sexual ardor he ascribed to people of African descent—which of course blatantly ignored the predatory sexual practices of plantation masters when it came to enslaved black women—proved that black men were not advanced enough in human development to handle such a task. Black men, women, and children therefore needed the protection, domestic management, and guidance of white men within white households. Alternately, Jefferson’s schema of human development connected Indians’ imputed sexual proximity to whites to a certain temporal affiliation with them as well. This likeness indicated that Indian people were not destined for coercive labor regimes. In a polarized racial economy, they were instead to be assimilated within the white population that Jefferson believed would eventually occupy their territories. These ideas about economy, reproduction, and settler expansion were inherently bio-political. That is, they revolved around beliefs that human populations could—and should—be managed by a state that positioned itself as invested in the growth and health of humankind. As theorist Michel Foucault has argued, bio-politics was “a general strategy of power” that engaged with “the problems of birthrate, longevity,” and other human health concerns to achieve “the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations.” To realize his vision of an expanded settler colony, Jefferson imagined a North American theater where Indians were absorbed into white society, leaving behind the cultural attributes that marked them as autonomous

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people within sovereign nations. This he asserted was in Indian people’s best interest. Indian men laboring as semi-subsistence farmers would help ensure their communities’ future by generating more food for their families and, perhaps, for commercial markets, than those who hunted in forests, where game supplies rapidly dwindled, particularly in the face of white settlement and animal husbandry. (“Where food is regularly supplied, a single farm will shew more cattle, than a whole country of forests can of buffaloes,” Jefferson wrote.) Exposed to consistent food supplies within patriarchal farms, Indian women would subsequently bear and raise greater numbers of children. While espousing a position in which U.S. expansion would benefit Indian people, Jefferson’s settler colonial bio-politics were in fact a form of structural genocide. Jefferson framed U.S. expansion as the inevitable result of male-headed household formations, obscuring a deeper truth: for settlers, population growth was intentional strategy. They committed themselves to reproducing their numbers in order to strengthen illegitimate claims to Native space. Jefferson’s declared desires to reproduce Indian populations were part of a broader ambition to make Indian people disappear into U.S. society, relinquishing their lands, cultures, self-determination, and national identities in the process. The takeaway of this bio-political vision was that if the United States promoted the education of Indian people in “white” domestic practices, then they would probably be very similar, if not identical, to whites: “To judge of the truth of this, to form a just estimate of [Indians’] genius and mental powers, more facts are wanting, and great allowance to be made for those circumstances of their situation which call for a display of particular talents only. This done, we shall probably find that they are formed in mind as well as in body, on the same module with the ‘Homo sapiens Europeaus.’ ” Reserving his ultimate judgment for sometime in the future, Jefferson speculated upon the probability that Indian people could live like and reproduce alongside U.S. whites as free members of U.S. society. Jefferson’s argument concerning the need on the part of the United States to engage in a kind of reproductive philanthropy vis-à-vis Indian communities, as well as his deferred conclusions about Indians’ racial and reproductive potential, would lie at the heart of a U.S. policy oriented around the assimilation—or adoption— of Indian people into the United States. Federal embrace of Jefferson’s ideas in his Notes did not come automatically. Rather, it was international politics that would drive government

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officials to advocate for the gradual assimilation or “civilization” of Indian people. For the first few years after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, those at the helm of the early national government structured national land policy around the direct and immediate territorial dispossession of Indian nations. According to this “conquest” theory of U.S. imperial sovereignty, all Indians had sided with the British (despite the fact that many remained neutral and some even fought alongside Revolutionary colonists) and had therefore lost their territorial rights when the British surrendered imperial rule. Through a number of treaties pushed upon Indian leaders, federal officials unilaterally redrew territorial boundaries. Conquest theory generated lasting and devastating land cessions from Indian nations but was short lived as formal policy. Since the diverse nations and communities living within the territories coveted by the United States were hardly inclined to accept foreign claims to their lands, the United States would have to gain them through outright military force. Federal administrators quickly realized that continuing to dispossess Indian people solely through military might was not only strategically risky given Indian people’s commercial and international connections, but also prohibitively expensive for a new nation with minimal financial resources. Adding to federal concerns were the moral implications of conquest. Direct assaults against Indian nations for the sole cause of claiming territory were, at least to some, morally repugnant. Revolutionary and early national rhetoric tended to describe Indian people in terms of what they supposedly lacked: hierarchical, male-centered households. Yet as federal administrators looked west, they were simultaneously forced to acknowledge Native political and economic power as they encountered highly organized political actors who had developed diverse resistance strategies adapted to nearly three centuries of European colonialism. Since the Seven Years’ War, pan-Indian resistance movements had gained ground across much of the eastern half of the continent, particularly in the Ohio River Valley (or the “Ohio country”). In addition, many Indian communities had ties to at least one European power in the Atlantic world, which they maintained through military alliance and the transatlantic exchange of furs for European manufactured goods. Between the close of the Revolution in 1783 and 1794, indigenous organizers eschewing practices they associated with the trappings of European colonialism worked side by side with Indian leaders who selectively embraced European cultural and political mores. Through such combined efforts, they solidified political

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affiliations across Indian communities, while reaffirming trade and military ties with European powers. These multiple strategies produced a shared project in which, together, Indian people would defend their territories and their political independence against U.S. colonialism. Expansion through immediate conquest created other problems for republican and Revolutionary governance. Revolutionary discourse promoting a new nation of “liberty” already fit uneasily with the perpetuation of racial slavery. The outright seizure of Indian lands further undermined Revolutionary and early national rhetoric. The primary assertion of the founders of the new republic— the inviolability of masculine property rights and national sovereignty— had been articulated through a celebration of Native governance rights, as well as through declared intimacies with Native people. Taking Indian lands threatened to further challenge national ideals. At the same time, rampant expansion could unsettle the very stability of the new Union. As reflected by early anx ieties over separatist movements on the part of Tennessee and Kentucky settlers, federal administrators feared that white settlers’ rapid access to Indian lands would undermine the vulnerable national authority that federal elites were working so hard to establish and maintain. When tensions erupted between Kentucky settlers and Indian communities living along the Wabash River in 1789, President George Washington’s first secretary of war, Henry Knox, made the exigencies of military conflict clear. He declared that it would require $200,000 to assemble and deploy the army of 2,500 men he considered necessary for “extirpating [these warriors], or destroying their towns,” “a sum far exceeding the ability of the United States to advance.”  That same year, Knox feared that Georgia and North Carolina settlers’ conflicts with the Creek Nation might spark an alliance between the Muskogee-speaking Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, provoking hostilities not only between the United States and allied Indian forces, but also with Spain. Spaniards in East Florida sustained their financial and physical security by maintaining commercial relationships with—and providing military aid to—Creek people. Creek leader Alexander McGillivray, for example, flexed his entrepreneurial affiliations with Spanish colonial administrators and his alliances with the prominent Creek leader Mad Dog, who accepted artillery from the Spanish, in his dealings with U.S. officials. Sparking a Spanish-backed Muskogean alliance, Knox anticipated, would create “an impassible barrier” to expansion, one that would put a

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mark against the reputation of the United States. As he wrote elsewhere, “the blood and injustice [of invasion] which would stain the character of the nation, would be beyond all pecuniary calculation.” Adoption became a means to address the logistical, economic, and philosophical problems generated by continental expansion. Drawing upon the environmentalist and reproductive ideologies exemplified by Jefferson’s writings in Notes on the State of Virginia, Knox stressed the need to first establish “conciliatory” relationships with Indian nations. Then the federal government would invade Indian lands with agents of “peace,” who would, over time, slowly incorporate—or adopt—Native people into the United States. This twofold process both recognized Indian people as belonging to foreign and autonomous political communities and utilized ideas and practices relating to childbirth, child-rearing, and “white” domesticity to chip away slowly at Native sovereignty and self-governance in order to make Native lands accessible to whites. To prepare the ground for Indians’ eventual assimilation into a U.S. national “family,” Knox emphasized the importance of recognizing Indians’ territorial borders. Leaning on Jefferson’s 1787 Northwest Ordinance, he wrote to President Washington in June 1789, “The Indians being the prior occupants, possess the right of soil. It cannot be taken from them unless by their free consent, or by the right of conquest in the case of a just war. To dispossess them on any other principle, would be a gross violation of the laws of nature, and of that distributive justice which is the glory of a nation.” Respecting Indian people’s national sovereignty was not just a moral necessity, Knox asserted, but also an essential step in gaining Indians’ friendship and trust. Once trust was established, the slow process of incorporation could begin. Indeed, Knox immediately undermined his initial position on Indian sovereignty by arguing that Indians needed U.S. intervention if they were to survive settler expansion. While asserting that it was necessary to respect Indians’ territorial boundaries, Knox pushed various education and trade initiatives in Indian territories, with the goal of changing Indians’ gender and labor practices so as to reflect those of U.S. male-headed households. Using Jeffersonian logics concerning Indian economies, Knox ignored the fact that Indian societies living east of the Mississippi had long practiced womencentered farming and had engaged in market-based exchange well before the emergence of the United States. Instead he described Indians as living in subsistence economies entirely revolving around the hunting of wild game.

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He asserted that white settlers would inevitably move into Indian lands, drive away the animals upon which Indians subsisted, and put their populations into rapid decline. “As the settlements of whites shall approach near to the Indian boundaries established by treaties,” Knox wrote to the president in 1789, “the game will be diminished, and the lands being valuable to the Indians only as hunting grounds, they will be willing to sell further tracts for small considerations. By the expiration, thereof, of the above period, it is most probable that the Indians will, by the invariable operations of the causes which have hitherto existed in their intercourse with the whites, be reduced to a very small number.” Knox insisted that settler populations might ultimately help the United States to gain the lands it wanted, but they would also bring about Indian “extinction.” “[I]n a short period,” Knox declared, “the idea of an Indian on this side of the Mississippi will only be found in the page of the historian.” This crisis in population could be averted, however, if Indians were taught to mirror behaviors practiced in U.S. households. “How different would be the sensation of a philosophic mind,” Knox continued, “to reflect that instead of exterminating a part of the human race through our modes of population that we had preserved through all difficulties and at last had imparted our Knowledge of cultivation, and the arts, to the Aboriginals of the Country by which the Source of future life and happiness had been preserved and extended.” Strengthening Indians’ population numbers through assimilation and “civilization” was not only morally righteous, but also financially expedient. Knox declared it “highly probable, that, by a conciliatory system, the expense of managing the said Indians, and attaching them to the United States for the next ensuing period of fifty years, may, on average, cost 15,000 dollars annually.” Meanwhile, “A system of coercion and oppression, pursued from time to time, for the same period . . . would probably amount to a much greater sum of money.” Yet just in case Indian people refused to go along with his plan, the secretary of war still reserved the option of engaging in “just wars.” Those nations who refused to take on U.S. conventions or, more importantly, to conduct “reasonable” treaty negotiations (or land cessions) with the United States were subject to invasion. Furthermore, any tribal nation failing to effectively establish centralized patriarchal rule could be disciplined by the United States. Since Indian political communities were “foreign nations,” the leaders of those nations were expected to maintain authority over their people, particularly over young men. If those men did

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not act in accordance with their leaders’ treaties, land sales, or political decisions, then the federal government could declare war upon the entire nation from which they hailed. By implying that such nations had failed in terms of governance, Knox insisted that “the United States may with propriety inflict such punishments as they shall think proper.” To encourage Indians’ adoption into the early U.S. republic Knox and his successors came up with an explicit “civilization” program, which they would codify into law through a series of “Trade and Intercourse Acts” beginning in 1790. Agents living in Indian territories would create friendly diplomatic relations with tribal leaders by working with them to keep settler encroachment at bay. Once trust was established, these agents would use diplomacy and, with the help of Christian missionaries, educational programs to teach Indians to change their gender-based labors. Indian men would give up the hunt and learn to farm and care for livestock. Indian women would move out of their agricultural fields and into the interior space of patriarchal households, where they would cook, clean, spin, weave, and sew. Finally, in a willful blindness to Indians’ long-standing market economies, Knoxian “civilization” programs posited that federally subsidized trading posts would introduce Indians to manufactured goods and, as a result, market relations. This process was to begin slowly, linking older traditions to new. At federal trading posts—or factories—Indians could exchange furs and other goods for the ploughs men would need for their agricultural pursuits, as well as the looms and spindles women required for spinning and weaving. Henry Knox, of course, was not the first North American settler to believe that he could draw Indian people into Euro-American “civilization” through education, religion, or commerce. Ever since early British settlement, Christian missionaries had consistently attempted to transform indigenous people in their own image by residing within Native societies, indenturing indigenous children, and establishing formal schools. Yet, as he selfconsciously represented his new nation-state, Knox articulated a bio-political program that attached Christian ideals to secular concerns in the name of “progress.” Leaning upon Jeffersonian claims to reproductive philanthropy, he argued that the “civilization” and adoption of Indian people into the United States created the best scenario for humankind. Educating Indians in U.S. reproductive practices would eliminate the cultural divide between Indians and whites while increasing Indians’ chances of populating their

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territories as effectively as did the U.S. whites who coveted and claimed their lands. As part of circumscribed and “civilized” national communities living on small farms, Indian leaders would then be inclined to give up “excess” territories previously used for hunting to U.S. settlement. In other words, the realization of Indians’ reproductive potential within an expanded United States could generate private property and fecundity for whites and Indians alike. “Were it all possible to introduce among the Indian tribes a love for exclusive property,” Knox announced, “it would be a happy commencement of the business.” Through intersecting formulations of race, reproduction, property, and progress, Knox created a kind of dual vision of territorial sovereignty, one that recognized the self-determination of American Indian nations while simultaneously promoting and legitimating what he framed to be peaceful social and economic interventions that would slowly incorporate Native populations and lands into U.S. “domestic” spaces and markets. Just as people of African descent ostensibly received guidance within white households, the U.S. government—under the auspices of the Department of War—would act as an adoptive father to Indian nations, protecting and guiding them as their populations supposedly emerged from what was deemed to be an early stage of human cultural development into social and political maturity. Like good patriarchal guardians, federal administrators would regulate Indian women’s reproductive potentials by acting as stewards over Indians’ national property, rendering U.S.-Indian relations at once an international concern between “foreign” nations and a “domestic” project on the part of the United States. It would not take long before influential U.S. whites would see themselves as adoptive guardians over Indian children. Indeed, Indian children became primary subjects through which individuals imagined they could intervene in Indian people’s reproductive futures.

Adopting Indians in a Post-Revolutionary Atlantic World The practice of adoption became a rational endpoint of Jefferson bio-politics and the early federal policies it helped to shape. Within the span of a few years, federal assimilationist rhetoric permeated U.S. popu lar culture, inspiring—at least in part—white men and women from the United States to consider adopting Indian children into families of their own. If Indians’

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racial characteristics owed their formation to the environment surrounding them, and if making Indians “white” preserved Native futures while generating private property for Indians and settlers alike, then what better way to “save” Indian people and support the interests of the United States than to incorporate Indians into the very spaces whose social, familial, and economic relations they were urged to emulate? While participating in diverse relationships— and embracing diverse goals—with respect to the Native people and communities with whom they interacted, those who sought to reeducate Indian youths within their homes drew upon Jefferson’s “environmental” logics concerning Indian “extinction” as well as his ideas about Indians’ racial malleability to explain their adoptive behaviors. As members of the Philadelphia Society of Friends would write to Seneca leaders at Cattaraugus in 1802, they would educate Seneca children in “well ordered families” in Philadelphia, “bring[ing] them up in Habits of Industry as our Children are.” In 1818 Thomas McKenney—who then served as superintendent of Indian trade in Georgetown—more explicitly engaged with ideas about environmental exposure when discussing James McDonald, the young Choctaw man who came to live in his home. Writing to McDonald’s previous Quaker guardians in Baltimore, McKenney described McDonald as a plant in a nursery, blossoming in ideal environmental conditions. “It cannot be other wise than gratifying to those who have nurtured this exotic to witness the congeniality of its nature with our temperament,” McKenney wrote, “and to see it put forth such promising fruits.” Even those who sought to reeducate Indians within mission schools positioned their institutions as adoptive households. Members of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions imagined their mission station on Cherokee land as an extended, male-headed family in which Indian boys and girls became resident sons and daughters. That individual familial households remained the ideal, however, is apparent. Students prized for their “capacities,” proclivities, or par ticu lar histories moved in with and were adopted by married missionary couples. White families, and especially white men, sought to place Indian children within their homes as a means to assert leadership. By declaring their households to be positive environments in which to school Indian youths in the trappings of U.S. society, white adopters advertised their own fitness for positions of power and authority. In Thomas McKenney’s case, his household was a laboratory demonstrating the efficacy of the large-scale educa-

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tional and trade endeavors he sought to implement within the federal government. In a related vein, American Board missionaries wrote epic accounts of the lives of the Indian children they placed in missionary homes and schools in their popular fund-raising campaigns to promote their mission efforts with Indian people more broadly. Some Quaker elites sought a different kind of capital through incorporation. Pacifism during the Seven Years’ War and the Revolution had pushed them outside of the masculine military culture that legitimated early national leadership. By incorporating children into Quaker homes, Quaker leaders hoped to gain the approval of both Native nations and the federal government for broader schooling programs in Indian territories, motivated, at least in part, by hopes of recovering a sense of political leadership lost since the 1760s. In this case, adopting Indians became a way to exercise nonviolent beliefs in the service of national belonging. Indeed, vulnerability shaped the politics of adoption on both individual and state levels. U.S. whites frequently incorporated Indian children into their homes during moments of social and political precariousness, while the federal government’s promotion of “civilization”-oriented policies reflected the instability of whiteness more broadly. In addition to reflecting anxieties about Indians’ territorial power, desires to fi x Indians within U.S. national and familial spaces highlighted concerns about U.S. liberal democracy in a post-Revolutionary Atlantic world. Framing U.S.-Indian relations as a family-based domestic aff air rather than an aggressive imperial project helped soothe the myriad tensions generated by a hierarchical democratic rule oriented around racial and gender disparities and territorial dispossession. The gross discrepancies between Jefferson’s simplistic articulations of a singular Indian hunting economy and the complex agricultural and market practices Indian nations actually engaged in and engendered did considerable ideological work. Nearly all Native communities east of the Mississippi River farmed. In fact, contrary to Jefferson’s assertions that Indian women relied upon Indian men for food, women-centered cultivation of “three sisters” agriculture— corn, beans, and squash— actually sustained most people’s dietary needs. While American Indian men did hunt, it was not necessarily to generate a subsistence food source but rather the furs required for the transatlantic exchange of manufactures and other European commodities, such as textiles and metal tools and weapons, that profoundly shaped everyday activities. While Jefferson and Knox emphasized Indian primitiveness and market naïveté, Indian people from the Great

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Lakes to the Gulf Coast were actually essential actors in a transatlantic and even global market economy, both generating the furs and consuming the commercial products that kept it afloat. Leading policymakers were well aware of these agricultural and market activities. Revolutionary soldiers not only marveled at women’s cornfields, they also targeted them in attempts to undermine Indians’ abilities to sustain themselves. Meanwhile, Knox’s emphasis on “civilizing” initiatives betrayed a fear that U.S. territorial aggression would spark a Creek-Chickasaw-Choctaw-Spanish alliance oriented around the protection of homelands as well as a complex network of market-based relationships. As it turned out, it was these very realities and relationships that presented both an external barrier to settler expansion and internal questions about the shape of democratic freedom, not only with respect to people of African and American Indian descent, but also among white women and men. Fictionalized accounts of Native life helped to keep these concerns and questions about imperial governance at bay. Indian societies modeled a markedly different way of organizing property, family, and community than did Jefferson’s idealized projections of U.S. kinship. Many Native societies east of the Mississippi traced genealogy through matrilineal kinship lines, a descent pattern that largely structured household spaces around women’s authority and tied collectively held territories to women-centered kin and clan lines. Although scholars debate the power that Native women exercised in pre- and post-“contact” North American communities, matrilineal descent— along with Native women’s critical role in agriculture—invested women with considerable influence over community decision-making. They actively participated in Euro-Indian diplomacy and contributed to debates over whether to send men to war. Some may have even accompanied war parties themselves. In addition to bearing children, Native women had also historically decided the fate of war captives, choosing whether to kill, enslave, or adopt outsiders as kin to replace family members lost by war or disease, and such roles allowed them essentially to determine who was and was not part of their communities. Like post-Revolutionary U.S. whites, Native people had unique and varying property systems. Generally speaking, however, individual nations exerted sovereignty over specific territories, and leaders recognized the land of particular kin and clan lines. Unlike U.S. whites, Native communities did not by and large orient their economies around private land ownership per se, but rather usufructuary rights. That is, land belonged to the kin and community networks that used it for settlement, hunting, and farming. These

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gender, labor, and property systems offered alternative social and economic models to liberal democratic rule. That they caught the attention and imagination of U.S. whites is evident. Accounts (many highly fictionalized) of white women, men, and children who had been captured and incorporated— indeed, themselves adopted—into Indian families and communities circulated widely throughout the United States during the early national period. Meanwhile, U.S. governing elites feared that the white settlers who pushed into Indian territories on their own accord proved all too willing to take up the social and economic practices of the people who were native to these regions. Misrepresentations of Indian economies obscured these realities. When positioned as in desperate need of reproductive assistance, Indian women were framed as individuals to be saved rather than figures to be respected or emulated. And in imposing a yeoman “pastoral” ideal upon supposedly prehistoric Indian societies, federal administrators and technocrats such as Knox and Jefferson could mask the fact that rather than bringing Indians “forward” in historical time and “benevolently” improving their environmental conditions, they were actually seeking to disempower them. Indian men trained to farm rather than hunt would no longer generate the furs and skins that had long served as their currency of exchange in Atlantic markets. Jefferson believed an expanded agrarian economy— one that would ultimately be supported by racial slavery— could stave off industrialization and the social discontent that accompanied it, and, in turn, find markets among European nations whose prolonged wars had ravaged their own food supplies. Yet the semi-subsistence farming practices thrust on Native communities often provided fewer immediately marketable commodities than did the fur trade, while the push for agricultural intensification mandated that the vast majority of Indian territories be transferred to white farmers, who would hold them as private property. Indeed, the point of the “civilization” program was to get Indian actors to withdraw from the fur trade with Spain, France, or England, severing the Euro-Indian commercial and military alliances that provided both creature comforts and political power in an Atlantic context. Once Indians had been dislodged from these networks and effectively “domesticated” within the U.S. political economy, the logic went, Indian lands would be there for the taking. Knox’s and Washington’s early “civilization” efforts in the Southeast reflected such desires to sever Atlantic market ties. In 1789 Knox argued that Southeast Indian nations such as the Creek and Cherokee Nations were

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appropriate subjects on which to test out his new policy. In 1792 he sent Leonard Shaw to the Cherokee Nation as the first temporary Indian agent. Between 1792 and 1795 Knox, followed by his successor Timothy Pickering, would urge Congress to approve two experimental federal factories, or government subsidized trading posts, in the Southeast. One would be situated along St. Mary’s River in Colerain, Georgia, and would attempt to ser vice Lower Creeks and Seminoles in the Spanish-Florida borderlands; the other would be established at the Tellico Blockhouse, a U.S. military post close to the northern arch of the Chattahoochee River, near the CherokeeTennessee border. The purpose of such endeavors was to draw Creek and Cherokee people away from British and Spanish alliances and attach them to U.S. commercial and territorial interests. By promoting in Indian territories male-headed farming households and the centralized and hierarchical patriarchal governments that ultimately supported them, federal administrators believed they could encourage wouldbe Indian patriarchs to ally themselves with the United States and thereby regulate their young men’s engagement in wide-ranging Euro-Indian relationships. Decentralized political structures had been a key advantage for Indian nations in transatlantic commerce. Because different political regions, townships, or even individuals within a given nation were not beholden to any single alliance with European powers, each could establish relationships with those that provided the best quality manufactured goods, exchange rates, military alliances, or colonial land policies. Such a “play-off ” system circumscribed the extent to which any colonial authority could dictate economic or political relationships with Native people. Centralized nations with regulated trade relationships, on the other hand, would not enjoy this flexibility. Discrepancies between the stated aim of federal policy to “save” Indian people from a premarket and precapitalist past and the actual resources enjoyed by indigenous people led to confusing and contradictory language among those who espoused a broader politics of assimilation. While saving Indian people from population decline was the stated intent of “civilizational” policies, men such as Knox simultaneously expressed fears about the large numbers of Indian men prepared to fight U.S. settlement. U.S. markets were supposed to improve reproductive conditions for Indians by bringing them trade relations, even though supporters of the federal factory system declared the urgency of severing commercial ties between Indian na-

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tions and British and Spanish traders. From missionary programs to trade incentives, the language promoting “civilization” initiatives declared patriarchal agrarianism to be in the ser vice of Indian population. Yet “civilization” efforts emerged in order to sever Indians from the very international alliances that had largely sustained their communities within the volatile market exchanges that constituted transatlantic commerce and that empowered them against Euro-American settler encroachment. Desires to adopt American Indian youths emerged out of expansionists’ myriad attempts to limit Indians’ political and economic power within this post-Revolutionary Atlantic context. And with Indians positioned as almost or “probably” white, the practice of incorporating Native children into white homes and institutions generated intimate and unequal relationships between white and Indian people without seriously upsetting a Euro-American domestic model oriented around white freedom and black servitude. Andrew Jackson adopted Creek infant Lyncoya into his slaveholding household precisely as he was trying to make Creek lands available for the U.S. plantation economy, a struggle that required a brutal war against Creek people and the severing of Creek ties with the British and Spanish. Thomas McKenney displayed equally calculating motives when he began incorporating young Southeast Indian men into his home as he promoted federal trade and schooling programs in Indian territories. Trade and reeducation, he argued, would help keep Indians “quiet at all times” by removing them from British influences. Both slaveholders, Jackson and McKenney situated the young men (albeit sometimes nominally) as free people within their homes who could enjoy some of the trappings, but not necessarily all of the opportunities, white kinship afforded. While prominent U.S. whites largely situated Indian adoptions within intersecting Anglo-American discourses of race, reproduction, kinship, and property, the circulation of Indian children was not solely the result of U.S. initiatives. As government officials and U.S. settlers began to effectively sever Indians’ commercial ties with Europe, Indians looked to gain a foothold in the post-Revolutionary Atlantic world by innovating their political and economic systems, a process that at times included placing their children with white families in the United States. Like aspiring U.S. elites, these Native men and women discerned political possibilities in the incorporation of Indian children into white households. Yet, counter to the “civilizing” ambitions on the part of white adopters, Indian communities recognized

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opportunities in such arrangements to generate tribal sovereignty and secure individual and national wealth on their own terms. Ideas about kinship also informed these international exchanges with the United States. Native people drew upon their own understandings of descent and affiliation when they chose to send children away and largely structured their political engagement with the United States—as they did other nation-to-nation relationships—through the lens of kinship. However, unlike U.S. understandings of kinship, which had become synonymous with patriarchal rights within the nuclear household, Native ideas about affiliation and belonging were traditionally oriented around ideas about reciprocity, respect, and interdependence. Through this kin-based exchange with U.S. whites, influential Native leaders sought to incorporate prominent U.S. figures—and the political communities to which they belonged—into their own “network of relations,” while also providing their children a leg up in the commercial practices that were increasingly dominating the North American economy east of the Mississippi. Adapting in the face of U.S. imperialism at times meant adopting male-headed farming practices and women’s domestic labors such as spinning and weaving, as well as learning the forms of literacy and numeracy that structured U.S. markets. As the plantation economy began to reshape daily life in the Southeast, select individuals from Southeast Indian nations assessed the changing landscape and responded by becoming pivotal participants in the circulation of children through U.S. households. Sending children to live in white homes— and frequently in those of Southern slaveholders—ideally created rights and responsibilities on the part of U.S. whites toward the people whose lands they invaded, while providing young Southeast Indian men the modes of knowledge that supported their participation in markets of slaves and cotton. This would allow Native families to assert spatial sovereignty over geographical regions that had become highly prized by slaveholding whites and to accumulate significant individual wealth. The first Native children to live in white households in the early U.S. republic, however, were not from the Southeast. This story begins with Indian nations, settler colonists, and Christian missionaries much farther north.

2 American Indians and the Post-Revolutionary Era

In the fall of 1790 Seneca chief Cornplanter— along with fellow Seneca leaders Half Town and Big Tree—traveled to Philadelphia to meet with officials from Pennsylvania and the U.S. federal government. Foremost on their minds was a series of affronts the Seneca Nation had experienced at the hands of treaty commissioners, land speculators, and the small groups of U.S. whites settled near their western Iroquoian homelands. Seneca people had dealt with various imperial powers long before the emergence of the United States. Over the course of the Revolution and its aftermath, however, new white settlements and state and federal land claims had made Seneca lands—and Seneca lives—particularly precarious. After their October arrival in what was then the federal capital, Cornplanter and his fellow diplomats outlined to President George Washington a series of duplicitous actions on the part of state and federal treaty commissioners and private land jobbers, who not only had robbed them of territory, but also had failed to provide even the meager payments promised in coerced and fraudulent treaties. Exacerbating these grievances was violence by U.S. whites, who stole from and murdered Seneca men and women with impunity. The chiefs desired Washington to “inquire into our complaints and redress our wrongs.” They also requested presents 

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in the form of tools and other forms of assistance under the auspices of the U.S. government’s “civilization” program. These included manufactures such as ploughs, sawmills, “broad axes, saws, augers, and other tools,” as well as a blacksmith. They wanted fi nancial support for their white interpreter, Joseph Nicholson. Finally—and perhaps most unexpectedly for Washington— they wished the president to take over the care of “nine Seneca boys,” providing these youth with an education in the United States. Cornplanter’s request that Washington accept these children might have been raised last, but it was hardly an afterthought. Indeed, it appeared to be an important goal of his travels to Philadelphia, which stood roughly 300 miles to the southeast of his settlement at Jenuchshadego in northwest Pennsylvania. For when Washington refused the boys—instead offering to “send a schoolmaster” to Seneca lands— Cornplanter sought other avenues through which to school at least some of the youth in the U.S. capital. Members of the Philadelphia Society of Friends had reached out to Cornplanter and the other chiefs during their stay in the capital city, offering to host the Seneca leaders before they returned to their homelands in what is now northern Pennsylvania and New York. Agreeing to meet with the Quakers in February 1791, Cornplanter asked his new acquaintances to “take under [their] care two Seneca boys,” including his own son, Henry Obail, as well as the son of his white interpreter. This time he met with success. After reaching out to the governor of Pennsylvania and U.S. Secretary of War Henry Knox to garner approval, the Philadelphia Quakers announced that they would take the children, appointing members to find “some examplary prudent Friend in the Country” to provide for the three boys’ care. Cornplanter inaugurated a new experiment in the post-Revolutionary era, one that would play an important role in early international politics. By the late 1790s Philadelphia Quakers had at least nine American Indian youths living among them, including two Creek boys, a “Cherokee lad,” and six girls from the Stockbridge and Tuscarora Nations. All of these children lived with the Friends upon the request of Native leaders and communities, and their Quaker hosts received the approbation, and sometimes even the fi nancial sponsorship, of the U.S. federal government for these boys and girls’ livelihood and education. This experiment would help shape late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century encounters between and among individuals from Indian territories and the United States, serving to bridge and build political relationships in a new and volatile imperial era.

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This placement of Native children in the Quakers’ care occurred during the social, political, and economic upheavals brought on by U.S. expansion. As U.S. settlers, state and federal soldiers, land speculators, and government officials sought to displace Native people in the post-Revolutionary era, Native communities responded by drawing upon their political, material, and spiritual resources to thwart dispossession. By the early 1790s U.S. expansionist ambitions bolstered armed resistance movements against territorial dispossession among a number of Native nations east of the Mississippi. Yet even as these communities drew together to present a united military front against U.S. aggression, some found armed defense increasingly untenable. Drawing upon a range of strategies, including international diplomacy and mediation, economic innovation, and selective engagement with the U.S. “civilization” program, they worked to protect their homelands, their spiritual and cultural values, and their political sovereignty in the post-Revolutionary era. When Native people relocated their children to Quaker homes, they were acting within the parameters of these resistance strategies. They believed that children educated in the United States could help their nations defend their territories, without the force of arms, against U.S. settler encroachment. After General Anthony Wayne’s defeat of pan-Indian alliances in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, increasing numbers of Native communities anticipated that the Quakers in par ticu lar could offer children and their families advantages in a new imperial era. In fact, influential leaders anticipated that those circulating through Quaker homes would play a signal role in postwar struggles for sovereignty. Quakers, too, were impacted by the warp and weft of U.S. expansion, albeit in dramatically different ways than the Indian people with whom they interacted. Finding their religious commitments at odds with the expansionist values embraced by their nation, they retreated—or were driven— from major roles in government. Through their interactions with indigenous communities they subsequently sought to change the course of the early Republic, as well as their place within it. Hosting indigenous youth became an important step in building the social relationships and political networks that would allow them to influence U.S.-Indian relations. The circulation of Native youth over the course of the 1790s took on different meanings for different actors— and reflected vastly divergent individual and national goals for Indian people and U.S. whites. Yet at the same time, the practice was linked to both Native and non-Native concerns about

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political and territorial governance, land use, and spirituality in indigenous and settler territories. Ideas and practices relating to gender came to play an important role in Indians’ and Quakers’ respective visions with regard to nation, community, space, and place. Through the adoption of indigenous children as well as mission work, Quakers sought to remake gender relations in Native territories in the image of their own idealized notions about Christian men and women. In the process, they attempted to reconfigure ideas about imperial masculinity within the United States. When Native people sent their children to live in Quaker homes, they also sought to innovate upon gender norms within their own communities as they adjusted their economies and political, spiritual, and cultural practices in the face of U.S. settler expansion. While changing labor roles for men helped shape these shifting conceptualizations of gender, many recognized that innovations in the labors of Native women could even more powerfully serve their nations’ struggles for sovereignty.

Cornplanter’s Request Cornplanter’s visit to Philadelphia took place just fifteen years after the start of the Revolution. Yet in this short period British colonists’ successful war for independent rule had deeply affected Seneca people. For over two centuries, the Senecas and the other five nations belonging to the socio-political and spiritual league of the Haudenosaunee— also known as the Iroquois or Six Nations—had managed to preserve territorial integrity in the midst of European invasion. In fact, through strategic engagement with the colonial market economy, a power ful internal political and spiritual system that linked the Six Nations together in peace, and careful diplomacy between competing empires, the Seneca, Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and, by the early eighteenth century, Tuscarora Nations that comprised the league had retained control over the majority of their territories in present-day northern Pennsylvania, New York, and southeastern Canada and maintained powerful diplomatic relationships with indigenous nations across the midAtlantic and Northwest regions. The Seven Years’ War somewhat attenuated the Six Nations’ power to thwart imperial interests over their homelands as the confl ict generated internal divisions within the league, limited commercial opportunities, and, perhaps most significantly, eliminated European rivals for the British in the Northeast, which emboldened the empire’s mili-

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tary figures and settlers to push into Haudenosaunee territories. Haudenosaunee people nonetheless remained a formidable presence when warfare broke out again in the 1770s between the thirteen colonies and the British empire. Along with other Haudenosaunee communities, the Seneca Nation initially sought to maintain neutrality during the Revolution. But as British administrators and rebel colonists each courted the Six Nations’ alliance or, in the very least, their promise not to join enemy lines, Seneca and other Haudenosaunee leaders weighed the potential costs and benefits of engaging in the conflict. By allying themselves with the British, they supported the enemy of the white settlers who pushed into Indian territories. Yet siding against rebel colonists could bring swift retribution by colonial settlers who coveted Indian lands. Decisions in the face of these challenges ultimately divided the Six Nations. Experiences with land-hungry colonists and commercial and familial ties to the British empire led Mohawks, under the leadership of siblings Molly and Joseph Brant, to support the British cause. Seneca, Onondaga, and Cayuga leaders eventually followed suit, while many from the Oneida and Tuscarora Nations—whose eastern lands stood in close proximity to rebel settlements— strategically allied themselves with the uprising. Although selected as a war chief to the British in 1777, Cornplanter was among a number of leaders who remained wary of joining a struggle whose causes remained obscure and in which the consequences of participation appeared dire. Facing threats of retaliation by American generals, his nation had initially signed a treaty promising not to take part in the conflict. After committing themselves to the British side, however, Seneca and other Haudenosaunee warriors wrought considerable damage against the rebel side, inflicting casualties against armed colonists and attacking settlers who encroached on their territories. In the end, the costs of assisting the British proved severe. During the infamous Sullivan-Clinton and Brodhead campaigns, rebel armies exulted in the opportunity to attack Haudenosaunee villages, razing more than forty Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, and Tuscarora towns and their surrounding crops and dispersing refugee populations throughout the Northwest. Haudenosaunee communities reeled from the devastation of these attacks. George Washington had earned the name of Town Destroyer as a result of his violence in Iroquois territories during the Seven Years’ War. His oversight of

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the destruction wielded against Indian people reconfirmed this unsavory reputation with his Indian neighbors. During their visit to Philadelphia, Cornplanter, Half Town, and Big Tree would tell President Washington that this name recalled the collective trauma his actions produced. “[T]o this day,” they asserted, “when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.” It is unlikely, however, that neutrality would have spared Seneca people from Revolutionary violence. For even those who sided with the emergent United States found their communities targeted during wartime, and, after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, state officials and land speculators from New York, Philadelphia, and Massachusetts; federal treaty commissioners; and individual settlers all vied for the lands of former allies and enemies alike, coercing cessions and long-term “leases” from Indian nations “by right of conquest” or simply by squatting on Indian territories. Cornplanter himself, reportedly in a state of duress, took part in a number of these treaties. In 1784 and 1789 U.S. officials pressured him to sign treaties at Fort Stanwix and Fort Harmar, which transferred huge swaths of Six Nations territory and Native lands in the Ohio River Valley to the United States without the consent of the leadership of these nations. Unsurprisingly, these treaties were immediately contested by Native people throughout Iroquoia and in the Ohio country, and remained a root concern in Indian-U.S. relations in the years to come. In 1788 New York land speculators wrested even more territory from the Seneca Nation in the Phelps and Gorham Purchase, which Cornplanter also signed. While treaty commissioners demanded these lands through the logics that, as allies of the British, Indians had been defeated by the United States during the Revolution, even people from the Oneida Nation—early allies of the Revolutionary government— suffered from the rebels’ victory. Indeed, Oneidas experienced immediate and dramatic assaults on their territories as state officials and private speculators took first steps toward building a transportation empire across New York. These Revolutionary-era affronts against Haudenosaunee people were so great that in 1798 Seneca chief Farmer’s Brother remembered the war and its aftermath as “a great tumult and commotion, like a raging whirlwind which tears up trees, and tosses to and fro the leaves, so that no one knows from whence they came and where they will fall.” Cornplanter’s journey to Philadelphia— and his eventual request that President Washington educate Seneca children—represented ongoing efforts

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to navigate this whirlwind. The chief hoped that his federal hosts would reconsider the boundaries of the unilateral treaties dictated to him and his nation in the 1780s, as well as guarantee his own community in Allegany unmolested travels downriver to fur-trade networks in Pittsburgh. His effort to use this precise moment to establish peaceful coexistence with the United States was carefully measured. Haudenosaunee people had long committed themselves to cultivating with their colonial neighbors mutual respect for territorial, political, and spiritual independence. And, in 1790, Cornplanter had good reason to believe he might extract from President Washington adherence to this impor tant diplomatic protocol. While the Haudenosaunee communities resettling after the war at Buffalo Creek, Tonawanda, Cattaraugus, Allegany, and along the Genesee River remained wary of joining the pan-Indian confederacy to their west, both they and U.S. federal officials were keenly aware that the Six Nations represented a powerful force that the United States could ill afford to ignore. Leading U.S. officials such as President Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox were reliant upon Haudenosaunee leaders such as Joseph Brant and Cornplanter, as well as the Mohican leader Hendrick Aupaumut—whose Stockbridge Nation had relocated to Oneida territories—to serve as intermediaries between the United States and confederated western tribes. Indeed, Washington and Knox were desperate to keep people within Haudenosaunee territories from taking up arms as part of these United Indian Nations, as this could significantly hinder the United States’ imperial goals. When Cornplanter arrived in the capital city, Henry Knox was formally shifting U.S. policy away from “conquest” and toward “conciliation” as a counterinsurgency strategy aimed at thwarting exactly such military alliances, opening the door for Native leaders to demand concessions from their imperial neighbors and insist upon a tenuous coexistence. Cornplanter surmised that children living under the roofs of the president and prominent U.S. citizens might secure a diplomatic relationship with the United States that would help to ensure his own nation’s survival. In the proposal he drafted along with Big Tree and Half Town, the chief explained to the president that youth placed with the leader would generate personal ties with the federal government and demonstrate Seneca people’s commitment and good faith efforts to remain at peace. Their most valued young boys—presumably including Cornplanter’s son Henry—would be in the hands of the United States, creating incentives to remain on good terms with

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federal agents. As the three chiefs relayed, “You have not asked any security of peace on our part, but we have agreed to send nine Seneca boys, to be under your care for education. . . . This will assure you that we are, indeed, at peace with you, and continue so.” Indeed, the boys’ continued presence with the president might secure the kin-based diplomatic ties that both the U.S. government and Haudenosaunee and other Indian people understood to be a central component of North American international relations. While U.S. officials sought to incorporate Indian people and their lands into their nation’s orbit and, as such, remake Indian people in their own image as adopted children, Haudenosaunee people had a different understanding of the relationship between kinship and international diplomacy. As historian David L. Preston writes, “emotional relationships between European and Indian communities exerted a powerful bearing on official diplomatic relations. . . . Ideals of community, kinship, and reciprocity— and the ceremonies preserving them—remained the bedrock of human relationship” to members of the Six Nations. Through their address to President Washington, Cornplanter and his fellow chiefs demonstrated their ongoing interpretation of leaders of colonial governments as “fathers” to Indian people. Not because they believed these political units were in fact superior, or had the right to dictate terms to Indians, but rather because fathers in Haudenosaunee (and, indeed, other matrilineal communities) played rather peripheral roles in their children’s lives, while still immersed in networks of reciprocity. Fathers were not part of the same clan lines as their children but offered advice, material resources, and affection. Children, in turn, gave their fathers respect. When President Washington refused to take the Seneca boys, signaling that they would not be included in such networks of exchange, Cornplanter turned to his “ brothers,” the Quakers, hoping to create lateral bonds of affiliation with “the Children of the Friends of Onas” instead. Placing children in the care of these U.S. whites strengthened and personalized international kinship ties that led to trust and good feeling in nation-to-nation relations. But the chiefs believed the youths could also serve purposes beyond those immediately at hand regarding the establishment and maintenance of kin-based diplomacy. That Cornplanter, Big Tree, and Half Town sought particular forms of education was clear. “[A]bove all,” they told the president, they hoped that he would “teach [their] children to read and write, and our women to spin and to weave.” “If you can teach [the boys] to become wise and good men,” they added a few days later, “we will take care that our

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nation shall be willing to receive instruction from them.” To the Quakers they were more specific. They wanted their children to receive an education similar to that of Quaker youth, including the written word. “[W]e wish them to be instructed to read and to write,” they told their hosts, “and such other things as you teach your own children.” At first glance, the educational goals of the three Seneca men for their children appeared to converge with U.S. and Quaker ambitions of forwarding the central tenets of “civilization” to Indian people. The chiefs in fact encouraged such a reading, expressing their eagerness to adopt the gender-based labor arrangements their U.S. acquaintances affiliated with human progress. Conjuring up a fictional image of declining game populations—which in fact remained quite robust in the rocky and forested lands upon which they lived—they asserted their willingness to relinquish men’s labors in the hunting and fur economy in exchange for male-headed farming patterns. “The game which the Great Spirit sent our country for us to eat, is going among us,” they declared. “We thought he intended that we should till the ground with the plough as the white people do.” The boys sent to live with U.S. whites were not meant to till the lands in question, however, as the chiefs’ interest in the particular gender-based labors associated with “civilization” was mostly strategic. Acknowledging U.S. leaders’ rhetoric set a tone of respect on the part of the Seneca leaders, as men such as Washington and Knox declaredly valued the ideas they promoted to Indian people. Touting the tenets of “civilization” also offered immediate financial benefits. Those who stated their openness to adopt male-headed plough-based agriculture had access to expensive tools such as gristmills and smithing supplies, distributed by federal officials and Christian missionaries, which both facilitated and intensified long-standing Seneca agricultural practices, including the milling of corn, and allowed for repairing firearms and other metal tools used to hunt and farm. But most crucially, these federal officials promised to recognize the sovereignty of those tribes who followed U.S. pastoral visions for Indian societies. Cornplanter, Half Town, and Big Tree used this promise to extract federal recognition of their land base. As they relayed to Washington, before even entertaining the adoption of federal promises concerning “civilization,” “we must know from you whether you mean to leave us and our children any land to till.” Yet even as Seneca engagements with the discourse of “civilization” were at times instrumental, some leaders truly appreciated aspects of the educational initiatives attached to federal programs. The acquisition of English

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language and literacy skills promised to create Native-born intermediaries who could free Seneca communities from their reliance upon paid white interpreters such as Nicholson, empowering them against fraudulent treaties peddled by predatory whites. Meanwhile—as many Native leaders had calculated since the era of European colonization—intimate experiences with colonial economic practices might enable young men, their families, and their communities to undergo the internal labor and economic transformations that would potentially secure political authority and territorial integrity. In the early 1790s Cornplanter was especially eager to send his son away for schooling to help support a sawmill enterprise. At the forefront of economic innovation among his Seneca community— and, indeed, upper Allegheny River whites as well—he courted U.S. “civilization” programs during his stay in Philadelphia in the hopes of acquiring what would become the first mill in his region. Ultimately establishing his business sometime between 1791 and 1795, he supplemented his personal and tribal income through the sale of timber to U.S. whites, with customers including the U.S. Army and the Holland Land Company. Placing his son under the guardianship of the U.S. president would have potentially benefited Cornplanter’s ambitions. A child in the care of the highest federal official would secure vital diplomatic connections for Cornplanter’s Seneca settlement and his nation more broadly—not to mention his own business concerns—while allowing his son to acquire an intimate grasp of U.S. economic and political systems. Cornplanter’s entrepreneurial interests were controversial within the Seneca Nation. By the time he traveled to Philadelphia in 1791 he had a burgeoning reputation for putting private concerns over collective aims. Historically, Haudenosaunee leadership had been based on the redistribution of material goods and a shared and reciprocal relationship to land. Yet over the course of the late 1780s some believed that Cornplanter had departed from these important precedents by securing lands for his own community at the expense of territories elsewhere within the nation and by accepting bribes for cessions. Cornplanter’s exact profits from the 1780s remain obscure. And there is little doubt that he expressed disapproval and dismay over—and even dissented from—the “conquest” treaties that facilitated U.S. land grabs. Yet at least one scholar speculates that criticisms over his participation in the devastating treaties of the 1780s led him to move away from the Seneca community at Tonawanda to his wife’s village in the Allegheny

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River Valley. When he left Philadelphia in February 1791, he had evidently secured lands in his own name from the state of Pennsylvania, including 600 acres in and around his wife’s Allegheny lands and 300 acres at Oil Creek. These were largely used for collective settlement. However, they also gave Cornplanter the advantage of territorial security as he began to embark on private entrepreneurship. Even as the impulses informing Cornplanter’s decisions concerning his son represented a departure from popular Haudenosaunee forms of political governance, his placement of his child among foreign neighbors was quite common in the cross-cultural history of the voluntary and involuntary exchange of human bodies in North America. Long before Europeans invaded the continent, Haudenosaunee people had captured and incorporated outsiders—particularly women and children—to maintain population numbers and mourn loved ones lost to illness and warfare, a practice that reached its peak as European diseases and colonial conflicts raged with the onset of the volatile transatlantic fur trade. The Seneca Nation itself was home to Mary Jemison, one of the most famous “white captives” taken during the British colonial era. In addition to capturing and incorporating outsiders, Haudenosaunee people used the strategic placement of individuals from within their communities into those outside of their nations in their diplomatic protocols. Sharing this practice with their Mohican neighbors, leaders within the Six Nations used this transfer of children in precisely the way Cornplanter did in 1790—to affirm feelings of friendship and provide assurance again future warfare. Although Washington ultimately refused the Seneca boys Cornplanter offered him, the chief had reason to anticipate a more receptive response to his request. At the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the U.S. government demanded six hostages from the Six Nations until “all the prisoners, white and black,” who were apparently “taken by the said Senecas, Mohawks, Onondagas and Cayugas” during the Revolution, had been returned to the United States. European settlers living near Haudenosaunee territories before the Revolution had also engaged in the cross-cultural circulation of people for coercive and diplomatic purposes. In 1748 Cornplanter’s own grandmother, a Dutch settler by the name of Catherine Abeel (née Schuyler), and several other white traders held multiple children hostage, including a young Seneca child, in order to coerce trade payments from their families. Growing up in the matrilineal community of his mother, a member of the Seneca Wolf Clan,

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Cornplanter appears to have had little interaction with his Euro-American father or his father’s extended family. Yet his mother may have spent considerable time with the Abeels during her relationship with Cornplanter’s father, John Abeel (also spelled Obeel, O’bail, or Obail). It is not hard to imagine her relaying the story of the captured Seneca child to her son, shaping his perceptions of Euro-American diplomacy as he himself rose to political prominence. The Six Nations had also been exposed to colonial scenarios that were not as immediately and blatantly extractive in nature. A few years before Catherine Abeel ransomed Indian children, British colonists had made overtures to educate Haudenosaunee boys at colonial schools. At the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster between the Virginia colony and the Six Nations, treaty commissioners advertised a “Fund for Educating Indian Youth” to the Native delegates, telling them—at least as Benjamin Franklin would relay it— “that if the Chiefs of the Six-Nations would send down half a dozen of their Sons to . . . College [in Williamsburg], the Government would take Care that they should be well provided for, and instructed in all the Learnings of the white People.” Haudenosaunee people varied in their eagerness to relocate their children to foreign polities, however, especially when it came to placing them in EuroAmerican settlements. Indeed, whether or not to accept colonial offers to school Native children was a subject of ongoing debate within the Six Nations. For their part, Cornplanter’s predecessors at Lancaster ultimately chose to decline the invitation to send their young boys to Virginia; they had allowed their children to be educated by settlers before and found these youth ill prepared for life in their own nations. According to Franklin, the chiefs explained, “Several of our Young People were formerly brought up at the Colleges of the Northern Provinces; they were instructed in all your Sciences; but when they came back to us, they were bad Runners, ignorant of every means of living in the Woods, unable to bear either Cold or Hunger, knew neither how to build a Cabin, take a Deer, or kill an Enemy, [and] spoke our Language imperfectly.” The end results were young men who had little utility in their Native societies: they were “neither fit for Hunters, Warriors, or Counsellors; they were totally good for nothing.” Many of Cornplanter’s contemporaries shared these earlier chiefs’ wariness when it came to sending children to live with, or be schooled in any capacity by, U.S. whites. Indeed, as they debated the utility of colonial schooling, they used arguments strikingly similar to those of Haudenosaunee

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leaders attending the treaty discussions at Lancaster. Cornplanter, however, appeared to believe that the relationships and skills his son could acquire outside of the Seneca Nation would prove useful, so much so that, after George Washington rebuffed his query, the schooling of Henry Obail, as well as of Nicholson’s son and an unnamed Seneca boy, became his main topic of discussion with the Friends. Seeking to create neither a hunter, warrior, nor counselor, but instead an entrepreneur who could fluidly navigate colonial business exchanges, Cornplanter underscored the changing worlds these boys found themselves growing up within. As he told the Quakers, “[W]e cannot teach our children what we perceive their situation requires them to know, and we therefore ask you to instruct some of them.” Since Washington had already promised to send teachers to Allegany— a promise the president made good on in March of that year— Cornplanter clearly sought more than formal schooling. A son living within a Quaker household would attach the chief to potential trade partners, diplomatic allies, and advocates, all while learning the inner workings of U.S. settler society. Given Cornplanter’s entrepreneurial interests, he likely also speculated that colonial schooling and personal connections in Philadelphia would allow both him and his son to enjoy an advantage over his Seneca peers when it came to accessing the resources that would generate both wealth and influence within—and beyond—his Native community. Henry Obail’s experiences in U.S. society seem to have fulfilled at least some of the Allegany chief’s diplomatic and educational ambitions for his son. Receiving the sponsorship of Timothy Pickering— one of the most important U.S. diplomats to northern Indian country in the early 1790s— the young man spent three years in the United States, first at the Academy and Charitable School in Philadelphia, a Quaker school for small children, then at a more formal academy for higher learning in New York, and finally at Dr. Hunter’s School in Woodbury, New Jersey. Obail’s time at these institutions may have been less than illustrious. However, not long after the youth’s transfer to the United States, Cornplanter received the sawmill that would allow him to launch his timber business. It also marked the beginning of a new era in which, with federal support, Quakers tried to position themselves as intermediaries and providers for Indian people in the face of their own troubles, becoming complicated and at times troublesome friends as the final decade of the eighteenth century came to a close.

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Exemplary Prudent Friends When George Washington refused to accept nine Seneca children in 1791, it was not yet common for U.S. political figures to host Indian children within their households for diplomatic and educational purposes. Jeffersonian philosophies concerning the philanthropic tutelage of Native youth were gaining in popularity, but the adoptive impulses to which they gave rise were not yet commonplace. Mid-Atlantic Quakers, however, were primed to inaugurate the practice of incorporating indigenous children into U.S. households as free subjects. At once prosperous and beleaguered, philanthropic and marginalized, Quakers sought to reestablish themselves within Anglo-American settler society through their desires to liaise with and, as they saw it, “civilize” indigenous people. Long before Cornplanter asked members of the Philadelphia Society of Friends to educate his son Henry, the Quakers had enjoyed strong connections with Native nations above the Ohio River. According to local lore, their history of diplomacy and accommodation with Native people stretched back as far as Pennsylvania’s founding, when in October 1682 prominent Quaker William Penn purchased land from Lenni Lenape (or Delaware) leaders beneath an elm tree in Schackamaxon. A land speculator, Penn greatly profited from selling territories to new migrants in his colony, at times before he had officially purchased them. Nonetheless, he gained a reputation for fairly acquiring clear title to the lands he sold, earning him the respected title of “Brother Onas”—the Haudenosaunee translation of “pen” or “quill”—from the Indian people with whom he interacted. Subsequent generations of Pennsylvania leaders, many of them Quakers, continued to enjoy this moniker and the legacy it represented. For roughly a century, Indian leaders strategically used it to emphasize the historical importance of just exchange and to encourage its continuance. The Friends dominated Pennsylvania politics up through the 1750s, using their positions to maintain ties with Native nations. As self-interested businessmen, they secured land and trade agreements with their neighbors to ensure their own financial prosperity. At the same time, many made attempts to live up to the title of “Brother Onas” by serving as witnesses in treaty negotiations or refusing to participate in or contribute to violence against Indian people. When Euro-American squatters organized genocidal assaults on local Indian communities as warfare raged in the 1760s, a number of Quaker men even took up arms in defense of Native lives,

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proving willing in this critical moment to forgo their religion’s firm commitments to pacifism. The rapid settler expansion that sparked the Seven Years’ War and the ethnic cleansing that became its central hallmark in the Pennsylvania region signaled the end of the Quakers’ golden era. As pacifists and Indian allies, Pennsylvania Friends received the ire of the mostly Scotch-Irish and German migrants who squatted on land in the Delaware and Ohio River Valleys and sparked hostilities with Lenape, Mohican, and Shawnee people. Either resigning from or pushed to the margins of Pennsylvania’s colonial assembly by the end of the war, Friends in the middle colonies found themselves without the political power to direct policies concerning Native nations up until the early national period. The violent land grabs that ensued would subsequently devalue the Quakers in many Indians’ eyes, with Native leaders replacing the friendly moniker “Brother Onas” with “Long Knife” for all of Pennsylvania’s residents, a special term previously reserved for the notoriously ruthless and land-hungry migrants traveling west from Virginia. Being lumped within the category of the “Long Knife” settler was not something Quakers relished. Equally difficult were the characterizations they would endure within their own colonial society. Given the fact that the Anglo-American colonization of North America was justified through discourses revolving around race, gender, and sexuality, it is no surprise that settlers waged their defeat of the Quakers along similar terrain, carrying out political battles that would come to shape the Friends’ eventual embrace of Indian youth. Leaning on the Quakers’ (recently shaky) commitments to pacifism, their history of diplomacy with Indian nations, and many Friends’ rather privileged positions as city businessmen, those in opposition to Quaker politicians characterized members of the religious society as hypocritical city elites who, in warring against fellow Europeans, showed their willingness to engage in improper intimacies with Indians, including— and especially—Indian women. In a sevenyear conflict that positioned “whites” and “Indians” as racially divergent and distinct, such suggestions cast Quaker men as improperly masculine, sexually deviant, and, as a result, both politically and racially suspect. When the Revolution broke out not long after the Seven Years’ War ended, members of the religious society found little opportunity to recover their social, sexual, or racial reputations. Their refusal to fight made them appear unpatriotic, while their pacifism kept them outside of the masculine social networks

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forged through battle against the British empire and Indian nations, further precluding their reentry into post-Revolutionary politics. Some bent to the wind of colonial politics, moving away from or redefining the central tenets of their faith and, in turn, spawning new fractures and disagreements within their maligned community. Yet many others adapted to these new conditions by doubling down on the very commitments that had driven them out of formal politics to begin with. Rather than proving their masculine prowess through war, Quaker men embraced charitable work, bringing it out of the exclusive realm of Protestant women’s— and, indeed, Quaker women’s—labors, and recasting it as men’s work. Committed to a strain of Quakerism that emphasized corporate outreach to individuals and communities they deemed morally infirmed or socially and economically vulnerable, Quakers used their particular brand of social justice to reinforce community cohesion and gain reentry into early national politics on their own terms. Focusing particularly on the abolition of slavery and communities of formerly enslaved African Americans, poor whites, and American Indian people, they made it their mission to provide financial aid as well as formal schooling to those who supposedly lacked economic resources, moral values, and appropriate educations. Through instruction in language, literacy, and trade skills as well as the nuclear-oriented familial relationships and gendered labors considered respectable within U.S. colonial society, these Friends positioned themselves as models of proper conduct. Given federal commitments to the expansion of slavery, Quaker abolitionist movements did not necessarily commend them to slaveholding federal elites. However, establishing connections with Indian delegations passing through the federal capital in the late 1780s and early 1790s, and eventually placing Indian children within Quaker households, became an important way to reenter the sphere of formal politics while redeeming relationships with indigenous people and recouping masculinities wounded by settler expansion. The federal government’s promotion of Christian missionary efforts among Indian nations placed Quakers, who declared their own missionary aspirations, in direct contact with some of the most influential government administrators of their day, re-enmeshing them within elite circles of political power. Their ensuing attempts to intervene in U.S.-Indian relations in turn rekindled desired connections with Native people. As Cornplanter’s hosts put it in their record of the 1791 “transactions” with the chief, “When any of the Indian nations go to Philadelphia on business with the government, it is thought proper by Friends there to continue an old

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custom of shewing a friendly regard to them, in order to inculcate a peaceable disposition, and to remind them of the cordiality, which, from the beginning, subsisted between their ancestors and Friends.”  This twofold process would ideally elevate Quakers’ status both outside of and within the United States. In addition to recouping Quakers’ positive reputations with their Indian neighbors, affiliations with Indian people and their putatively “wild” territories provided the largely urban mercantilists with an outlet through which to express a new brand of manliness. Taking up popular—and fantastical— discourses emphasizing Indians’ adherence to “pre-market” economies, Quaker men with missionary aspirations stoically presented themselves as willing to venture into the unknown in order to “save” an endangered race while recouping for themselves a rugged preindustrial life of simplicity. It was not part of prominent Quakers’ initial ambitions to bring Indian children into their homes. Quakers hoped to serve as intermediaries between Indian nations and the U.S. government and eventually establish their own mission settlements on Indian lands rather than host indigenous youth. However, when Cornplanter proposed that they educate Seneca children, they clearly saw opportunities of their own. In 1791 Philadelphia Friends faced impediments when it came to their missionary efforts. Ongoing warfare between the United States and the United Indian Nations made settlement within Indian territories in the Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region a dangerous and foolhardy prospect, even for more adventurous missionaries. Meanwhile, a number of Indian nations— Senecas included— remained ambivalent about, if not outright opposed to, missionaries’ presence in their homelands. Christian evangelists brought teachings that undermined indigenous values, and their very presence had historically proved a harbinger for land loss and dispossession. Incorporating children may have been an intermediary strategy in the face of these obstacles, one that would make small inroads toward larger goals. While the Quakers remained silent when it came to their calculations concerning Henry Obail and the other boys offered up by Cornplanter, they likely connected their education of Seneca youth to their missionary ambitions as well as to their hopes to mediate U.S.-Indian relations. Accepting the children clearly accommodated the wishes of important Seneca leaders, allowing the Quakers to begin their prized educational initiatives and place themselves as middlemen between the Seneca Nation and the U.S. government. The fact that the Friends sought permission from the governor of

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Pennsylvania and the president of the United States before accepting the three boys indicates their awareness that the children might play an important role in placing Quakers on the political map. While reaching out to government officials ensured that the Friends were not overstepping diplomatic boundaries, it also served to highlight their unique relationship to influential Seneca chiefs. The approval by state and federal officials to host the Native youth subsequently formalized long-term relationships with both Seneca people and those in U.S. government. That the Quakers eventually saw their incorporation of youth into their homes as strengthening their relationships with Indian communities is clear. Drawing upon long-standing language used by Native people to articulate their relationships with colonial allies, one missionary wrote to Stockbridge leaders in 1801 upon the return of three Stockbridge girls to their nation that he hoped the Quakers’ efforts with the youth would render “the chain of friendship” between the two communities “stronger and brighter.” In addition to the formal relationships engendered by the Quakers’ work with Seneca youth, their “adoption” efforts tackled their social reputations. When Cornplanter’s hosts asserted that they would place Seneca boys within the home of an “examplary prudent Friend in the Country,” they suggested that members within their community had the capacity to produce the ideal domestic environments through which to “civilize” Indian people, making them and their white families appear compliant with, even models of, U.S. national ideals and civic arrangements. Within the intimate confines of their homes they could demonstrate the patriarchal kinship conditions celebrated within the early U.S. republic. What better way for Quakers to position themselves as viable citizens within a U.S. national family than by showing their competency in assimilating Indian people into the very kinship structures that signaled national belonging? While the Friends did not initially plan on working with Obail and other Seneca youth within the United States, their willingness to embark on this enterprise would generate their reputation as colonial educators of Native boys and girls over the ensuing years.

The Postwar Era It is impossible to overemphasize the significant role that the changing geopolitics of the mid-1790s played in reshaping Native strategies to combat dis-

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possession at the hands of the United States. Embroiled in a war with one another across the Atlantic, French, English, and Spanish officials grew increasingly wary of supporting their Native allies in endless struggles against U.S. settler encroachment. Taking advantage of Indians’ loss of transatlantic resources, the U.S. government crushed armed resistance movements both north and south of the Ohio River, forcing Indian people to navigate an unprecedented political terrain as well as the rapid loss of land to settlers, speculators, and federal officials. The year 1794 in par ticu lar proved to be a watershed for both Indian people and the foreigners who clamored for their North American territories. After years of battling—and losing—against the United Indian Nations in the Ohio country, the U.S. Army, under the leadership of General Anthony Wayne, defeated the confederated nations at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in the summer of that year, destroying their food and shelter in the process. In the battle’s wake, the federal government dictated its claims to Northern territories as far west as the current state of Indiana in the Treaty of Greenville. Meanwhile, in the South, the Creek Nation temporarily lost Spanish support for their resistance efforts against U.S. settlers, which, along with the death of their controversial but influential leader Alexander McGillivray, forced a recalibration of previous resistance strategies. Settler expansion across the region that would become known as Kentucky and Tennessee further isolated Southern tribes, including the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws, from Indian and European allies above the Ohio River. Adding to these troubles, U.S. troops defeated warriors from the Cherokees’ Chickamauga towns, effectively putting a halt to large-scale armed resistance efforts within the Native Southeast until civil war broke out within the Creek Nation, and pan-Indian unity efforts resurged, in the early 1810s. The numbers of Native youths in Quakers’ care swelled as a result of these devastating events and the rapid settler invasions that came in their wake. Finding themselves living within radically circumscribed territories with few foreign allies to defend themselves against the United States, increasing numbers of Native people engaged in selective diplomacy with state and federal governments and experimented with new economic practices that would allow them to sustain and empower their communities. This facilitated the Quakers’ mission work with Indian people and, in turn, made Quaker households more appealing locations in which to provide children with tools to deal with aggressive and covetous imperial neighbors. Reflecting their

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growing prominence in the postwar years, Pennsylvania Quakers formalized their interests in Indian affairs in 1795 under the orga nizational auspices of the Indian Committee of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. By the end of the decade, their adoptions of Native youth had become standard practice. The children who arrived in Quaker communities in the mid-Atlantic hailed from those Northern and Southern Indian nations that most directly contended with land speculation and settler expansion. In 1796, five years after the Quakers had agreed to work with Henry Obail and the other youth Cornplanter had sent from the Seneca Nation, Creek chiefs sent two boys to live under the Philadelphia Indian Committee’s care and oversight. Named James Bailey and Alexander Durant, these children resided with a man named William Blakey in Bucks County, where they received formal schooling until 1800. In 1797 Cherokee leaders delivered a boy named Thomas Wilson to the mid-Atlantic Friends, whom the committee subsequently placed with a man near Concord named Joseph Trimble. Not long after, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting discussed bringing seven girls from the Stockbridge, Tuscarora, and Oneida Nations to Philadelphia. The growing stature of the Friends and the interconnected social movements that spanned Indian nations undoubtedly facilitated these migrations. Along with their hospitality to Indian visitors to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Friends reached out to federally appointed Indian agents living in Indian territories and, from the early 1790s, traveled to Indian nations on diplomatic missions, often upon the invitation of Native leaders. In February 1792 Philadelphia Friends met with a deputation of Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw leaders visiting their city, establishing a relationship with the Southeast Indian nations that would eventually send them children. In 1796, just before Bailey and Durant arrived in Pennsylvania from the Creek Nation, the Philadelphia Indian Committee began a correspondence with Benjamin Hawkins, the federal agent residing there, in which the latter requested that the Friends send “to the people of [the Creek] Nation a few useful tools and agricultural implements and at the same time addressing them by letter, in order to prepare the way for cultivating a friendly correspondence with them.” The Committee subsequently sent money to Hawkins for the purchase of these goods. There were also ample opportunities for Philadelphia Friends and Northern Indians to exchange ideas—and requests— concerning indigenous youth. In 1791 and 1793 Haudenosaunee chiefs invited Quakers to serve as

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witnesses to treaty negotiations at Newton and Sandusky, and in the fall of 1794 Philadelphia Friends attended the Treaty of Canandaigua, again at Haudenosaunee leaders’ request. According to Seneca chief Red Jacket, the hope was that their Christian guests might prevent deception on the part of treaty commissioners. With over 1,500 people present at Canandaigua, Quakers certainly had the chance to broadcast their education of Native children—or answer queries about colonial schooling. Timothy Pickering, the former U.S. postmaster general and later secretary of war, who had been sent to resolve boundary disputes between the United States and the Six Nations, brought the Quakers’ current pupil, Henry Obail, to the treaty grounds in New York so the young man could visit his family. If the Quakers at Canandaigua did in fact advertise their eagerness to host Native youth in the United States, it would not be the last time. In 1800, Seneca leader Farmer’s Brother reported that members of the Society of Friends and U.S. federal officials solicited children from his nation, stating that “[t]here have been several applications made to our nations by the government of the United States and the Quakers, to send some of our youth to get them to get learning.” Quakers’ willingness to house and educate Native children in the United States would have also circulated in indigenous networks completely outside of the Friends’ purview, leading indigenous people to initiate conversations about Quaker schooling. As Pickering’s relationship with Obail indicates, by 1796 the Quakers enjoyed the growing interest of the U.S. federal government in their work as intermediaries and would-be missionaries, which in turn amplified their notoriety among Indian communities. In March of that year, members of the Philadelphia Indian Committee managed to secure a meeting with President George Washington, to whom “they fully explained [their] objects and intentions” regarding missions in Indian territories. The committee reported Washington’s satisfaction with the encounter and the president’s encouragement that they remain in contact with Pickering should “an application to Government in future be necessary.” Henry Drinker and John Parrish from the Indian Committee subsequently met with Pickering, who provided the two men with three letters, “one directed to the Indians of the Six Nations, one to . . . [the] Superintendant of the Six Nations & one to [their] interpreter.” In the documents Pickering praised the Friends’ “wise plan to show . . . young Men and Boys the most useful practices of the white people” and encouraged Indian leaders to allow Quakers to live

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among them. “The Quakers and the good men they employ will ask nothing of you,” Pickering asserted, “neither Land nor money, nor skins nor Furs, for all the good they will render you: they will request only your Consent to the attention of the young men and Boys to learn what will be so useful.” Pickering’s letters flagged the Quakers’ growing influence with federal elites and their potential to influence government officials on Indians’ behalf. By the end of 1796 the Sachem Party of the Oneida Nation officially invited the Quakers to establish a mission in their territories. Keenly aware of the Friends’ growing prominence, Sachem leaders anticipated that these new evangelists might serve as more faithful and honest intermediaries than other Euro-American missionaries—namely, Presbyterian Samuel Kirkland—who lived in and sought to acquire portions of their homelands. Quaker delegates subsequently traveled to Oneida Country, where they spent a month preparing to establish their society’s first mission settlement. Indian communities enjoyed social and diplomatic networks that would enable them to convey information with one another about the Friends in the postwar years. Indeed, Haudenosaunee and Algonquian people across the Northeast had long-established relationships with one another, envisioning the region as shared Native space both before and after the defeat of the United Indian Nations. In postwar years, relaying knowledge of settler activities and international affairs would have become especially crucial to communities utilizing nonmilitaristic means to defend their sovereignty. According to Quaker sources, Indian people repeatedly sought them out to educate their children, often demonstrating knowledge of both the locations in which Native children were receiving schooling and the kinds of educations the Quakers were providing. When the Indian Committee discussed bringing the seven Stockbridge, Oneida, and Tuscarora girls to Philadelphia, they indicated that they were responding to requests on the part of the young girls’ family members. Quaker Enoch Walker similarly reported that “there were several [Oneida] Indians . . . who wanted to send their children to Philad[elphia] or the County adjacent, to be brought up in friends Families, to learn good, (as the[y] say).” Some older Oneida youth apparently expressed similar desires for U.S. educations. As Walker related, “One young man came to talk to us about going down to Philad[elphia] to stay three years, to learn to be a Farmer, and to get an Education.” Walker discouraged his request, hoping instead to teach him at a mission school in Oneida territories. “[W]e desired them to be patient,” he reported, “that we expect a school would be open’d next winter.”

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In at least one case, news of the Friends’ efforts with Indian youth may have fulfilled long-established plans of Native communities to school their children in U.S. settlements. In 1790 Creek chiefs—including Alexander McGillivray—had requested in a secret and controversial treaty in New York that the U.S. government provide funds for Creek youth to be educated within the United States. McGillivray himself was among a group of Indian leaders who had received schooling among whites in the British colonies. The son of a Creek woman and a wealthy Scottish loyalist and prominent slaveholder, he was educated with a relative from his father’s side in Charleston. While McGillivray did not utilize the secret provision during his lifetime, it more than likely funded Bailey and Durant’s stay in Pennsylvania starting in 1796. The growing interest in sending youth to live with the Quakers, however, was more often a strategy of survival in the years following the calamitous events of 1794. As discussions at the 1744 Treaty of Lancaster make apparent, Native people had had opportunities prior to the 1790s to school their children in colonial settings but had not always been keen to do so. Records remain scant in terms of the precise motivations of the families and communities who sent their children to U.S. homes and schools. Yet it is not hard to imagine that as settlers hemmed in hunting grounds and claimed Native settlement sites as their own, and federal officials, state representatives, and private land jobbers successfully jockeyed for unprecedented amounts of Indian lands in the late 1790s, greater numbers of Indian people hoped that U.S.-educated children could combat those who sought to cheat them of their national territories. Some Native families struggled with the idea of sending their children to live among the Quakers, even as they saw potential utility in doing so. Ambivalences concerning U.S. schooling became evident in the case of the Stockbridge, Oneida, and Tuscarora girls whom the Friends prepared to receive in 1797. On October 16 of that year, Joseph Clark and Henry Simmons—both of whom would become prominent missionaries within a few years’ time—set out to Oneida territories, where Tuscarora refugees and the Algonquian-descended Stockbridge people had settled with the permission of the Oneida Nation. After arriving and attending “a conference with the Stockbridge and Tuscarora Indians” and then a meeting with Oneida chiefs, the two men quickly realized that they would be taking home a different group of children than they had anticipated. While Stockbridge leaders remained eager to place young girls in the Quakers’ care, the Oneida leaders asserted that “those who go out of the young Indians often learned wrong

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habits.” They preferred the Quakers teach directly in Oneida territories, “which would better preserve [Oneida children’s] morals and be of greater utility among the Indians.” This refusal subsequently inspired Tuscaroras to question their own daughters’ education in Philadelphia. The Tuscarora families appear to have ultimately agreed to let their children travel south, for sources indicate that on November 10 Clark left Oneida territories with four Stockbridge and two Tuscarora girls. Clark and Simmons failed to document the detailed deliberations among the three nations concerning schooling, but it is evident that these Native communities had carefully considered the costs and benefits of colonial educations, and some decided to keep their children close to home. Those families who did place their children in Quaker homes sought opportunities to rebuild, renew, and empower their communities by combining long-standing indigenous values and belief systems with new labor and economic practices. Some appear to have had overlapping interests with Cornplanter, sending young boys to receive the language and literacy skills and diplomatic connections that would allow them an upper hand in nation-tonation agreements and economic exchanges in the male-centered worlds of U.S. whites, as well as within the political economies of their own communities. While Oneida families ultimately refused to send their children along with Clark, early interests on the part of Tuscarora, Oneida, and Stockbridge people in placing young girls with Quaker families indicate the important roles that Native women were also expected to play in the postwar revitalization of their communities. Mary Peters, one of the Stockbridge girls who eventually traveled to Pennsylvania with Clark and Simmons in 1797, lived up to these expectations. As her trajectory would show, U.S.-educated Native women wielded significant influence in their own communities, even more so than the “examplary” Quaker women who sought to transform Indians into their own likeness.

Learning Everything Necessary The Oneida, Stockbridge, and Tuscarora Nations that initially sought to send young girls to live with the Quakers had been particularly hard hit by U.S. territorial aggression when they encountered the Society of Friends in the 1790s. By the time General Wayne defeated the United Indian Nations to their west in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the three nations had al-

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ready watched the Oneida land base upon which they lived shrink from roughly 6 million acres to about one-quarter million acres. In 1795 they lost another 132,000 acres, and just two years later they faced the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company as it built a 1.7-mile canal right through the heart of the Oneidas’ remaining homelands. In the face of these devastating territorial cessions, many firmly rejected the colonial culture that condoned such blatant disrespect of Native sovereignty, including its religions, economic practices, and gender roles. Others remained deeply critical of their imperial neighbors, yet saw in Christianity and the agrarian labors promoted by missionaries useful tools to help them navigate ever-encroaching colonial settlements. They did not necessarily embrace Christianity at the expense of previously held indigenous traditions, but rather synthesized settler spiritual practices and ideologies with indigenous worldviews. The documentary record makes it very difficult to trace the contours of Native women’s history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Women seldom left written records of their own, and those U.S. whites whose writings make up the bulk of colonial archives were mostly disinterested in the details of Native women’s lives. Indeed, neither Clark nor Simmons provided much specific information concerning the Tuscarora or Oneida families who initially entertained the prospect of placing their daughters within their care or about the young girls who embarked with the two foreign men on the journey south to Pennsylvania. However, the genealogies of the Stockbridge girls who ultimately made their way to the Philadelphia area suggest how the skills that the Indian Committee promoted among Native people in general, and Indian women in particular, could support national sovereignty. Among the roster of Clark’s six Stockbridge and Tuscarora travelers were Mary Peters and Margery Hendrick Aupaumut, both of whom were likely relations of Hendrick Aupaumut, an impor tant Stockbridge leader who played a premier role in the early 1790s as an emissary of the United States to the United Indian Nations in the Ohio country. Aupaumut’s goal was to initiate peaceful relationships between the settler empire and western Indian nations—who he identified as the Stockbridge Nation’s extended kin—while strengthening ties to his fellow Algonquian communities across the Northeast. Whereas the Stockbridge leader initially hoped the United States would recognize the sovereignty of his network of Native relations when he set out to persuade them to lay down their weapons, even before the events

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of 1794 he began to recognize the aggressive acquisitiveness that characterized U.S. interactions with Indian people. When the United States defeated the United Indian Nations at Fallen Timbers, federal officials no longer leaned on Aupaumut to mediate between the United States and Native people in the Ohio country. Nonetheless, even after his disillusionment with, and disentanglement from, federal aims and ambitions, he remained committed to the belief that the fusion of Christian and Mohican spiritual traditions, education in English literacy, and the adoption of gendered labors associated with U.S. “civilization” could help his Stockbridge Nation secure its autonomy in the face of U.S. settler expansion. Aupaumut was not unique, of course, in his strategy, even among Stockbridge people, nor was he unaware of the struggles it would entail. The Mohican communities from which the Stockbridge Nation hailed had been, in the words of historian Rachel Wheeler, “avid cultural borrowers” long before Europeans arrived, “adapting those aspects of neighboring technology and ritual that allowed them to maintain community and . . . a presence on their lands” as they navigated their geographical location between Haudenosaunee and other Algonquian people. With the advance of British settler colonialism, Stockbridge men and women syncretized Protestant doctrine and Euro-American-style living arrangements with long-standing Algonquian traditions in order to survive alongside land-hungry neighbors in western Massachusetts, Vermont, and the Hudson River Valley. But forced removals from these locations made clear that even the selective adoption of Euro-American land-use and labor practices failed to preclude settlers from seizing Native land, leading Stockbridge people to move to Oneida territories in the mid-1780s, where they hoped they might find final respite. Yet even as U.S. whites repeatedly negated Stockbridge rights to territory, Aupaumut held out hope that cultural, economic, and political autonomy resided in the fusion of indigenous values with settler cultural practices such as having men in charge of farming and women engaged in domestic labor, which had become synonymous in the United States with good governance. When Aupaumut’s Stockbridge community again faced assaults on its settlements in Oneida country at the close of the eighteenth century, it became apparent that women could play powerful roles in thwarting the duplicitous dealings that cost the nation land. Women with English-language and literacy skills could advise leading men in interactions and treaty negotiations with patriarchal whites; they could build relationships with the

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Christian missionaries, who would potentially advocate for Stockbridge land rights; and, perhaps most crucially, they could accept missionary offers to teach women to spin and weave. While missionaries promoted spinning and weaving as part of broader efforts to “domesticate” Indian women within the “private” space of male-headed households, Stockbridge women’s acquisition of these arts led to important opportunities within the realm of international politics. As postwar trade opportunities shrank with British withdrawal from Haudenosaunee territories, white traders charged Indian people exorbitant prices for textiles and eagerly plied alcohol on Native consumers, leading them into debt. By learning how to make cloth, young girls could finally free their communities from predatory exchange practices that led to economic, political, and territorial vulnerability. Members of the Philadelphia Indian Committee were eager to provide precisely these forms of training for young Indian women. Teaching women to read and write, spin and weave was a central component of their vision to make comprehensive changes in the social and economic practices of Indian communities. While the Quakers did not set out to initially transform the spiritual practices of Indian people, they believed that Indians could— and should—be assimilated into U.S. settler society because, using the language of Joseph Clark, Indians could be seen as “family.” Men’s adoption of plough agriculture and private land use and women’s taking up of spinning, weaving, and general housekeeping was a first step toward accomplishing these aims. Over time, Quakers believed, these new labor practices would bend Indians toward the Friends’ own understandings of Christian virtue and allow them to fend off the “inevitable” extinction Quakers assumed that Indians would face if they retained their hunting economies. An 1801 letter from the Indian Committee to the chiefs of the Oneida Nation encapsulated this vision. “We think it would be very profitable to put Fences round your Common and divide it into Fields of 10 or 20 acres each,” the Friends declared, before explaining the crop rotation and pasturage practices they believed would best utilize these individual sections of land—instructions that Oneida women may have found both amusing and frustrating as they continued to farm land in common as their ancestors had done for at least a millennium before Europeans arrived on the continent. “It would also yield a great profit to your Nation if you would sow Flax,” the Friends persisted, “and prepare it for spinning, and when you Fence in your Common and the other Land you may clear, then you may keep some Sheep, learn your Girls

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to spin Flax and Wool, which when woven together make a very good stuff for Clothing.” While the Friends’ hubris may have been off-putting, their offers to provide such crucial skills were not easily ignored. That Aupaumut in particular courted the Friends’ alliance and sought out their schooling of Stockbridge children is apparent: he attended the meeting with Joseph Clark that would lead to the Stockbridge girls’ 1797 travels to Pennsylvania. Mary Peters of the Stockbridge Nation exemplifies the possibilities that both a Quaker education and strategic alliance with the Friends could provide. Perhaps Aupaumut’s niece, Peters was one of the six young girls who departed with Clark from Oneida territories. Just nine years old at the time, her travels set her on a journey that ultimately positioned her as a political and economic leader and cultural broker between Stockbridge and Haudenosaunee people and U.S. whites. Placed along with a twelve-year-old Stockbridge girl named Margery Jacobs in the Chester County home of Quaker Hannah Jackson and Hannah’s husband, Isaac, both Peters and Jacobs spent three years learning “to read and write the English language” with their hosts and, according to the Indian Committee’s notes, were “instructed in a sober steady conduct and in those good customs and useful methods . . . followed in the families of our sober, industrious, and good Farmers.” By 1800 Peters and Jacobs, along with a third Stockbridge girl named Elizabeth Baldwin, expressed their longing to return home to their families. As Peters herself relayed in a letter to the Indian Committee, she believed she had “learned enough, every thing necessary” from her hosts. “I want to go home very much,” she explained, “to see my Father & Mother & Brothers & Sisters.” The Indian Committee had little choice but to oblige, sending the three girls back to the Stockbridge Nation. Within a few years of arriving home, Peters made it evident that she had indeed learned a great deal during her tenure in the Jackson’s household. While residing with her mother, she immediately took up spinning flax and wool and, according to a letter she wrote to Hannah Jackson, “made some cheese to show our Indians how to make chees[e].” She may have also taught members of her community cloth-making skills, as she reported that women were beginning to “sewe some flax” and raise sheep for food and wool for cloth. Sometime between 1810 and 1815, Peters married an Oneida man by the name of Peter Doxtater and began to take his last name. By 1812 or 1813 Mary Doxtater became a fixture in women’s schooling in Native New York, teaching spinning and weaving to Stockbridge and Haudeno-

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saunee women within her community, who were anxious to acquire these skills and relay them to their children. By 1817 she had opened up a formal spinning school, receiving support from Hannah Jackson—who by this point had herself become a prominent missionary—to run it. In 1820 Doxtater took part in the founding of the Female Cent Society in the Stockbridge Nation, which promoted the forms of education and “good customs” emphasized by her Chester County hosts. Just a year later, in 1821, she established yet another spinning school for Onondaga women, again with the support of the Quakers. As indicated by Doxtater’s alliance with Hannah Jackson, Doxtater maintained close relations with Quakers throughout this period. As she wrote to the Friends concerning her first school, which included Onondaga women in its rosters, “the Onondaga are pleased with the scheme of giting into Civilized habits they have don well so far I hope the[y] will not only have the countenance and aid of the society of friends in the manufacture of cloth but also in agriculture.” Though her actions may have fostered hopes that Indian people would reflect Quaker values, her long-term commitments were not necessarily with the religious society. In addition to disseminating the technical knowledge that would allow Stockbridge and Oneida women to eliminate white traders’ hold over them when it came to cloth, she also drew upon her formal schooling to provide legal support for her nation. In 1824, in a document signed by Hendrick Aupaumut, among others, Mary Doxtater was declared her nation’s “Lawfull Attorney” during negotiations in Albany between the Stockbridge, the New York State Legislature, and the New York Land Office. Doxtater’s power in the Stockbridge Nation contrasted with Quaker women’s influence within their own communities. Quakers’ missionary efforts with respect to Indian people were based upon the presumption that Indian communities needed to shelter Native women from the supposedly harsh labor conditions that came from agrarian labors within what Quakers defined as the Native “wilderness.” As the Indian Committee wrote to the Oneidas in 1801, “it is our belief your young Men should lay aside false notions of Honour with respect to War and Hunting, for while this remains, they will wander about with Gun, Bow and Arrow, do little or no good themselves, and leave the poor Indian women oppressed with the principal part of the work.” The Quakers did not appreciate the fact that Native women in Haudenosaunee territories actually experienced significant empowerment

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within their communities, even as the onset of European colonialism chipped away at some of their traditional leadership roles. In the late eighteenth century, Haudenosaunee and Stockbridge women selected their nation’s male leadership, decided whether or not to go to war with neighboring nations, reared children within their matrilineal clan lines, and controlled the food sources that sustained human life. Aupaumut himself acknowledged that Mohican women also guarded wampum belts, whose beaded patterns depicted spiritual values and diplomatic protocol in nation-to-nation agreements. Quaker women enjoyed influence within their own communities, sharing their voices within their society’s monthly meetings, organizing charitable work through women-only meetings, running schools, and, by the early nineteenth century, participating in mission work within Indian territories. Yet they were also restricted by the patriarchal tenets of marriage within U.S. society. Expectations that they perform time-consuming domestic labors within their individual households appear to have limited their ability to participate in “public” charitable activities once they married, even as they assumed greater responsibilities in monthly meetings. And regardless of marital status, Quaker women were prohibited from permanent membership within the elite committees— such as the Philadelphia Friends’ Indian Committee—which were the domain of men. Indeed, reflecting the emphasis prominent figures in the early republic placed on the “Republican mother,” who was supposed to provide care and moral instruction for future citizens, mid-Atlantic Quakers seeking to revitalize their communities emphasized the importance of women’s domestic roles within nuclear families. This, of course, was in lieu of women’s formal political power, which Quaker women, along with all women in the United States, were prohibited from claiming. The domestic labors that supposedly empowered married white women within “private” households could in fact prove both overwhelming and exhausting, so much so that at times they even thwarted the Indian Committee’s attempts to place Indian children with Quaker families. An undated document, most likely from around the time the Stockbridge and Tuscarora girls came to Pennsylvania, demonstrates the considerations individual households in Chester County made before accepting Indian children, and most of them revolved around the available time that Quaker wives had to care for new additions. A man named Joseph Strimble declined a request he

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take “one of the Indian Girls” due to the “Bodily infirmity of his wife & other considerations.” An elderly couple by the name of Chandler was “advanced in years & somewhat infirm[ed],” and this, combined with “having some of their grand children,” meant they could not accept any Indian youth. Enoch Wickersham was “desirous of putting out his farm” and therefore found the Indian Committee’s wishes “not convenient.” John Marshall declined to take any of the girls because he already had “several small children placed under his care”—or, presumably, under that of his wife— and Humphrey Marshall’s wife also already had “divers Children under care,” with the result that her husband refused the committee’s request. There is little information concerning how the individual households that did incorporate Native girls and boys managed and delegated the labors of additional children. Humphrey Marshall’s wife’s responsibility for “divers Children” indicates, however, that women played a major role in feeding, clothing, and educating them. While some Quaker women clearly resisted the work required to host Native children, others may have welcomed the opportunity to resume “charitable” aspirations they were forced to leave behind when they married. This may have been the case with Hannah Jackson, Peters’s and Jacobs’s hostess. Seven years after taking Peters and Jacobs into her home, Jackson petitioned the New Garden Monthly meeting, the governing body of the Society of Friends in Chester County, to allow her to join missionary couple Benjamin and Rachel Cope “to reside amongst the Indians near the Allegheny River in order to assist in their Improvement.” By 1807 she was instructing at least “two Indian girls” in the Seneca town of Tunesassah, one of whom was apparently the daughter of Cornplanter. Either inspired by her work with Peters and Jacobs or already entertaining the hope of missionizing among their communities, Jackson was eager to offer her own contribution to U.S.Indian affairs. Unable to access the highest echelon of Quaker leadership when it came to planning and overseeing Quaker initiatives in Indian country, she fused her household responsibilities with her missionary aspirations when she agreed to open her home to Peters and Jacobs and, eventually, chose to widen her influence by teaching domestic labors to Native youth in their own settlements. Unlike the young girls with whom she would work, however, she was not to officially represent her nation—or even her own religious society—in formal diplomatic or leadership roles. Rather, women missionaries such as herself were expected to instruct Native women

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in “domestic labors” such as “the management of their Dairy’s, spinning and various other branches of Housewifry which they are much acquainted with.” Doxtater’s training in English language and literacy and the “domestic labors” of spinning and weaving appears to have lent her far more autonomy and individual authority within her nation than they did for Jackson in her own community or for Quaker women in general. But at times her application of the skills she acquired under Jackson’s tutelage in Chester County and honed during her later years in Stockbridge and Oneida settlements appears to have stirred controversy. Even as she worked as an educator and advocate for Stockbridge and Haudenosaunee people, she also used her personal resources to acquire extensive material possessions. Her 1824 travels to Albany as the Stockbridge’s lawyer were part of a several-year period in which she enmeshed herself in land transactions, including purchasing at least six hundred acres from her Stockbridge neighbors. One generous reading of these purchases asserts that she did so to provide financial assistance to those who sought to move to Green Bay as her nation faced yet another removal in New York. And remarks from several of her peers confirm her willingness to provide ongoing material assistance to those in need. Some of her contemporaries, however, asserted that her behaviors were less forthright. In 1828 a number of Stockbridge women accused her of selling land and failing to transfer the payment to the original owners. While it is difficult to assess Doxtater’s intentions when it came to her financial transactions, records do indicate that she enjoyed a great deal more material wealth than did most of her Stockbridge and Oneida neighbors. Unlike the young Haudenosaunee men sent to live in the British colonies earlier in the eighteenth century, Doxtater and her tribal community found a lot of use for the skills she acquired in the United States. From her participation in Stockbridge land deals to her education of Stockbridge and Haudenosaunee women, she occupied an influential position within and beyond her nation and sought to empower others in the face of settler expansion. At the same time, her willingness to harness certain U.S. colonial values—including the accumulation of individual wealth— clashed with other indigenous values in her community. Doxtater was joined by other Quaker adoptees whose synthesis of Native and settler gender roles sparked consternation within their nations. In 1800 Farmer’s Brother reported to Elkanah Holmes of the New-York Mission Society his own take on the Friends’ work with Seneca children. As he

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relayed to Holmes, he had placed his own grandson with the Quakers after the society, along with federal officials, had solicited children from his nation. When visiting Philadelphia two years after the young man had moved to the city, the Seneca leader reported being saddened by the changes he witnessed in the young man, who borrowed too much from the versions of masculinity embraced by many young white men. “I . . . gave up one of my grandsons to the United States to get learning, in the hopes that this youth, when he got learning, would be of great ser vice to our nations, to inform us of the good customs and ways of the white people,” he told Holmes. “And how was I surprised when I first saw him,” he lamented, “he was in a tavern.” Farmer’s Brother next watched his grandson engage in gaming, dancing, and visiting “a bad house, where were bad women.” The Seneca leader had placed his grandson with the Quakers hoping the child would become useful to his people. But after the visit he reported that “all my expectations fell of thinking he would ever be of ser vice to our nations, for we know of no such things among us, of boys of such age as he was, going into such company and following such bad ways.” Farmer’s Brother’s grandson’s return to Seneca lands at Genesee confirmed that time with the Quakers had steered the youth in the wrong direction, as the young man seemed only interested in following the path that many young white settlers took to mark their manhood: the exhibition of martial prowess and the accumulation of private property for individual gain. Finding his grandson in “soldier’s dress,” the chief explained that the “first request he made to me was, for two miles square of land, to support him to go about and attend other business.” While Farmer’s Brother had approved of the Quakers enough to invite them to serve as witnesses to treaty negotiations at Sandusky in the Ohio River Valley in 1794, by the early nineteenth century the Seneca chief’s experiences with his kin convinced him that Quakers were not equipped to work with Seneca children either on Seneca lands or in the United States. As he summed up his experience to Holmes, “While this grandson of mine was at school, we were looking to see how he would turn out; intending if he did well, to send several more of our youth to be learned by the white people; but finding he has turned out so bad, our hearts fell, concluding that if we send more of our boys, and they should learn such bad ways as he had, that our land would be cut into small pieces, and our nation dispersed and ruined.” Farmer’s Brother’s critique of the Quakers may have been politically motivated. In 1798 prominent Friends had helped

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Cornplanter thwart a significant cession of Seneca bottomlands, which apparently precluded Farmer’s Brother from pocketing much of the bribe he had been offered by the Holland Land Company in exchange for territory. But this does not rule out the possibility that the leader was disconcerted by his grandson’s interests in private lands, even as he himself proved willing to accept cash bribes for cessions. Even with detractors such as Farmer’s Brother, the Philadelphia Indian Committee’s relationship with Cornplanter ultimately led in 1798 to a mission at Genesinguhta, a nearly abandoned Seneca town nine miles upriver from the roughly 350 people who lived in Cornplanter’s Town, the name given to the Seneca settlement on the leader’s private lands along the Allegheny River in Northern Pennsylvania. Just as Quaker missionaries were moving into their new home at Genesinguhta, growing disillusionment on the part of Indian leaders, government officials, and, eventually, the Quakers themselves with Indian schooling within the United States began to stem the tide of Indian children finding their way to Quaker doorsteps. Although transfers of Indian children to Quaker homes endured well into the nineteenth century, with select Indian youth moving in with families in mid-Atlantic cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore, the practice waned as the eighteenth-century came to a close. Indeed, many began to see it as a failed enterprise, one that no longer served the needs of Indian people and—for some U.S. whites in the early national period—reflected the impossibility of Indians’ incorporation into a U.S. national family.

Nations Divided During Cornplanter’s stay in Philadelphia in 1790 and 1791, Timothy Pickering wrote a letter to Washington in which he declared his shared belief with the president that educating Indian children within the United States was not sound policy. “I am fully of opinion with you,” he wrote, “that the mode of education which has hitherto been pursued with respect to those young Indians who have been sent to our colleges is not such as can be productive of any good to their nations. Reason might have shown it and experience clearly proves it to have been the case.” Instead, he thought Washington’s “ideas with respect to introducing the art of husbandry and civilization” directly “among the Indians” was a sounder one. Pickering’s letter must have been of some comfort to the president, steeling the latter’s resolve to refuse Cornplanter’s wishes to place Henry Obail and the other Seneca youth in his

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care. For just a few weeks after Pickering wrote to Washington, Secretary of War Henry Knox delivered the president’s refusal to host the boys offered to him by the visiting Seneca diplomats. Pickering and Washington were joined by a chorus of others in the United States in the 1790s who discouraged Indians’ education in U.S. territories. They did so out of the belief that the existing citizens of the early republic would ultimately be unwilling to see Indians’ adoption into a broader U.S. national family. As one report by missionaries from 1796 put it, white society would never fully embrace Native children as equals, leading to feelings of inferiority and insecurity among these youth. The evangelists argued that the Indian scholar (presumed to be male) “acquires some knowledge, and is taught some ornamental, and perhaps useful accomplishments; but the degrading memorials of his inferiority, which are continually before his eyes, remind him of the manners and habits of his own country, where he was once free and equal to his associates. He sighs to return to his friends; but there he meets with bitter mortification.” Stuck in between two cultures, this youth was declared to be “neither a white man nor an Indian; as he had no character with us, he has none with them.” The end result was that “such persons must either entirely renounce their acquired habits, and resume the savage life; or, if they live among their countrymen, they must be despised and their death will be unlamented.” Pickering sponsored Henry Obail within a matter of months after his January 1791 letter to Washington, clearly indicating that the postmaster general was willing to bend on his opinion concerning Indian scholars residing in the United States. By the early 1800s, however, there were other detractors who sought to rein in the practice, including those among the Quakers themselves. Not only did Native people such as Farmer’s Brother sometimes find fault with the Quakers’ work with their children, but children and parents had difficult times enduring the separation, leading the Quakers to believe it was impossible to complete Indian youths’ schooling. Adding to these complexities, as with Cornplanter, many of the families who sent children to live with Quakers were more interested in the elite forms of knowledge the Quakers could provide—including extensive literacy skills— than transforming their children into the diligent creators of patriarchal farmer households the Indian Committee envisioned. Children, too, resisted the rigorous labors expected of them by their hosts. As Joseph Trimble, Thomas Wilson’s Quaker guardian, complained, “I know not whether I have heretofore informed thee, that Tommy dont appear to

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possess a strong robust constitution, but rather other wise; upon frequent trials latterly to put him to some little labour, he has after an hour or two complained of the sick head ache, & I believe it is real.” The more Trimble pushed his charge, the more Wilson resisted his efforts. “I think I have endeavoured by every method I could devise to bring him into habits of industry,” Trimble lamented, “but without the desired effect . . . my efforts of late have only tended to produce sourness in him, and a belief that I am not his friend.” As with Peters, Wilson ultimately asked to go home. When then Indian agent to the Cherokee Nation Silas Dinsmoor arrived in Philadelphia in 1799, Trimble reported that “returning to his own country had much fixed in [Wilson’s] mind.” (The death of Wilson’s grandmother the year before surely heightened the young man’s desire to be close to his Cherokee family again.) Wary of Wilson’s refusal to make himself pliable to Quaker instruction, the Friends sent him back to his Cherokee homelands in 1801 with the approval of the U.S. secretary of war. In order to prevent similar struggles in the future with respect to Native “adoptees,” the Friends were placing strict limits by 1802 when it came to the number, age, gender, and background of the individuals they were taking from Indian territories, and they emphasized to Native guardians that they were training future farmers, rather than highly schooled diplomats or businessmen. In response to a request from Senecas at Cattaraugus respecting “the Education of four of their Boys,” the Quakers agreed, “provided such as are of suitable Age and pretty good Disposition can be selected” and that “their Parents and Connections freely consent to their remaining here until they may have acquired such Habits as will be likely to be useful to them in their return to their own Country.” “We think none should be younger than fifteen and not much older than Seventeen of age,” members of the Indian Committee wrote. And they wanted the children to remain in the United States until the age of twenty-one. The “Boys and their Connections” were also to be made aware ahead of time that they were to perform the central tenets of “civilization,” which meant to “labor either as Farmers or at some other useful” profession in their own lands. For the Quakers, the “Chief Object” was “to bring them up in Habits of Industry as our Children are, in well ordered families.” As the Indian Committee put it, only in this way would Indian children “be usefull to their Nation” once they returned to it. It was of course somewhat disingenuous for members of the Indian Committee to state that they held the same expectations for Indian children as

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they did for their own offspring. Young Quaker men and women were not necessarily expected to work as farmers or in technical low-wage labors such as those members of the Indian Committee wished to impart to the Native youth among them. And hence lay a central divide between the visions of Indian people and those of Philadelphia Friends over the meaning, shape, and duration of schooling. Friends believed that Indian people were to be agrarian farmers in their own circumscribed territories, ignoring the actual exigencies faced by Native people and the reasons why Native leaders and families sent children to reside among them in the first place. While individuals such as Cornplanter, Aupaumut, and Peters embraced certain tenets of the Quakers’ teachings and saw utility in many of the manual labors the Quakers sought to impart, their vision for their children and their applications of the tools these children learned in the United States were ultimately imperceptible to the Friends, whose own vulnerabilities, insecurities, and personal investments in Indians’ futures hindered them from schooling Indian children in the way their Native families saw fit. Even as Washington, Pickering, and the Quakers themselves expressed wariness of the idea of incorporating Indian children into U.S. homes and institutions, many U.S. whites still desired to make Indians, in the words of Secretary of War Henry Dearborn in 1801, “a useful part of the great family of the United States.” For their part, the Indian Committee in Philadelphia continued to take in children in the early nineteenth century as Native leaders and Indian agents requested schooling, and Quakers in Baltimore and New York would follow suit. Records for these Quaker communities are less detailed concerning the youth in their care. Letters from the Stockbridge Nation show, however, that New York Friends oversaw the education of two Stockbridge boys in 1815, while later nineteenth-century sources indicate that at least two children from the Choctaw Nation resided with Baltimore Quakers in 1816, including a young man named James Lawrence McDonald, whose life would come to profoundly shape the history of transnational adoption as the early antebellum period unfolded. Yet by that point for the Quakers, efforts in educating Indian youth had moved from individual households in the United States to Quaker “mission families” in Indian territories, where women such as Hannah Jackson and men such as Joseph Clark and Henry Simmons— early advocates of Quaker adoptions— were pushing for whole nations to transform themselves into the vision Quakers held for them, which involved them eventually entering the U.S. national family en masse. White slaveholders, federal bureaucrats,

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Presbyterian missionaries, and Indian agents, however, would follow in the Quakers’ footsteps when it came to individual efforts with Native children. Southeast Indian men and women were often the ones to initiate these new transfers of Indian youths from “Indian” to “white” worlds. Even when that was not the case, at the heart of every exchange lay struggles over the meaning and shape of what it meant to be “Indian,” “white,” and—increasingly— “black,” and how these identities fit into both U.S. and Southeast Indian understandings of national, racial, and territorial belonging.

3 Domestic Fronts on the Eve of 1812

While working in Choctaw homelands in the lower Mississippi Valley, U.S. Indian agent Silas Dinsmoor began to imagine himself as a father to Choctaw people. Choctaw resistance to his instructions in the agrarian labors and domestic arrangements associated with U.S. “civilization” policies did not thwart his paternalism. It enhanced it. In the spring of 1807, as he put the African men and women he enslaved to work on the plantation he ran as part of his newly relocated Choctaw Agency, Dinsmoor saw himself as mirroring, like a good father, the patriarchal agrarian life to which he believed Choctaw women and men should aspire. When, once again, his cattle wandered into his agency grounds having been shot full of Choctaw arrows, Dinsmoor complained to his wife, Mary, of his “de[vil]ish children.” By January 1808 Dinsmoor began to playfully refer to Silas Jr., his infant son in New Hampshire, as Choctaw. “Kiss our young Chaktaw for me,” he relayed in letters home, before sending love to the rest of the family. Around 1811 the Indian agent took over the guardianship of an actual Choctaw boy named James Lawrence McDonald. He incorporated the ten- or elevenyear-old youth into his new family home, a slaveholding household located roughly one hundred miles southwest of Dinsmoor’s Pearl River Choctaw 

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Agency in the burgeoning U.S. planter town of Washington, Mississippi. McDonald would live there for the next two and a half years before Dinsmoor took him to Washington, DC, where he was placed with Baltimore Quakers for further schooling. Dinsmoor’s paternalistic sentiments and unexpected domestic arrangements unfolded in the fi rst decade or so of the nineteenth century, an interim moment between U.S. military victories over armed Indian resistance movements in 1794 and the return of extensive military warfare between the United States and allied Indian nations in the series of conflicts that collectively became known as the War of 1812 (1812–1815). These were years of intense activity on the part of Indian people and the U.S. whites who both orchestrated expansionist policies and directly invaded Indian homelands. The U.S. government honed and amplified its “civilization” program during this time, warring for Indian lands through agents of “peace,” including missionaries such as the Quakers, who settled in Haudenosaunee lands and Native territories in the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes region, and Indian agents such as Dinsmoor himself, who traveled into and resided among Indian nations both above and below the Ohio River. U.S. whites also inflicted direct physical harm against the Native people whose lands they coveted, while Indian communities engaged in a number of resistance strategies to defend their territories, some of which included careful and cautious diplomacy with the United States and selective engagement with “civilization” programs in the ser vice of political and economic innovation; smallerscale attacks against settlers and their property; and ongoing efforts to rebuild the unity movements that the United States would once again face in the second decade of the nineteenth century. As an Indian agent deployed to enact the “conciliatory” initiatives forwarded by Henry Knox in the 1790s, Dinsmoor found himself negotiating these various strategies. Indeed, when he brought James McDonald into his plantation household, the Shawnee-Creek leader Tecumseh had just spent two years trying to firmly ally Southeast Indian nations with a broader panIndian movement armed against U.S. settler expansion, leading U.S. federal elites to prepare for a possible war. One of Dinsmoor’s responsibilities was to try to prevent such an alliance on the part of the Choctaw Nation by smoothing over hostilities between Choctaw people and the United States while simultaneously attempting to acquire Choctaw territories. Dinsmoor

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did not execute these roles well. The image of his cows shot full of arrows provides a glimpse into the intimate tensions that simmered between Dinsmoor and the Choctaw people whose lands he occupied. As it turns out, so does Dinsmoor’s paternalism. As the Indian agent faced a host of conflicts generated by his promotion of unpopular policies in Choctaw territories in the opening years of the nineteenth century, he began to embrace the belief that he could wield patriarchal control over Choctaw people within the space of his own home. An examination of the federal career of Silas Dinsmoor and its eventual convergence with the life of James McDonald opens a window onto intimate and everyday battles for Southeast Indian lands in the early nineteenth century. It reveals that the hierarchical kinship arrangements that structured U.S. households not only oriented the expansionist federal policies formulated by Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox, but also informed their messy and contested implementation on the ground. A middling official in U.S. Indian affairs as well as an aspiring Southern planter, Dinsmoor had ambitions to acquire Choctaw territories in the lower Mississippi Valley for both his nation and his own “private” use. As with the federal policymakers for whom he worked, he legitimated and justified these professional and personal aspirations by asserting that he was bringing to Native space the patriarchal familial relationships and farming practices that, according to popu lar U.S. beliefs, best made use of North American territories. Yet as Dinsmoor attempted to fulfill his goals, he came up against the limits of both his personal fantasies and the “commonsense” logics orienting U.S. settler expansion. Not only did many Choctaw people refuse to accept his teachings in the gender-based labors associated with U.S. “civilization,” but also the diplomatic requirements of his federal appointment often stood in the way of his ambitions to participate in an expanding Southern plantation economy as a slaveholding settler. Dinsmoor tried to resolve these tensions through the space of his familial household. By establishing a plantation home and eventually placing a Choctaw child within it, he sought to assert direct authority over the Native communities he was billed to control while focusing on his desire to claim Choctaw territories as his own. Dinsmoor’s efforts ended in failure—at least for himself. Neither the Choctaw people who resisted his teachings nor the federal officials he was meant to please changed their opinions of him as a result of his actions with

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respect to James McDonald. However, his choices paved the way for new contests between Southeast Indian elites and the U.S. whites who coveted their homelands. For as Dinsmoor struggled to assert paternal mastery in Choctaw territories, he opened the door for at least one Native family to access the diplomatic connections and elite forms of colonial schooling that would support their own claims to territory and the slave-driven commercial interests that were consuming the lower Mississippi Valley. This would ultimately prove no small matter. Dinsmoor’s relationship with James McDonald and James’s mother, Molly, would help to set the stage for the battles over land and slavery that would come to a head in the era of removal.

Indian Agent to the Choctaw Nation When Silas Dinsmoor was appointed Indian agent to the Choctaw Nation in May 1802 he received a set of instructions from the U.S. secretary of war regarding his duties. As the federal appointee to live within Choctaw territories, it would be Dinsmoor’s job to serve as a diplomat, policeman, and educator among Choctaw people. Drawing upon the policies formalized by Knox in the 1790s, Henry Dearborn wrote to Dinsmoor, “The motives of the Government for sending Agents to reside with the Indian Nations, are the cultivation of peace and harmony between the U. States, and the Indian Nations generally; the detection of any improper conduct in the Indians, or the Citizens of the U. States, or others relating to the Indians, or their lands, and the introduction of the Arts of husbandry, and domestic manufactures.” This meant that Dinsmoor was to monitor relations between members of the Choctaw Nation and their U.S., European, and Indian neighbors, while encouraging Choctaw women and men to take up the various domestic “Arts” that his federal supervisors associated with the “plan of civilization.” His appointment occurred five years before letters appeared in which Dinsmoor imagines himself parenting Choctaw people— and longer still before he established a relationship with Molly McDonald’s son James. However, the logics and expectations contained in Dearborn’s instructions would directly influence Dinsmoor’s later decisions with respect to his domestic space. Dinsmoor’s deployment to Choctaw territories reflected the visions and ambitions of proslavery expansionists in the early U.S. republic. The Choctaw Nation’s homelands stood in the lower Mississippi Valley— covering vast

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expanses of the current state of Mississippi— stretching east from the banks of the Mississippi River to the Tombigbee River in what is now within the southwestern limits of the state of Alabama. Designated as suitable slave country by the Northwest Ordinance, these lands had become highly desirable to U.S. whites for the slave-driven production of short-staple cotton, the burgeoning cash crop highly valued within transatlantic markets. Not only did Choctaw territories prove fertile for agricultural production, but their proximity to the slow-moving waters of the Mississippi also offered ready access to the Gulf of Mexico, a crucial access point to Atlantic world exchange. With well-off planters and non-slaveholding settlers pouring into the region to test their luck in cotton markets in the 1790s, U.S. government officials had taken their first steps toward claiming Choctaw lands well before Dinsmoor ever traveled to them. In 1795 federal administrators negotiated the Treaty of San Lorenzo with Spain, which granted the United States imperial sovereignty over lands above the thirty-first parallel east of the Mississippi and guaranteed U.S. citizens the right to navigate the Mississippi River. In 1798 Congress formally declared Choctaw lands as part of the “Mississippi Territory.” Shortly after Dinsmoor accepted his position as Indian agent to the Choctaw Nation, Thomas Jefferson would shore up U.S. imperial claims to the neighboring region through his purchase of France’s “Louisiana Territory.” This transferred French imperial sovereignty over a vast stretch of territory just west of the Choctaw Nation to the United States, circumscribing the presence of nearby European imperial rivals for the early republic. Indians, of course, were not consulted in any of these dictates and agreements. Federal officials only acknowledged this fact long enough to assess that the final step toward securing U.S. territorial hold over the Choctaw landscape was to undermine Choctaw people’s national claims to their homelands. It was Silas Dinsmoor’s job to implement the quotidian relationships that would make this happen. In an effort to prevent any further Choctaw alliances with the Spanish or British traders who still supplied manufactures and military assistance to Native people in the Gulf Coast region, or with the revitalizing pan-Indian resistance efforts rippling through the Southeast and extending north into the Ohio River Valley, Secretary of War Dearborn sent Dinsmoor to weaken Choctaw territorial claims through the “conciliatory” strategies implemented via the U.S. “civilization” program. His mission was to encourage Choctaw men to give up the hunting practices that had historically fueled the

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transatlantic exchange of deerskin for manufactured European commodities and to persuade Choctaw women to forgo farming and the matrilineal family structures that underpinned Native women’s autonomy. Instead, men were to adopt the male-headed farming traditions, patriarchal family relations, and private property values idealized within post-Revolutionary governance. As Secretary of War Dearborn put it, Dinsmoor was to use “Suitable measures . . . for introducing the use of the plough, and the growth of Cotton as well as Grain” among Choctaw men, while hiring “A woman well calculated for the business” to teach Choctaw women “spinning and weaving, and other household Arts.” The new agent was to recognize the Choctaws’ “right of soil,” or their inherent rights to own their homelands. However, through the promotion of these labor transitions, he was simultaneously to convince— and coerce— Choctaw communities to consolidate themselves upon small, privately owned, male-run farmsteads. In sum, he was to find “peaceable” ways to make Choctaw people yield the bulk of their territories to the United States. Dinsmoor well understood his briefing. He had already spent three years as an assistant U.S. agent to the Cherokee Nation, making the secretary of war’s written instructions merely pro forma. Appointed to this post in 1796 at roughly thirty years of age, Dinsmoor had sought to quell confrontations erupting between Cherokee people and the white settlers who crowded into their territories. Meanwhile, he promoted the “arts” of U.S. patriarchal agrarianism and white domesticity by distributing plows to Cherokee men and spinning wheels, cotton cards, and looms to Cherokee women. Cherokee communities selectively adopted some of the ideologies and practices he advocated. Under his watch the Cherokee National Council, an emerging Cherokee governing body, created a centralized police force to establish and punish actions that had become new crimes within their territories, including the theft of settlers’ horses and, in some cases, retributive attacks against those who killed Cherokee clan relatives. Drawing on the tools Dinsmoor offered and the teachings he promoted, a number of Cherokee women also began to make their own clothes. If Dinsmoor took credit for these changes, his understanding of individual and collective agency was limited. As was the case with Haudenosaunee and Mohican communities to their north, Cherokee people’s cultural adaptations had more to do with their own interests in innovating their economies in response to settler encroachment and land loss than they did with any par-

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ticular persuasiveness on Dinsmoor’s part, thus incorporating the trappings of “civilization” on their own terms and to their own advantage. Although horse raids and clan revenge against those who killed Cherokee people had long played an important role within the Cherokee Nation’s economic and governance systems, the Cherokee National Council recognized that these practices fueled international frictions with neighboring whites and, in the case of accidental deaths, generated internal tensions within their nation. Subverting Dinsmoor’s intentions to inspire men to farm, Cherokee women grew cotton alongside corn, beans, and squash in their own agricultural fields, cultivating the billowy fibers that might lessen their reliance on an increasingly volatile fur trade. Although Dinsmoor ultimately had little to do with Cherokee economic and cultural transitions, federal officials were pleased with Dinsmoor’s efforts in Cherokee country. Indeed, likely because of Cherokee women’s and men’s adoption of certain tools and technologies from the U.S. “civilization” program, Dinsmoor became an attractive candidate for the position of Choctaw agent when it opened in 1802. After he was elected to the presidency in 1801, Thomas Jefferson redoubled federal commitments to acquiring Indian lands, expanding upon the central tenets of fledgling “civilization” policies to see them through. As part of these efforts, his administration not only appointed Dinsmoor to succeed the previous Indian agent to the Choctaw Nation, but also asked him to intervene in conflicts arising in Chickasaw territories as he made his journey into Choctaw homelands. Dinsmoor accepted these requests and began his travels west, but his years working as an agent to Choctaw people would not go smoothly. He struggled to promote the private property structures and gender-based labors idealized within the “plan of civilization.” In fact, he initially struggled to effectively model these systems and practices himself. It was these challenges that set the stage for his paternalistic desires, as well as for his eventual encounters with James McDonald.

Choctaw Agency In August 1802 Silas Dinsmoor made his way to Choctaw country. Traveling south from Chickasaw to Choctaw lands in the late-summer heat, the thirty-six-year-old agent passed into an undulating terrain of slow-moving rivers and swamps, lowland oak forests, and pine-ringed highland prairies.

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He most likely took a road newly dubbed the Natchez Trace, which the U.S. government had carved out of existing Choctaw and Chickasaw paths just a year before his arrival to connect U.S. settlements in Tennessee and Kentucky with the growing settler communities in Natchez and New Orleans. Choctaw and Chickasaw leaders granted this right of way through the heart of their lands in exchange for the promise of “two thousand dollars in goods and merchandise” in the Choctaws’ case, and “goods to the value of seven hundred dollars” in the Chickasaws’. Because of Choctaw communities’ weakened economic position within the lower Mississippi Valley due to both declining deer populations and their limited access to transatlantic trade routes, Choctaw leaders ceded this right of way through their territories in the hope of generating new commercial opportunities through interactions with migrating settlers. U.S. whites popularly referred to the Natchez Trace as the “Wilderness Road,” a designation that erased the presence of the Native communities whose lands it traversed. Yet, as Dinsmoor journeyed along the Trace, he encountered some of the roughly 11,500 Choctaw people whose territories spanned to its east and west, and whose hundreds of towns and countless agricultural fields of corn, beans, and pumpkins dotted the highland terrain. There are no detailed records of Dinsmoor’s 1802 travels. However, other accounts from this time report Choctaw women selling produce along the roadway and indicate the presence of roadside taverns run by white resident traders and their Choctaw wives, where a traveler such as Dinsmoor could find a hot meal and perhaps even a comfortable bed after a long day’s journey. It is possible that Dinsmoor encountered James McDonald’s extended kin as the Trace wound its way south through the Pearl River region of the Choctaws’ territories, where the McDonalds reportedly lived. If their paths did cross, however, their meeting would have been brief, because Dinsmoor ended his journey into Choctaw country roughly one hundred miles due east of the Pearl River Valley. It was in the fertile valley stretching east from the banks of the Chickasawhay River—near present-day Quitman, Mississippi—that Dinsmoor established his first agency. While the location was most certainly one in which Choctaw leaders agreed to let him reside, a Chickasawhay settlement also suited U.S. imperial ambitions, particularly when it came to monitoring Choctaws’ remaining participation in transatlantic trade. From his station in Chickasawhay, Dinsmoor had opportunities to keep tabs on the large

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Choctaw towns in the area, which stood just north of the Spanish at Mobile Bay. Dinsmoor shared concerns with local governing elites about ongoing affi liations between Choctaw people and the Spanish. Just before establishing the agency, he and the Mississippi territorial governor had exchanged fears over “the traffic trade” that the Spanish “carried on with the Choctaws from Mobile, and the lake contiguous to Orleans.” While evidence is lean concerning Dinsmoor’s day-to-day actions at the site, it appears that he resumed similar strategies to those he had pursued in Cherokee country. He passed out spinning wheels and cotton cards to women and ploughs and hoes to men while hiring white men and women to help him establish a “model farm” to demonstrate the roles commonly associated with settler agrarian life. George Gaines, the federally appointed trader to the Choctaw Nation, remembered that Dinsmoor hired a retinue of employees, including blacksmiths and wheelwrights, inspiring these workers “with an ardent desire for the improvement of the Indians.” What Gaines failed to report was that along with Dinsmoor’s “civilizing” efforts came demands for territory. In addition to distributing agricultural tools and manufactures for the production of homespun cloth, Dinsmoor helped his government flex its growing economic power over Choctaw people. Relying on the increasing U.S. influence in Choctaw trade relations in the wake of circumscribed European trade within the region, in October 1802 Dinsmoor negotiated a treaty in which the United States pressured Choctaw leaders to cede rights to 50,000 acres of land. Three years later, in 1805, he pushed for the cession of the southern portion of Choctaw territories— comprising a total of 4,142,720 acres—to cover trade debt and generate annuity payments. Another three years after that, Dinsmoor oversaw another proposed cession by Choctaw leaders who were “pressed for payment” by merchant creditors. U.S. imperial attitudes concerning American Indian and African American people directly informed Dinsmoor’s actions. Like many other U.S. whites, he deemed Euro-Americans, particularly those hailing from the United States, as inherently superior to people of African and American Indian descent, and Native people in particular as both desirous of and uplifted by U.S. governance. As he promoted U.S. domestic regimes among Choctaw people both within and beyond the space of his agency, he imagined that he would transform them into tractable and pliable subjects happy to be subsumed within an expanding United States. He quickly encountered

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diverse forms of resistance to his assumptions concerning assimilation. Some Choctaw men and women outright rejected the labors and economic and political systems he hoped to impart. And those who appeared to embrace them would later battle fiercely with U.S. government officials and settlers over rights to their territories in the lower Mississippi Valley up through the early 1830s. Indeed, Dinsmoor’s combined efforts to promote the “plan of civilization” and obtain land led to his mixed reception in the Choctaw Nation. When he distributed cotton cards, seed, and looms, or encouraged families to keep livestock, he was—at least in part—bolstering an indigenous semisubsistence economy adapting to the specific pressures that came with U.S. expansion. As was the case in other Indian nations, women and men in the Choctaw Nation took what they wanted from Dinsmoor in order to accommodate changing economic circumstances and reduced territorial resources. At least a decade prior to his arrival, Choctaw women began the process of enlarging their fields to grow cotton alongside corn, beans, potatoes, and pumpkins and began to keep chickens to sell to migrants passing through their territories or to settlers in Mobile and New Orleans. As deer became increasingly scarce, both women and men raised livestock such as hogs, horses, and cattle for their own subsistence and for trade with whites. Facing land cessions, settler encroachment, and a decline in deer populations over the course of the late eighteenth century, they increasingly relied on livestock and new agricultural ventures for their economic survival, assimilating stock raising and the small-scale production of cotton into enduring matrilineal hunting and agricultural economies. In addition to those Choctaw people who engaged with Dinsmoor to support the diversification of their smaller-scale subsistence and market practices, a few of those who enjoyed elite positions within the nation saw in Dinsmoor opportunities to further more aggressive ambitions to enhance familial wealth. Prior to European influence, Choctaw economic practices were primarily oriented around the redistribution of food and highly valued trade and sacred objects. Although particular leaders and prominent families held more goods than others, their power came from reallocating this wealth of resources rather than hoarding it for individual consumption. While the introduction of the fur trade and the behaviors of white settlers and government officials living within or near Choctaw settlements introduced Choctaw people to acquisitive economic systems over the course of the eighteenth century, perhaps most influential in the transformation of the

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Choctaw Nation’s economic practices were the European traders who resided within Choctaw territories and the bicultural descendants these men raised with Choctaw women. Beginning in the mid-1700s, it became common for British, Scottish, and French traders to marry the matrilineal relatives of prominent chiefs, an arrangement that secured transatlantic commercial alliances through the bonds of kinship. While these men frequently adopted Choctaw customs of dress and diplomacy, many continued to value the norms of their natal communities, including white men’s private ownership of land and their enslavement of African-descended people. Matrilineal customs designated the children of these unions as fully Choctaw, giving Choctaw mothers and their clan relatives a great deal of control over these children’s upbringing. Nonetheless, some of the men and women who grew up under white traders’ paternal orbit replicated their fathers’ racialized economic practices, particularly after inheriting Choctaw territory and black people as alienable property. By the first years of the nineteenth century, as historian Samuel Wells has shown, white traders and their bicultural Choctaw sons and daughters owned “huge herds of black-faced cattle,” transported “bales of cotton downriver to Spanish Mobile” for sale, and set themselves up “as innkeepers and ferrymen along the early frontier roads and horsepaths.”  The forced labors of enslaved people of African descent helped them to run these enterprises. Bicultural families were not alone in these economic ventures in the Choctaw Nation. Indeed, there were Choctaw families without European ancestry who engaged in cattle and cotton production utilizing the labors of black slaves. The larger-scale commercial endeavors of many bicultural families, however, as well as their kinship ties to prominent Choctaw chiefs placed these individuals at the forefront of the Choctaw Nation’s small but growing slave-driven commercial economy. From Silas Dinsmoor, they acquired tools to expand their economic ventures. Not only did the agent recognize their private holdings in land and labor, but he also provided resources for the mass production of cotton. In the early nineteenth-century land concessions that both Dinsmoor and his predecessor helped to negotiate, Choctaw chiefs requested women instructors to teach spinning and weaving, as well as ploughs, hoes, cottonseed, and even a cotton gin explicitly for the descendants of prominent traders and their bicultural Choctaw sons. While Dinsmoor appears to have carefully supported alliances with these communities, he still wrote of his struggles to impose his teachings among

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the vast majority of Choctaw people. Indeed, Choctaw women and men recognized Dinsmoor’s goals, and they rejected them. To the agent’s dismay, his neighbors shunned him and continued to value their own social, political, and economic customs even as they adapted to environmental and economic changes in the lower Mississippi Valley. Women owned, farmed, and shared the harvests of the land as their female kin had done for generations, while men persisted in hunting and trading as well as warring against those who intruded on Choctaw territories. Either willfully or ignorantly disregarding Choctaw women’s efficient crop management systems, Dinsmoor complained after riding through a Choctaw town in 1807, “The women perform all the labour, are principally employed in cultivating wild roots, & preparing them for food . . . & the corn fields too generally lie neglected.” Young men targeted Dinsmoor and his agency in the horse and cattle raids they generally reserved for white settlers and perhaps even one resident white trader. After his participation in treaty negotiations in 1805, John Pitchlynn—an influential trader, slaveholder, and interpreter for the United States who was married to a bicultural Choctaw woman named Sophia— appears to have suffered damage to his property as a result of an attack on his farm, for which he was eventually compensated $2,500. In the words of one imperial observer, as Dinsmoor pushed for new land cessions in 1805, “some turbulent young Choctaws” destroyed the Indian agent’s own “stock and other property” at Chickasawhay. From Dinsmoor’s ongoing complaints of attacks on his cattle, it is possible that the agent’s farm was one of the more popular targets in the lower Mississippi Valley. As he modeled U.S. “civilization” for Choctaw people and demanded land cessions, Dinsmoor and his Chickasawhay agency may have become the very symbols of imperial aggression. Silas Dinsmoor took note of these combined failures but blamed his lack of success on the supposed frailties of Choctaws’ character rather than the imperial arrogances that underpinned his mission. As he framed it, Choctaw people suffered “an excess of poverty, wretchedness, & famine” as a result of their own behavioral shortcomings. The men were “[t]oo proud to labour for the subsistence of themselves or families,” leaving agricultural labors up to women, who he declared did not execute them properly. If Knox and Jefferson framed their “civilization” program in terms of saving Indian people from population decline, for Dinsmoor this mission was futile. The reproductive philanthropy these officials promoted—at least on a large scale—was hopeless. “Poor devoted people,” he concluded in 1807, “devoted to self de-

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struction and total extinction.”  For Dinsmoor, Choctaw people could not adopt the U.S. kinship patterns that U.S. whites asserted would allow them to bear more children. This, he believed, made them destined to disappear. As Dinsmoor faced his increasingly unpopu lar position within the Choctaw Nation, he began to withdraw from his efforts as an Indian agent and, instead, to focus on claiming Choctaw territories for his own personal settlement. In 1806 he married a white woman from New England and purchased black slaves. Possibly lured by trade connections from the Natchez Trace or—just as centrally—the presence of prominent Choctaw chiefs and other influential slaveholding Choctaw families who had provisionally accepted his place within their nation, Dinsmoor moved his agency to the Pearl River Valley. There he sought to transform the Choctaw landscape into a plantation home. These efforts inspired a new kind of racial paternalism, one that deviated from the racial cast that had shaped his earlier initiatives. Indeed, as he began to think of himself not only as a federal Indian agent, but also as a local Mississippi Southerner, he began to imagine that he could safely contain Choctaw people within the space of his household.

Settler Paternalism Federal officials and the U.S. settlers who migrated into Indian territories shared the belief that the social relationships and land use practices heralded by the United States and many of its citizens granted both groups unfettered access to indigenous homelands. Yet at the same time, the modes and methods of territorial acquisition of these two constituencies frequently diverged. The federal policymakers who deployed Dinsmoor to Choctaw territories clearly coveted these lands for U.S. settlement. However, while they ignored Native sovereignty when they purchased territories from Eu ropean empires and attenuated it when they sent agents, missionaries, and traders into Indian territories, they nonetheless had to acknowledge Indians’ “right of soil” in order to “legitimately” claim Indian lands through treaties. They aspired to access Indian country in a systematic and “orderly” manner, both to avoid widespread warfare with Indian nations and to control the settlement patterns and national loyalties of U.S. whites. Settlers’ plans for territories, on the other hand, were often less cautious. As U.S. migrants laid claim to Native homelands, it was common for them to demonize indigenous communities or ignore Native people’s land rights entirely in order to undermine

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any challenges to their own immediate occupation. As Dinsmoor transformed himself from a federal agent into a local planter, he exhibited the overlapping ideologies and competing interests of government and settler constituencies. He initially sought to persuade Choctaw people to become small-scale landholders on reduced territories but over time came to assert his own direct ownership of Choctaw space through various forms of erasure of the Choctaws’ presence within it. Like other federal observers and policymakers, when Dinsmoor first arrived in Southeast Indian country he positioned Indian territories and U.S. settlements in diametric opposition to one another. One had all the creature comforts of family, society, and technology, while the other seemingly suffered from chaos and poor governance. In 1794, while working within the Cherokee Nation, Dinsmoor wrote a fantastical letter to his future wife, Mary Gordon, comparing life in Cherokee society to the one he imagined he was missing in New Hampshire, where he was raised. “Now behold me,” he asked of Gordon, “cross legged sitting on a Panther’s hide or Bear’s skin, or in a mat of Boughs . . . surrounded by a group of tawny savages, jealous & revengeful. . . . Not a friend to whom I may with confidence unbosom, & lay my thoughts in open view before him.” This was a far cry from his life in the Northeast, where he had enjoyed the company of “worthy gentlemen whose minds intent upon their several objects” were “like bees which on a sunny day seek precious honey dew from opening flowers,” striving “contently to gain the boon of rational delights.” Hunting economies went hand in hand with petty and foolish behavior, Dinsmoor suggested, while the agricultural practices popularly associated with a U.S. yeomanry as well as more wealthy gentlemen elites allowed men to enjoy more “rational” inquiries in bucolic homosocial settings. That Dinsmoor was actually in Charleston when he wrote this letter mattered little to his description of his surroundings. His language had more to do with proving the disjuncture between U.S. and Indian territories—not to mention his masculine bravery and intellectual acuity to the object of his affection— than with accurately describing his material circumstances and personal company. Despite the differences Dinsmoor believed existed between Indian territories and those occupied by U.S. whites, the agent’s responsibilities required that he reshape Indian societies so that they more closely matched those that he celebrated within the United States. But after he began to build his own

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household around 1806, he moved away from lengthy comparisons of Southeast Indian society to white gentility in New Hampshire or his efforts to oversee Indian communities’ transformation into the latter’s likeness. Instead, he emphasized the processes through which Choctaw territories could be made a suitable place for U.S. whites to live. Dinsmoor’s newfound beliefs were not unique to him or his individual psychological traits. They paralleled those of many other non-Native settlers. Like settlers before him— and, indeed, those who would follow in his footsteps—he claimed Native territory directly for himself by characterizing indigenous people as unassimilable foreigners in their own homelands. Describing Choctaw people as inherently lacking the ability to replicate the patriarchal structures that were supposed to foster large-scale agriculture and human population, Dinsmoor positioned them as an anachronistic presence on their own lands, one that was to be replaced entirely by U.S. whites. As he wrote to Mary Gordon in 1807 shortly after their marriage, he had seen genteel white settlers thrive within the Choctaw landscape. Speaking of “a beautiful lady, educated in all the refinements of independence in Charleston,” Dinsmoor described her life “on a new farm, on the extreme frontiers, on the very thouroughfare of Indian hunting parties, & where they exercise more rudeness and insolence, than in their own towns.” “[Y]et this charming creature is happy,” he declared to his wife. Her mental acuities allowed her to understand that the landscape could be changed. She and her husband “already possess[ed] an independent fortune, and are come hither to improve it.” If the comforts Dinsmoor associated with U.S. society would not come from remaking Choctaw men and women in the white family’s image, but rather by establishing on Choctaw lands a “white” family of his own, Dinsmoor initially faced obstacles to his efforts to fulfill the kinship roles that justified his individual claims to Choctaw territories. While he used his position as Indian agent to occupy Pearl River lands, in order to legitimate his permanent place upon them he wanted—and, indeed, needed—to establish his own family there. Ironically, his very presence in Southeast Indian territories had worked against his ability to realize the family structure he so actively promoted and desired. As he was pursuing Mary Gordon’s hand in marriage, Dinsmoor struggled to ease Gordon’s fears of having to live with him on Native lands, fears exacerbated by the counsels of friends. According to Dinsmoor’s correspondence, Gordon’s social circle “drew . . . a horrid

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picture” of the agent’s “situation” among the Choctaws, complete with “savage beasts,” “more savage men,” and “the deprivation of all . . . friendly connexion.” They raised such doubts about Dinsmoor’s “own ability to afford the necessary comforts in life” that Gordon initially rejected the agent’s proposals. Dinsmoor clearly convinced Gordon to overcome her fears long enough to marry him, which she did at the end of the summer of 1806. Yet even after their marriage, his new wife hesitated to join him at the agency, wishing she might instead “dream” her husband “out of the wilderness.” Silas Dinsmoor’s 1807 celebration of the Charleston lady was an attempt to convince Mary of the suitability of his surroundings for her own comfort. “How natural was it for me,” he relayed, “to draw the parallel & contrast” between Mary and the plantation mistress, “& cherish the flattering hope, that my Mary would yet be happy too, even in a wilderness?” If this woman could see possibility in her new settlement, perhaps Mary, too, might use her imagination to do the same. An essential step toward ensuring Mary’s ease within Choctaw territories—not to mention the profits that could be extracted out of them—was for Silas Dinsmoor to become an enslaver. For the labors of people of African descent not only helped to materialize the agricultural visions of established and would-be Southern settlers such as Dinsmoor, but also made possible the comforts many U.S. whites believed their families required. In October 1806, a few months after traveling back to New Hampshire to marry Gordon, and upon the eve of the closing of the transatlantic slave trade, Dinsmoor prepared to fulfill this role, rushing to Charleston to purchase African women and men who had just survived the Middle Passage. Among them would be an enslaved woman who might create the domestic conditions that would soothe his wife’s anxieties about life in Native territories. “My object is to purchase some Africans,” he wrote his bride, “& [I] shall not forget to procure a nice made [sic] for you.”  It might seem odd that Silas Dinsmoor, a New Englander, saw racial slavery as crucial to setting up his household for his new family. But the business of slavery was nothing new to the Indian agent. Before he even arrived in Choctaw territories and witnessed their burgeoning plantation settlements, his time in Cherokee country had exposed him to both white and Cherokee families who owned African and African American slaves. Slavery had come to shape visions of wealth and prosperity for many aspiring white men and, indeed, served to shore up and even create elite white status itself. More

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than this, census records from 1790 indicate that his own father, a settler from Ulster Ireland, held three slaves in New Hampshire at the close of the eighteenth century, signaling a likeliness that Dinsmoor grew up in a household using African and African American labor. As gradual abolition began to curtail slave ownership over the first decade of the nineteenth century, younger men like Dinsmoor may have felt that life with slaves in an expanding plantation South was more in line with their visions of their futures than life in New England without them. It is unclear whether Mary Gordon also grew up in a family that held slaves or, even if she did not, if she was eventually lured south by the thought of becoming a plantation mistress. If either was the case, she would have given her new husband additional incentives to purchase and enslave people of African descent as she expected—or even demanded—that her spouse create the domestic environment to which she was accustomed or aspired. Still, a previous history in slaveholding was not necessarily required to inspire white settlers to move into Southeast Indian lands in general, or the lower Mississippi Valley in particular. Dinsmoor was joined by other Northerners who moved south to realize visions of mastery over people of African descent. In his journal from an 1802 tour of Choctaw, Apalachee, and Caddo lands, Philadelphian sojourner and land speculator George Hunter epitomized how both Northern settlers and speculators who moved south and Southern colonists who moved to their west viewed the Mississippi landscape. Drawing upon the logics of capitalism, Hunter turned every thing he saw, tasted, smelled, or touched into the raw materials of speculative economic fantasies. As he moved through Southeast Indian lands, he noted the ways in which soil composition, salt deposits, vegetation, and access to water potentially enabled cotton, wheat, and corn production, as well as salt and mineral extraction and cattle ranging. The U.S. settlers he encountered during his travels were clearly sympathetic to his views. They fenced in and “improved” lands through monoculture and cattle farming, hoping that by doing so they would reap the financial profits from the material resources they believed these territories had embedded within them. By 1795 of primary interest for most settlers was a given piece of land’s capacity to produce cotton. As Hunter’s journal reveals, cotton production had sparked the imaginations of white people east of the Mississippi River, from established Mississippi planters, such as Scottish settler William Dunbar, who had arrived in the lower Mississippi Valley during the Spanish

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colonial period, to white men migrating from the Atlantic states. These U.S. citizens’ excitement emanated from the ambitions of British textile manufacturers, who saw economic opportunities in cotton bolls, hoping to meet consumer desires for inexpensive muslins and calicoes. The ensuing innovations in industrial cloth manufacturing—combined with new fashion preferences— changed physical landscapes across the Atlantic world, from West Africa, to Brazil and the Caribbean, and on to Asia. The soil and climate of the South, however, was especially conducive to the production of a particular variety of cotton, which English manufacturers found highly responsive to industrial processing. For aspiring cotton growers, Southeast Indian people, such as the Choctaws, occupied the promised lands of commercial agriculture. Along with these settlers’ dreams of cotton came desires for slaves. When white men and women from both Northern and Southern states migrated to the region, they sought to cultivate cotton through the bonded labors of Africans and African Americans. Instead of framing these desires in the language of human exploitation, slaveholders characterized their visions as both necessary for the large-scale agricultural production that putatively marked human progress, as well as part of an orderly and natural racial regime in which white men— and their subservient wives— served as the guardians of the people they enslaved, who supposedly demonstrated inherent behavioral characteristics that prevented social, economic, and familial autonomy. Like Jefferson, proslavery migrants cast black men and women as racially incapable of forming their own independent families and, as Dinsmoor would eventually suggest, in need of a white patriarch’s—or shepherd’s—guiding hand. The casual ways in which Hunter noted the presence of his fellow travelers’ slaves, along with Hunter’s collaborative entrapment of a black man whom he presumed to be a runaway slave, indicates both the prevalence of racial slavery in Mississippi by 1802 as well as the desire to correlate blackness with white men’s domestic prerogatives. For Hunter and his colleagues, any black person they encountered in the Mississippi Valley was—or should be— some white man’s property. Purchasing enslaved people for the first time challenged Silas Dinsmoor’s sense of himself as a philanthropic gentleman. Two weeks after announcing his decision to acquire slaves for his and Mary’s home, he expressed his disgust with the “horrid traffic of purchasing negroes.” Dinsmoor’s horror was not due to the conditions endured by newly enslaved Africans, but rather

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because he was “obliged” to deal with the “unprincipled people” who sold them, a common sentiment expressed by slaveholders confronting the brutal realities of the slave market. Dinsmoor clearly recovered from his initial foray with those he cast as the lower sorts who trafficked in human bondage, however. For, in the end, he purchased sixteen people, whom he sent ahead of himself with a slave driver. He emerged from this visit to Charleston slave markets armed with the paternalistic discourses justifying enslavement. “I shipped my flock of black sheep,” he wrote Mary from the Southern coastal town, drawing on Christian imagery to position himself as a benevolent and paternal shepherd of human souls. By January 1807 two of the sixteen people he enslaved had died. Adopting slaveholder beliefs that the principles of Christianity and the property values supporting chattel slavery could easily coexist, Dinsmoor relayed the news to his wife in a “painful talk.” “My property has sustained a revers, since I wrote you last, by the death of two of my Africans.” “No foresight could have prevented the loss,” he continued, absolving himself of wrongdoing. Dinsmoor did not preserve the names and histories of the two enslaved people who lost their lives, nor did he remark upon the direct causes of their deaths. His physical demands of them, however, could certainly have been contributing factors. In the winter of 1806–1807, a matter of months after purchasing the sixteen African women and men from Charleston and driving them to Choctaw territory, Dinsmoor relied upon their labors to move his agency one hundred miles west of Chickasawhay to the Pearl River Valley. Once there, the Indian agent again depended on the people he enslaved to prepare sixty acres “for culture” and establish, in the words of one early twentieth-century historian, an agency house of “a very fine structure.” As Gaines—the same federal trader who remarked on Dinsmoor’s early “civilization” efforts in Choctaw country—noted, this building and its surroundings quite explicitly resembled “a large plantation.” The intense physical work required to build Dinsmoor’s agency home would have taken its toll on men and women weakened from poor nutrition, disease, and confinement during the Middle Passage as well as by the lengthy overland journey from Charleston to the Pearl River Valley, all the while enduring personal sorrows brought on by separation from their families, communities, and homelands. As the cold winter days slowly warmed and lengthened in the spring of 1807, the presence of the fourteen African women and men remaining at

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Dinsmoor’s new plantation agency changed the Indian agent’s relationship to the Choctaw landscape. For the first time in his correspondence, he began to write with a sense of pleasure of his surroundings. Scanning a horizon in which the boughs of “upwards of a hundred fine young peach trees” spread their blooms, 112 cattle and 64 hogs roamed in search of food, and where even “two domesticated deer cut fantastic symbols,” Dinsmoor celebrated his “ little rustic domain.” He even wrote of the pleasure he felt from hard work in his garden, performed alongside his slaves or, more than likely, primarily entailing the oversight of their labors. The agent celebrated the planting of peas, “irish potatoes,” leeks, asparagus, and oats—vegetables popular among white settlers such as himself—as well as Native corn. Even Choctaw people seemed less hostile to him, “more respectful than usual,” leaving his cattle alone and sending along good wishes to his wife. For Dinsmoor, only Mary could complete the transformation of his Indian agency into a fully “domesticated” space. “Without my Mary,” he asserted, “society is a wilderness, or desert!!!” Nonetheless, he explicitly saw himself as creating an orderly plantation household, one that beckoned his wife “home.” Even as they were barred from any legal rights to their own families, enslaved people were foundational to the creation of white familial space. Indeed, they were synonymous with the household itself. “My household are in perfect health, docile and tractable,” Silas told Mary, in reference to his own perception of the well-being and actions of those he enslaved, one that must have required a great deal of willful blindness. “When shall my Mary join me,” he queried in closing, “to view this wilderness blossom as a rose . . . ?” Slaves created the household. Dinsmoor just needed a companion with whom to oversee and share in what he perceived to be the domestic joys of agricultural “progress.” Dinsmoor’s confidence as a patriarch greatly expanded once he established his plantation. As he asserted mastery over the African men and women he enslaved to “domesticate” the Choctaw Agency, he began to imagine his slaveholding household as a kind of container through which he could effectively assert his authority over Choctaw people as well. Although he had never used paternalistic language in his letters before, after establishing his plantation agency, Dinsmoor suddenly referred to the Choctaw men who continued to “depradate” his cattle over the spring of 1807 as his children. And when Mary Dinsmoor gave birth to Silas Jr. in New Hampshire in the summer of 1807 and began to make preparations to join her husband at the

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new plantation agency over the following year, Silas Jr. became a “young Chaktaw.” When imagining white children as Native offspring, colonists such as Dinsmoor may have revealed anxieties about white children exhibiting the so-called savage traits of the Native people whose lands they occupied. Yet Dinsmoor’s playful rhetoric can simultaneously be read in terms of governance and desire in a Native world he could not control. If Dinsmoor felt ineffective as an Indian agent, reimagining Native people as adopted children was a way to symbolically disempower them and, in turn, reconstitute his own authority. This process may also have been a way to shore up his wife’s tentative feelings about living in Choctaw lands. Positioning Mary as a mother to a young Choctaw child— even in jest—may have been an attempt on the part of the agent to elevate her confidence as a maternal figure in foreign lands. As was the case with the men and women he enslaved, Dinsmoor’s paternalism toward Choctaw people reflected a broader disregard for Choctaw life. In fact, the Indian agent made it apparent that he saw Choctaw people— or, more appropriately, their physical bodies—as mascots and tokens to be collected and preserved for his own enjoyment. In March 1807 he wrote to Mary of having paid to heal an elder Choctaw woman whose jaw was evidently broken in a riot on Choctaw lands the previous winter. He expressed little regard for the woman’s well-being or distress over her bodily trauma. Instead, he celebrated his acquisition of her bones. “The poor creature was horribly disfigured & mangled,” he reported, “but 130 dollars mended all, & I thought it a good bargain for I have a piece of her jaw with two teeth in it in my desk.” For Dinsmoor the “bargain” was not in the price of caring for this woman, but in the object that emerged from her, a reminder of his own physical distinctness from Choctaw people, whose remains did not merit the same sanctity and memorialization as did those of whites. It was not unusual for paternalism to encompass the collection and preservation of indigenous remains. The profound lack of respect Dinsmoor exhibited for the elder Choctaw woman’s body reflected a growing interest on the part of a number of U.S. whites who expressed fatherly concern over Indian people’s well-being to collect signifiers of Indian identity and culture. Over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, many of the statesmen, bureaucrats, and other wise interested individuals from the United States who were most vociferous in their anx ieties over Indians’ futures in North America were prolific collectors of what they saw

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as indigenous memorabilia. Thomas Jefferson, for example, established what scholar Anthony Wallace has referred to as a “cabinet of curios and mementos” in the entry way and library of his Monticello estate as early as 1780 and, after assuming the presidency, encouraged government-appointed “explorers” such as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to collect physical objects as well as linguistic and cultural information concerning the Native tribes they encountered. Later on in the 1810s and 1820s, Thomas McKenney, the superintendent of Indian trade and the first head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, would make similar requests of those under his supervision, and commissioned paintings depicting the likeness and dress of Native leaders passing through Washington, DC. That these men expressed dismay over the effects of settler expansion on Native people’s prosperity was not incongruous with their impulses to collect and display physical objects affiliated with Indian communities, including bones, weapons, clothing, and sacred objects. They saw themselves as preserving Indian culture in light of what they believed to be the inevitability of Indians’ disappearance into either the U.S. national family or, as it may be, a vanishing “wilderness.” In this sense they became self-appointed paternal benefactors of a “true”—and supposedly fading—Indian identity, one that they paradoxically articulated as static, timeless, and unchanging. Even as Dinsmoor shared with other U.S. governing elites the desire to collect and preserve indigenous bodies, his motivations were informed by the specifics of his particular surroundings and interactions. When he relocated Choctaw remains into his home, he merged his ambitions to remain a federal agent while embarking on activities that befitted a local settler. The preservation of a woman’s jaw commemorated his professional responsibilities to heal her, while his personal acquisition of her remains simultaneously positioned her bones as relics and curiosities, suggesting her society was in the process of disappearing—or, as he put it, facing extinction—to be replaced by that of U.S. whites, including himself. Dinsmoor’s later incorporation of a Choctaw boy into his household would soon echo these dual allegiances. It pointed to his continued work in “civilization,” albeit on a smaller scale, while allowing him to proceed in his personal visions of settlement. James McDonald’s presence within Dinsmoor’s home made it possible for the Indian agent to highlight his pedagogical efforts— and his ability to assert paternal control over at least a single Choctaw person—while focusing his primary attentions on the plantation household he had so long desired.

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After Dinsmoor married and began to enslave black people, his ambitions as a settler increasingly distracted him from his responsibilities as a public servant. The larger his private holdings grew, the more he withdrew from Choctaw politics. Gaines remembered seeing “but little of Col. Dinsmoor after he removed his agency” from Chickasawhay to Pearl River. By January 1809 the agent had again moved with his wife, children, and at least some of the people he enslaved to live one hundred miles farther southwest, in the planter town of Washington, Mississippi. In February 1809 Dinsmoor continued to expand his landholdings, purchasing a three-hundred-acre plantation along the Mississippi River in Concordia Parish for $3,400. His absences from Choctaw settlements became so prolonged that they attracted the attention of then current secretary of war William Eustis. When Tecumseh traveled to the Southeast in 1811 to court Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Chickasaw participation in a united Indian front against U.S. expansion, Eustis dashed off a note to his missing agent. “Inconveniences to the public ser vice having arisen from the absence of the Choctaw Agent from his Agency; and late circumstances having rendered his personal residence in the nation indispensible to the due exertions of his duties,” Eustis chastised, “you will be pleased after the receipt of this letter, to repair thither without delay; and in future consider yourself as permanently resident among them.” Dinsmoor begrudgingly accepted, relocating himself, at least part time, to the agency, though he appears to have focused most of his attentions on ensuring slaveholders’ proper documentation of slaves brought through Choctaw lands. It was sometime around Tecumseh’s 1811 tour that Dinsmoor interacted with Molly McDonald long enough to obtain her child. He then sent the ten- or eleven-year-old James McDonald to his home in Washington, Mississippi, surrounding the boy with the patriarchal familial structures he as an agent was supposed to impose more directly within the McDonalds’ nation. Dinsmoor’s later actions suggest that he did so, at least in part, in the hopes of demonstrating his commitments to his federal appointment by showcasing his efforts with the young man to his federal supervisors. In 1813 he traveled with McDonald and another young boy— Choctaw chief Apuckshunubbee’s son Thomas Jefferson—to Washington, DC, presenting the two youths to Secretary of War John Armstrong with the hopes of securing their further schooling in the region. Given Dinsmoor’s awareness of his government’s approval of the transfer of the Cherokee youth Thomas

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Wilson to the Philadelphia Quakers’ care in the 1790s, the Indian agent had good reason to believe his efforts might be rewarded. Yet if Dinsmoor anticipated that his tutelage of James McDonald would save his career, it was a gamble that ultimately failed. Just as he traveled to the nation’s capital with the two boys, political winds were working against him, with Andrew Jackson waging a campaign for Dinsmoor’s removal. Jackson was incensed at Dinsmoor’s demands for written proof of slave ownership when settlers passed through Choctaw territories with those they enslaved. Dinsmoor may have hoped that McDonald’s presence in Washington would garner favor with the secretary of war, demonstrating the beleaguered agent’s commitments to “civilizing” Indians even as he concentrated on strengthening his position in Mississippi land, slave, and cotton markets. However, as the War of 1812 raged during Dinsmoor’s travels to and from the East to bring McDonald and Jefferson to his government’s attention, the secretary of war appointed a new agent to the Choctaw Nation. Dinsmoor may have ultimately lost his position as agent, but his actions remain poignant, as they suggest the powerful political work he hoped his domestic relationships would accomplish. The process of assembling a plantation household, and then situating at least one Choctaw person within it, appears to have eased his personal frustrations over his limited influence among Choctaw people more broadly. Indeed, his slaveholding familial space became the primary site through which he sought to alleviate the tense and contradictory circumstances that arose as he tried to settle on Choctaw lands while serving the federal government. Both U.S. migrants and policymakers heralded the rights of household patriarchs to hold Indian lands and African American slaves as private property, yet clashed when it came to immediate claims to Native space and formal mandates to assimilate Choctaw people within a U.S. national family. By incorporating a Choctaw child into his home, Dinsmoor participated in his government’s efforts to promote U.S. “civilization” among Choctaw people while simultaneously doing his best to ignore his broader mission of bringing a larger group of Choctaw men and women into the U.S. “domestic” orbit. He instead maintained his focus on the white family that was already, to him, clearly part of his own national community and who, along with the people he enslaved, he believed would help him transform Choctaw lands into a place that he, his wife, and his white son might ultimately call home.

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Silas Dinsmoor positioned himself as a paternal benefactor to enslaved people of African descent and the people of the Choctaw Nation. And he may very well have believed that he was. As the federal government moved toward more explicit removal policies in the aftermath of Andrew Jackson’s virtual elimination of British, Spanish, and pan-Indian collaborations over the course of the War of 1812, the former agent apparently labeled “the policy of our government towards the Indian tribes” as “a harsh one” (no doubt relishing in the opportunity to fire back at the man who had cost him his career with the federal government). Nonetheless, Dinsmoor remained unable to resist either the lures of settlement and slavery in an expanding U.S. South, or the imperial logics that legitimated them. Indeed, Dinsmoor’s actions during his tenure as an Indian agent foreshadowed the federal government’s eventual disregard for assimilationist programs, not to mention Native sovereignty, in the postwar years. After Jackson negotiated the very first treaty exchanging Choctaw lands in the East for lands west of the Mississippi in 1820, Dinsmoor eagerly received a two-mile tract of his own at the Choctaw Nation’s Little Turkey Town along the Tombigbee River to compensate him for his loss of livestock while living in Choctaw territories. Dinsmoor may have critiqued Jackson’s policies, but if Choctaw lands were to become U.S. slave country, he was going to make sure he held a stake in it. Dinsmoor was not alone in his assessments or his calculations when it came to U.S. Indian policy or Indian territories. When Andrew Jackson’s presidential administration coerced leaders of the Choctaw Nation to formally relinquish their remaining territories in 1830, Southerner William Bodley expressed “horror” with his nation’s Indian policy, describing Choctaw land cessions as “wholesale robbery.” Yet Bodley still planned to “get a tract” of Choctaw people’s Mississippian homelands, seeing them as some of the best agricultural territories in the region and, in turn, “the best possible investment” of his family’s “funds.” Dinsmoor’s career makes clear that U.S. settler expansion, Native dispossession, and the expansion of black servitude did not simply evolve out of the public “successes” or “failures” of a few great politicians or military heroes. The war to control land and people was also a daily struggle unfolding in the shared spaces in which individuals labored and lived. Molly McDonald’s decision to send her son to live with Dinsmoor—the Indian agent and the plantation settler—was a significant intervention in those battles. If

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Dinsmoor adopted James McDonald in the hope of educating the young man to settler norms and to secure personal and political capital in both the Southeast and the federal capital of Washington, DC, his actions had unexpected consequences. In establishing a paternal relationship with a Choctaw youth, he created opportunities to resist dispossession. James McDonald’s education in Dinsmoor’s home and, later, in and around the nation’s capital, enabled Molly McDonald and her son to acquire useful tools for individual empowerment and in support of Choctaw sovereignty. Drawing on their own ideas about race and kinship, they worked to resist the imperial reach of the U.S. government and the white settlers it represented. In other words, Dinsmoor inadvertently supported Molly McDonald’s efforts to use her matrilineal kinship relationships with her son as a means to retain economic influence and territorial and political sovereignty in a changing colonial world. A broader consideration of Molly McDonald’s navigations of U.S. efforts to impose racialized family formations on Choctaw people demonstrates the yawning gap between imperial agendas and colonial realities as Native people found new ways to maintain sovereignty over their homelands.

4 A Choctaw Mother in Slave Country

U.S. settler William Haley described the Pearl River Valley of the 1810s and 1820s as an “open” country. “[L]ittle or no undergrowth” tangled its rolling terrain. “[Y]ou could see almost as far as the eye would let you, except for the cane and wild pea vines that covered all the branches and bottom lands.” In the low country, the cane could grow up to “twenty to thirty feet in height” as it traced the edges of the Pearl River and the “larger creeks” that crisscrossed the landscape. Tall grasses took over where the country banked upward, reaching “higher than a man’s head.” There was an “immense quantity of game,” Haley remarked, including “deer, panther, catamount, wildcat, turkey, foxes, raccoons, opossums and wolves,” providing food and pelts for hunters or, alternately, preying on the livestock of smallscale stock raisers and wealthy horse and cattle ranchers. James McDonald’s mother, Molly, was one of the elite ranchers in this region. When the United States directly claimed the Pearl River Valley for U.S. settlement in 1820, she lived on a farm on Rhodes Creek, located about fifteen miles south of the current city of Jackson, Mississippi. The site took its name from her third husband, a white Tennessean named John Rhodes. Yet Rhodes’s authority was mostly symbolic. Molly’s family owned the land 

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as a Choctaw “reserve,” and she herself was an important player in regional horse, cattle, and slave markets. She had “a great many horses,” perhaps up to five hundred, Haley recalled, and she raised beef steers to sell to local settlers. At least two black slaves helped her run this enterprise, as did her husband. Indeed, Rhodes may have worked the fields alongside those whom McDonald enslaved on her property. Molly McDonald’s matrilineal nephew, Robert Jones, remarked in 1826 while residing on his aunt’s farm that he kept a man named “John . . . Pretty [steady] employed at clearing . . . land” for his aunt’s agricultural interests, referring either to one of the people of African descent enslaved by Molly, or to her husband himself. While this was nearly a decade after Silas Dinsmoor had come and gone as U.S. Indian agent to the Choctaw Nation, Molly McDonald’s status and power in the 1820s suggest the nature and shape of her interactions with Dinsmoor after he migrated into her territories after 1806. No sources document her life in those earlier years, but her later holdings in land, horses, and cattle and her enslavement of people of African descent position her among the small section of Choctaw elites who may have welcomed—at least temporarily— some of the material resources and diplomatic ties someone like Dinsmoor could offer. In 1818 her son James declared that he left the lower Mississippi Valley with Silas Dinsmoor in 1813 to fulfill his mother’s wishes that he continue his schooling in the East. Molly McDonald’s encouragement of her son’s education across the country, combined with her influence in the northwestern region of the Choctaw Nation, suggest that Dinsmoor’s incorporation of James McDonald into his household in 1811 served her purposes as much as it fulfi lled those of the struggling agent. When Molly McDonald sent her son to live in Dinsmoor’s home, she set in motion a series of events that would ultimately enable her to retain her farm, even as her lands became enveloped by the state of Mississippi. James McDonald would become his mother’s staunch advocate, using his educational experiences and his diplomatic ties to ensure her holdings in land and slaves, even as local U.S. settlers—and, eventually, the federal government—sought to eliminate Choctaw people’s presence from the lower Mississippi Valley entirely. The contours of Molly McDonald’s life provide a compelling vantage point into Southeast Indians’ motivations for circulating boys through U.S. plantation households and educational institutions in the early nineteenth century. They reveal how Southeast Indian understandings of kinship and

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governance and growing engagements with Southern U.S. markets inspired a small group of well-positioned families to place children in the domestic spaces of some of the very individuals who sought their dispossession. McDonald’s choices situate her squarely among those Southeast Indian elites engaging in large-scale economic and political innovations over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as well as Native struggles to protect their territories. Her decisions with respect to her household suggest the novel ways in which a particular set of Southeast Indians, including Southeast Indian women, influenced their communities’ navigation of the racialized labor systems and settler land grabs that rapidly transformed the Pearl River landscape and other regions of the Southeast. As with the stories of other Native women of her era, most of the details of McDonald’s experiences remain beyond the scope of the archives. In her case, those that do exist come from the men who knew her: from Haley, whose migration into her territories and later reminiscences offer us a glimpse of her circumstances after the United States had claimed the Pearl River Valley for U.S. plantation settlement in the 1820s, and from her younger son and nephew, whose colonial schooling and elite connections placed them within the purview of U.S. record keeping. Yet these fragmentary sources add up to provide a compelling account of the conditions she faced and the decisions she made, both of which would come to shape the social, political, and spatial history of Choctaw-U.S. encounters in the lower Mississippi Valley during the first three decades of the nineteenth century.

A Life amid Empires By the time Molly McDonald encountered Silas Dinsmoor in the early nineteenth century, she had spent her life navigating European and EuroAmerican empires. Based on the ages of her two children, James McDonald and Alexander Hamilton, she was probably born sometime between 1760 and the early 1780s. These were volatile years in Choctaw history. Geopolitical contests across the Atlantic world caused Choctaw lands to pass from French to British imperial jurisdiction, then from British to Spanish control, and, finally, by the 1790s, from Spanish claims to those of the United States. None of these empires actually owned Choctaw territories, as theirs was an imperial sovereignty that thwarted competing foreign interests in the region. Yet these imperial transfers had a profound effect on Choctaw people. As

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she came of age, McDonald witnessed Choctaw communities undergo a series of social, political, and economic transformations as various foreigners asserted their stake in Choctaw homelands. By the time she bore her two sons, she herself was a major innovator in the political economy of her nation, a position that would directly inform her interactions with the U.S. federal agent. In the century prior to Molly McDonald’s birth, Choctaw people had become deeply enmeshed within the transatlantic fur trade. Creating what historians have termed the “play-off system,” each of the three geographic and political districts that collectively made up the Choctaw Nation strategically— and autonomously—pitched British, Spanish, and French traders and government officials against one another, using contesting imperial ambitions for the region and independent district governance structures to maintain authority over their homelands. By switching allegiances between European powers eager for Choctaw military and trade connections, individual Choctaw leaders were able to curb settler encroachment on their territories, demand a steady supply of gifts from imperial elites, and secure the favorable exchange of deerskins for the European manufactures upon which they had come to rely. The fur trade was a volatile system deeply enmeshed in the boom and bust cycles of European capitalism, creating tensions among Choctaw people and between neighboring tribes. However, the play-off system allowed Choctaw chiefs to hold a powerful place in this extractive economy while maintaining the social, economic, and spiritual practices that bound their interethnic communities and regional divisions together as a nation. Sustained by women-centered agriculture, they integrated hunting and transatlantic exchange into long-standing forms of diplomacy, spirituality, and community governance. The era in which Molly McDonald was born would see Choctaws’ strategic engagement with imperial powers come to an end. After defeating France in the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Britain claimed Choctaw territories under its exclusive imperial control. With the departure of one of their major European rivals, British administrators put an end to gift giving, inflated the price of manufactures, emphasized individual Choctaw debt, and expanded the liquor trade in Choctaw territories. Choctaw people did not accept these changes passively. As historian Stephen van Hoak writes, they “refused to allow the English to dictate the terms of their relationship” by “confiscat[ing] the goods of English traders, especially those who attempted

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to enforce Choctaw ‘debts.’ ” Yet new British trade practices took their toll. Willing to bypass the Native leaders who had traditionally controlled goods coming into and out of their territories, British traders peddled rum to individual hunters. As younger Choctaw men became embroiled in the liquor trade, they overhunted white-tailed deer, sending populations by the 1780s into steady decline. New settlement schemes also marked this era of European colonialism in the lower Mississippi Valley. Up through the 1760s Native people made up the majority population in the region. This, combined with Indian leaders’ diplomatic and economic savvy in the face of imperial scheming, left French settlers with little choice but to remain clustered along the Gulf Coast. As the British and Spanish empires battled over western Florida between the 1760s and 1780s, however, imperial administrators promoted mass immigration as a way to claim and hold onto territory. By incentivizing in particular planter migrations along the Gulf Coast, the British and Spanish empires expanded colonial populations from roughly 10,000 in the early 1760s to 30,000 by the middle of the 1780s, tipping the demographic balance of power in their favor. Th is allowed for the expansion of the regional plantation system, which began to extend north along the Mississippi from New Orleans and Point Coupé. As a result, Choctaw people encountered limited mobility in regions to the south of their settlements and further struggled to reestablish the diverse trade partnerships necessary to maintain strong exchange rates for skins and furs. As a young girl in the Western District of the Choctaws’ homelands, Molly may have heard about these changes in the region from her mother and uncles and the extended matrilineal kin who made up her family ties. She perhaps also learned of them from her father, if he played a major role in her upbringing. She would have also directly witnessed transformations in the daily labors of the larger Choctaw community of which she was a part. To avoid entrapment in the cycles of debt and dependency promoted by the British empire, Choctaw people experimented with some of the very practices Silas Dinsmoor would encounter as he moved into Choctaw lands in the early nineteenth century. Women engaged in the agricultural entrepreneurialism that likely sustained Dinsmoor during his travels along the Natchez Trace, selling their produce to settlers, and both women and men integrated horses and cattle into their farming and hunting economies to lessen their reliance upon wild game. Some also migrated west of the

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Mississippi River, where an abundance of game allowed them to continue hunting, while others turned to the U.S. wage economy and small-scale trade to expand their access to foreign goods. Women found employment during part of the year picking cotton, and men both sold the game they could fi nd within their homelands to local traders and, at times, worked odd jobs in exchange for manufactures. Over the course of the early nineteenth century, Choctaw men joined women in settlers’ cotton fields as wage employment within colonial plantations expanded alongside the growing cotton industry. The forms of slavery practiced by foreign settlers to produce cotton and other export commodities influenced Choctaw adaptations to changing environmental, political, and economic conditions. As deer populations and British and Spanish diplomatic efforts continued to wane toward the end of the eighteenth century, Choctaw men raided plantation settlements for human and animal spoils, integrating long-standing warfare and hunting strategies with new economic initiatives. Arriving home with horses, cattle, and both Euro-American and African American men, women, and children, Choctaw hunters and warriors expanded human and animal resources within their communities. While horses and cattle were incorporated into family herds, human captives were either tortured and killed or integrated into Choctaw matrilineal kin networks to avenge or appease the loss of loved ones. Some were also held as slaves, a status that condemned these individuals to the liminal status of kinlessness. With no clan or family to protect them, these were the most vulnerable people within Southeast Indian societies. They also became highly valuable economic resources within a changing colonial setting. Scholars have debated whether the concept of “race”— and its relationship to ideas about heritable human difference—was foreign to Choctaw society and, indeed, to Native societies in general. Southeast Indians did believe that different social, ethnic, and political communities had distinct origins, and some Native societies such as the Choctaws had historically treated enslaved captives as less than human. It is not apparent, however, that Southeast Indians permanently and differentially classified entire populations of people as bearers of physiological and behavioral traits that could be passed down over generations, regardless of cultural context. Nonetheless, it is clear that by the 1780s, Choctaw plantation raids were increasingly informed by the racialized labor systems practiced by the Euro-Americans

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they targeted. With the expansion of British and Spanish settlements came the recognition of the high monetary prices Euro-American enslavers paid for people of African descent. Choctaw men subsequently began to target black people as captives to be sold for significant profit in Euro-American markets. When McDonald bore her second son in the early 1800s, the capture and sale of African American men and women operated alongside livestock herding, agricultural entrepreneurialism, and the fur trade, solidly connecting Choctaw people to a regional—and expanding— Southern slave economy. McDonald may have had intimate encounters with racial slavery in her earlier years, ones that went beyond the capture and sale of human beings. Indeed, she may have grown up in one of the bicultural households that expanded the presence of plantation slavery within Choctaw territories. Her English name—and those of her sisters, Sally and Peggy—and her later plantation initiatives suggest her descent from an elite Choctaw woman and a British trader. If this was the case, her Euro-American father would have likely taken up residence in her mother’s household and she herself would have inherited the family, clan, and tribal membership of her mother, making her indisputably Choctaw. Yet her father would have also carried his own understanding of race, property, and patriarchal authority into the marriage, potentially introducing new patterns of bondage into her Choctaw family. Although slavery itself was not new to Choctaw people, the racialized forms of chattel slavery practiced by Southern white planters were. European ancestry did not make people inherently inclined to hold slaves. Rather, as white slave traders brought ideas and practices about chattel slavery and black inferiority, not to mention enslaved people of African descent, with them from colonial settlements into Indian lands, racial slavery became commonplace within their bicultural households. These men’s view of racialized bondage as essential for economic development had profound implications for the children who emerged out of these family settings. If McDonald grew up in such a household, she would have watched her father demand that his slaves perform both quotidian and novel labors, creating very specific associations for his daughter with regard to gender, race, labor, and ancestry. In Choctaw society, agricultural and household work were traditionally located under women’s purview. Slaveholding traders, however, expected both enslaved men and women to engage in these practices, as well as in new and particularly taxing monocultural endeavors. This

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affi liated black bodies—regardless of gender—with both feminized labor and intense physical toil. Within slaveholding bicultural families, black men and women cleared fields and planted crops, and probably engaged in large-scale horse and cattle rustling. Molly McDonald’s mother likely maintained her status as the head of her household in the eyes of her Choctaw kin. And she surely educated her daughter in many of the gender-based social customs traditionally valued within her community. Indeed, McDonald’s eventual role as the head of her own household indicates that she understood Choctaw women to be the proper owners of their land and of the goods produced from it. But if she was raised in a bicultural setting, she may have also received the message from both of her parents that she could deploy black men and women to work for her private commercial gain. This would have distinguished her understandings of gender, labor, and land use from those of other Choctaw people. While most Choctaw households continued to pool family resources and own land via women’s usufruct rights, McDonald’s parents potentially commodified individuals within their household and used enslaved labor to claim larger swaths of territory as family property, directly informing their daughter’s later economic initiatives. McDonald’s presence within such a household setting would have made her part of a very small minority of the overall Choctaw population, but one that enjoyed important and powerful family connections within the Choctaw Nation. Marriages between Choctaw women and European men emerged out of Choctaw leaders’ efforts to synthesize long-standing governance practices with the distinct market relations that characterized the fur trade. Choctaw chiefs initially came to power through elite matrilineal kinship ties and individual success in hunting and warfare. Yet they retained their status within the towns and districts they represented through control over foreign trade. With the onset of the transatlantic fur trade, they connected sisters and nieces—their nearest matrilineal relatives—to white traders to ensure a monopoly over manufactured goods and exert some control over foreigners’ economic behaviors. While it is difficult to gauge the interpersonal bonds that undoubtedly developed between white traders and Native women, both had their own incentives when it came to intermarriage. For European men, such unions secured economic connections with Choctaw people and gave them access to Choctaw lands, which stood under the control of Choctaw women. On their wives’ personal property, they set up their commercial livestock and plantation ventures. Meanwhile, Choctaw women

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married to white traders had access to valuable manufactures and, through the redistribution of these trade goods, could ensure that their family lineages maintained influence. That the children of these unions frequently enjoyed powerful positions within their communities as a result of their mothers’ lineages, their ties to foreign markets, and their own individual accomplishments is clear, for it was not uncommon for sons of EuroChoctaw unions to take over positions of leadership from their matrilineal uncles. McDonald’s settlement in the Pearl River Valley and her eventual marriage patterns affirm the likelihood of her upbringing in an elite bicultural family. By the end of the eighteenth century, larger-scale bicultural cattle rustlers and slaveholders moved away from centralized Choctaw villages as the deerskin trade went into decline. With permission from Choctaw chiefs, they established homesteads in the more sparsely populated Choctaw borderlands. Sources remain thin with respect to late eighteenth-century demographic concentrations of those practicing chattel slavery, but it is evident that, by the early nineteenth century, the Pearl River region hosted a number of bicultural families who, with the labors of African American slaves, raised cattle, grew cotton, and ran the taverns that hosted the increasing numbers of U.S. migrants passing through Choctaw territories. From these more distant vantage points, Choctaw women and their white husbands maintained ties with the matrilineal kin who had encouraged their unions, remaining integrated within the broader family and clan networks that held Choctaws together as a people. Molly McDonald’s successive marriages to white men point to the ways elite matrilineal ties likely shaped her life in the Pearl River region. As William Haley recalled, she married three white men over the course of her life, “1st McClure, the 2nd McDonald and the third John Rhodes,” the “Tennessean” who would lend his name to the farm she established on Rhodes Creek. Her sister Sally also married a white man “named Mackey,” with whom she bore “two or three daughters.” Sally eventually established a household with or near that of their sister Peggy at either Indian or Pegies Creek, located roughly thirty-five miles south of Molly’s farm in what would eventually become known as Copiah County, Mississippi. Since only the sisters and nieces of prominent chiefs tended to form these cross-cultural connections, Molly’s brother or uncle probably played an important leadership role in the Western District from which she hailed and connected his female kin to those foreign men who could continue to buoy his and his extended family’s trade connections.

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There are no genealogical records confirming Molly McDonald’s parentage, although there are clues suggesting her specific family connections within the Pearl River region. Given the social prominence and political associations of Molly, Sally, and Peggy, Choctaw genealogist Jennifer Mieirs has strong suspicions that they were the nieces of Apuckshunubbee, the principal chief of the Western District who moved into the Pearl River region in the first years of the nineteenth century. James McDonald’s later travels with Apuckshunubbee’s son Thomas Jefferson to Washington, DC, under the guardianship of Silas Dinsmoor, strengthen the possibility of this familial connection. Indeed, Molly McDonald and her uncle may have worked together to encourage Dinsmoor to take the two youths east. If Apuckshunubbee was Molly McDonald’s matrilineal uncle, marriages between his nieces and Anglo-American traders such as McClure, McDonald, and Mackey in the late eighteenth century would have secured the chief’s access to British goods and potentially stemmed the tide of predatory practices on the part of other British traders within his district. As both Molly and Apuckshunubbee would soon realize, however, they would not have to contend so much with British traders or even British imperial policies. As the nineteenth century unfolded, the United States would end up most directly impacting their lives.

New Settlements As the turbulent eighteenth century drew to a close, Molly McDonald bore her first surviving child, a boy. While raising her son and running a household with her Anglo-American husband (either McClure or McDonald), she may have found herself pulled between budding economic interests and the upbringing of her child. Her mother, maternal aunts, and sisters— all of whom would have seen her child as part of their own family—may have helped in her transition to motherhood. If Molly McDonald or her husband brought slaves into their union, she may have also relied upon their labors to nurse, entertain, and nurture her child as he undertook the slow transformation from birth to manhood. There are very few sources illuminating the daily lives of late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Choctaw slaveholders, and fewer still outlining those of slaveholding Choctaw women such as McDonald. Scholars, however, have found compelling material pertaining to plantation mistresses in other Southeast Indian nations, particularly among Cherokee slaveholders.

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Tiya Miles provides an especially illuminating account of a bicultural Cherokee woman, Peggy Vann (née Scott), after she married her bicultural Cherokee husband, James. As Miles reveals, Peggy Vann had tense ties with James, who adhered to many of the patriarchal values advocated by the U.S. “civilization” program in Cherokee territories as well as those fostered within the system of Euro-American plantation slavery heralded by British colonists such as his father. Taking up the prerogative of patriarchal household heads, James Vann expropriated the wealth that his wife inherited from her British father, including “one black slave woman, cattle valued at $700, and land on the Savannah River in South Carolina,” and abused her in fits of rage. As Miles argues, having “grown up in a slaveholding family” and “married into a plantation lifestyle,” Peggy “never expressed doubt or concern about buying and owning people of African descent.” Her position as a plantation mistress, however, had a profound effect on her ability to resist her husband’s behaviors. The physical distance of her husband’s household from nearby Cherokee settlements and her daily responsibilities within it reshaped her relationships with her kin. Displaced by slaves from the agricultural labors that had bonded Cherokee women across generations, Peggy found herself isolated within her plantation home, devoid of both the camaraderie and protection afforded by matrilineal relatives. While Miles’s account of Peggy Vann’s life carefully illustrates one Southeast Indian woman’s experiences as a plantation mistress, Peggy Vann’s position differed considerably from that of Molly McDonald. Unlike Peggy, Molly maintained control over her household goods and resources, even as she married men who may have had an inclination to claim them for themselves. Th is was not unheard of among Southeast Indian women with black slaves. As Creek Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins observed in 1796 of a “Mrs. Durant,” the eldest sister of Alexander McGillivray, and a “Mrs. Weatherford,” another bicultural slaveholding Creek woman, both “[kept] the command absolute of every thing from their husbands.” Molly McDonald’s quick succession of marriages as well as the possibility that her young Choctaw nephew gave orders to her third spouse potentially indicates her ability to refuse any claims her foreign husbands hoped to make on her household property. European traders sometimes left their Native wives and children when intermarriage no longer suited them, and evidence indicates that Southeast Indian women, too, could end unions that proved burdensome. Perhaps McDonald’s first two white husbands departed—with

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her encouragement—as they found themselves unable to harness the land and slaves of their Native wife for their own economic ambitions. McDonald’s initial years in her expanding household are impossible to recount, as are her first engagements with large-scale farming, ranching, and slaveholding. The earliest sources confirming her as a slaveholder come from 1824. By that time, racial slavery was deeply woven into the tapestry of the Pearl River landscape, and McDonald found herself surrounded by U.S. settlers and the men and women they enslaved. Any evidence of McDonald’s ownership of black slaves during the course of her life, however, makes it clear that she both tolerated the practice of racial slavery and had the financial means to purchase people of African descent. Census documents from the early 1830s indicate that only fifty-four Choctaw people of the nearly twenty thousand people who lived within the Choctaw Nation at that time owned black slaves. By purchasing even one person of African descent in the early 1820s, McDonald set herself apart from her peers, demonstrating her endorsement of a racial practice in which only a very small group of Choctaw elites participated. If McDonald owned people of African descent as slaves during her early years as a mother, their labors would have indeed made her stand apart from other Choctaw women. Rather than working in the fields alongside female kin planting corn, beans, squash, and other Native and foreign crops incorporated into Choctaw semi-subsistence economies, she would have likely left these labors up to the men and women whom she owned, reserving the rest of her day for caring for her child, possibly spinning and weaving, and overseeing general household and business affairs. How she interacted with those she enslaved remains unknowable. Some former slaves attest to milder treatment by Southeast Indian masters, particularly by those who owned just one or two people, and some even found themselves included as part of the family. As one freedperson who was enslaved in the Choctaw Nation declared, “I think dat Indian masters was just naturally kinder any way, leastways mine was.” Hawkins complained of Mrs. Durand’s “bad management” of those she enslaved on her cotton farm, leaving them “all idle,” which suggests Durand’s refusal to force those she owned to work the interminable hours that many Euro-American planters demanded of slaves in the ser vice of largescale agricultural production and to maintain plantation estates. Indeed, Hawkins’s account indicates a great deal of intimacy between Durand and both enslaved and free people of African descent. “Her negros do but little,”

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Hawkins complained, “and consume every thing in common with their mistress.” He even suspected that her husband was “mixed with African blood.” Yet Native slaveholders were not necessarily above the brutal and coercive behaviors required to hold men and women in bondage. Peggy Vann’s husband, James, for instance, became notorious for the brutality he inflicted upon his slaves, violence that mirrored the behaviors of white Southern slaveholders. As a small-scale slaveholder, McDonald may have refrained from inflicting extensive bodily harm against the men and women she owned. However, as enslaved people of African descent were all too aware, buying another human being was itself an act of violence, one that stripped them from their families, friends, and communities and reinforced their status as owned people. There is provocative evidence suggesting that as U.S. settlers made their first forays into the eastern edges of Choctaw territories in the 1790s, McDonald was sympathetic to some of the household arrangements and political ideologies they brought with them. The name of her first son, Alexander Hamilton, was after a “founding father” of the country from which these new settlers emigrated. It was not uncommon for Choctaw people to receive multiple names over the course of their lives, and Hamilton may have chosen this name for himself or been renamed by U.S. whites as the United States amplified its presence in his territory. The U.S. missionaries who moved into Choctaw lands after the War of 1812 especially encouraged Native men, women, and children to rename themselves after prominent federal elites or simply dictated new “white” names to mission students. Further, like James McDonald, Hamilton appears to have spent several years in the home of a white Southerner. The young man’s U.S. adopter possibly played a role in giving Molly McDonald’s elder son a new name. Choctaw women, however, also named their children after power ful influences outside their nation. As historian Greg O’Brien argues, for Choctaws, “borrowing of foreign appellations probably served metaphorically to unite dissimilar peoples as well as honor the recipients with foreign epithets that connoted power.”  McDonald may have called her son Alexander Hamilton to provide him with the spiritual influence and economic resources that her new neighbors appeared to enjoy. In so doing, she may have contended with the fact that U.S. settlers— and the nation that represented them—both threatened Choctaw sovereignty and presented new opportunities to initiate or expand upon agricultural entrepreneurialism. If she did

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anticipate both conflict and affiliation with the United States, her actions proved prescient. Migrating U.S. whites—particularly the federal agent who came to reside in the Pearl River Valley—would play signal roles in her life as she built the economic enterprises that made her so notable in her region. Molly McDonald could not have helped being crucially aware of the growing power of the United States over Choctaw people, as well as with respect to the competing empires in the lower Mississippi Valley. Between 1785 and 1786 the new U.S. republic made its first treaty with the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee Nations at a South Carolina plantation. In exchange for “protection” from the United States, the promise of much needed trade alliances, and an assurance that the U.S. government would renounce its relationships with any citizens settling on Choctaw lands, Choctaw chiefs ceded 69,120 acres of land to federal treaty commissioners and promised their allegiance to the United States. As would become increasingly common as Native people lost their transatlantic and pan-Indian military alliances, federal elites failed to follow through on promises to restrict U.S. settlement. Rather, they sought avenues to preclude any remaining opportunities for Choctaw leaders to reinvigorate their strategic international policies by undercutting potential alliances with European empires and promoting trade debt. In concert with U.S. settlers’ illegal migrations into Choctaw territories, U.S. officials negotiated the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo with Spain, in which the Spanish conceded U.S. citizens’ free migration of the Mississippi River and relinquished any remaining imperial claims to Choctaw lands to the United States. In 1803, five years after Congress’s 1798 re-designation of Choctaw country as part of the U.S. Mississippi Territory, the speaker of the House of Representatives, William Gordon Forman, would argue that the treaty gave planters in Kentucky and Tennessee the right to float agricultural commerce down the Mississippi to New Orleans markets without Spain’s permission, and meant that the lands that stretched to the south of Cumberland settlements in Tennessee were now under the rule of the U.S. government. “While the treaty of San Lorenzo secured the free navigation of the Mississippi, and a convenient place of deposite for the merchandise of American traders,” he argued, “it politically incorporated the country [ceded by the Spanish] as a part of the United States.”  U.S. boundary surveyor Andrew Ellicott exhibited this point of view when he planted an American flag in the ground just outside of Natchez, much to local Indians’ offense. More immediate to Molly McDonald’s world, as slaveholding U.S. citizens expanded their settlements in the 1790s in the

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Ohio country and in shared Southeast Indian hunting grounds in the Cumberland region to the north of Chickasaw territories, they relied on the Indian trading path that would become the Natchez Trace to transport both slaves and agricultural produce, passing through the Pearl River Valley—as would Silas Dinsmoor in 1802—as they made their way south to New Orleans and Natchez markets. If McDonald anticipated that her household’s future was tied to that of the new migrants in her territories, such entanglements would become increasingly realized after the eighteenth century came to a close. As she brought her second son, James, into the world around 1800 or 1801, the number of U.S. officials and settlers, along with enslaved people of African descent, in Choctaw homelands was rapidly increasing. By the first years of the nineteenth century, one observer reported more than “thirty one families settled at and near” the fi rst United States trade post in the region at Fort St. Stephens. These families joined another thirty-two settler households “[s]ettled on the West Side of [the] Tombigbee,” the river that bounded eastern Choctaw territories. The number of slaveholding settlers boomed so quickly in the years following the San Lorenzo treaty, in fact, that as early as 1800, territorial governors began to doubt their ability to suppress slave uprisings. Governor Winthrop Sargent sent a circular to “Respectable Characters, and slave holders” (probably not intending the differentiation that his grammar nonetheless asserted), warning them that recent slave revolts in Virginia might spread to Mississippi. Slaveholders, he wrote, should “use their best endeavours to produce perfect submission to the statutes for the Regulation of slaves within the Mississippi Territory.” Th is meant closely surveilling enslaved people’s “Quarters and places of Rendezvous” during Saturday evenings and on Sundays, “when the Negroes of different Plantations assemble,” and drawing upon military slave patrols. Sargent suspected “ foreign influence” in the Virginia uprisings and feared that the Caribbean routes many black Mississippians had recently traveled—and the forms of knowledge they had acquired along the way—made Mississippi planters especially vulnerable. With slave revolts such as Gabriel’s Rebellion and the Haitian Revolution on his mind, the governor insisted that enslaved people across plantations were “frequently mixing with such as have of late been introduced amongst us (some of whom, it is more than probable have been actors in the Bloody scenes that have already devastated whole Countries).” In 1801 Sargent urged his militia officers to stay orga nized, “not necessarily to harass the

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[white] Men, but more Strongly to impress the Negroes that we are never off our Guard.” The following year Governor William C. C. Claiborne received from the federal government “five hundred Rifle Guns” and “three Hundred Muskets” to help maintain racial hierarchies between planters and slaves. As these actions revealed, maintaining white supremacy was not an easy job. It required an army. In 1802 Governor Claiborne acknowledged his fear that planters’ insatiable appetite for enslaved men would endanger white patriarchy in the Mississippi Territory and, by extension, the long-term viability of cotton production in the region. Claiborne felt that in order to maintain the territorial stability he imagined, he had to curb planters’ preferences for the labors of black men over those of women and children by regulating the traders who sold them. The legislative council for the territorial government in Washington, Mississippi, however, refused to ratify a law prohibiting “the importation into the Territory, of Male Slaves, above the age of Sixteen.” Their veto was dangerous in Claiborne’s eyes. “[T]his kind of population,” he warned, “is becoming alarming, and will in all probability, (sooner or later) prove a source of much distress:—The culture of Cotton is so lucrative, and personal labor consequently so valuable, that common Negro Fellows will generally Command five hundred dollars per head, and if such encouragement should long be afforded, to the sellers of Negroes, this Territory must soon be overrun, by the most abandoned of that unfortunate race.” Claiborne revealed his distaste for large numbers of black slaves per white settlers, implying that such ratios would pollute the Mississippi populace, and clearly affiliated the potential for mass insurrection against planter patriarchy with black men. By extension, he revealed a misguided presumption that black women and children were a more docile population of laborers, easily controlled by the white men who ruled plantation households. As plantation settlements boomed, federal administrators pushed for new land cessions. In 1801, facing a drought-induced famine, Choctaw chiefs gave the United States permission to officially create the Natchez Trace, expanding the Choctaws’ original trade path into “a convenient and durable wagon way” for settlers, and also ceded “the southwestern corner of their territory, 2,641,920 acres” in exchange for $2,000 and blacksmithing tools. And, of course, after moving to the Chickasawhay River Valley, Silas Dinsmoor helped to secure the cessions that occurred under his watch as Indian agent. These included the transfer of 50,000 acres of Choctaw lands just north of Spanish settlements at Mobile to the United States in the 1802 Treaty of Fort

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Confederation, which, for U.S. administrators, would ideally curb any remaining trade connections between the Choctaws and their Spanish neighbors. Seeking continued trade alliances within the context of shrinking transatlantic commercial relationships, Choctaw leaders allowed Thomas Jefferson’s presidential administration to establish a federally run trading post, or factory, along the Tombigbee River at Fort St. Stephens that same year. Yet Choctaw chiefs and federal officials had different visions as to what this factory would mean. While Choctaw leaders saw the trade post as an opportunity to expand their numbers of trade partners, Jeffersonian administrators sought to draw Choctaw people away from any remaining “foreign” trade influences. The following year brought another treaty, the Treaty of Hoe Buckintoopa, in which Choctaw chiefs relinquished 853,760 acres of land in exchange for trade debt with the Scottish trade company Panton, Leslie & Company. Dinsmoor’s 1805 Treaty of Mount Dexter again required more land in exchange for trade debt and annuities, costing Choctaws 4,142,720 acres in their southernmost territories. Choctaw individuals and communities continued to innovate their economies in order to navigate territorial dispossession and expanding settler populations. In the 1790s and early 1800s Choctaw women and men traveled to Natchez, where they worked to reinitiate imperial gift giving, an act that acknowledged colonists’ presence on Choctaw lands and solidified mutually beneficial arrangements between hosts and guests. Choctaw women and men also went to Natchez, Mobile, Fort St. Stephens, and New Orleans to trade for manufactures and generate economic alliances with settlers, or to barter with migrants along the Trace. Some women sold chickens, cabbages, leeks, garlic, baskets, mats, moccasins, and firewood, as well as foodstuffs from their traditional crops of corns, beans, and squash. Settlers did not always make these exchanges pleasant. Governor Claiborne reflected many settlers’ worldview when it came to Choctaw people and, indeed, Indians more broadly. He characterized the Choctaw delegations encamped near Natchez, for example, not as people with rights to exert sovereignty over their territories by expecting gifts in exchange for residency, but rather as lazy beggars. As he complained in 1802 to President James Madison, the “Men, Women, & children” who seemed to be “Encamped within six miles” around Natchez were “great pests to this Territory.” “I have no Presents to make,” he insisted, “and very seldom supply them with provisions, but they notwithstanding, will not, & cannot be persuaded to remain in their own Lands.”  Willfully inverting the chronology of

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human occupation of the lower Mississippi Valley, Claiborne expressed his annoyance and vexation at Choctaw people’s ongoing claims to homelands. Settlers and those they enslaved exhibited their own disregard for Choctaw sovereignty when they denigrated Choctaw culture and inflicted harm on Choctaw people. In 1804 the local newspaper in Natchez indicated many settlers’ opinion of Choctaw people when it published a disparaging vignette entitled “Character of a Chactaw.” “For the character of these people,” it stated, “collect all the vices possible for ignorant people to commit, with a portion of the most amiable virtues, heighten the contrast, by uniting complacency and tenderness with the most obdurately vindictive temperament; shake all together and take out a dose sufficient to hang a white man, and you have a Chaktaw.” Given local whites’ attitudes toward Choctaw people, it is unsurprising that Choctaw men and women found themselves subject to violence at the hands of U.S. settlers. In 1801 a Choctaw man named Samuel Vaun, in Indian agent John McKee’s words, was killed “by a Negro,” an act that McKee feared would further anger Choctaw people already suffering “ill treatment . . . from white people.” McKee and fellow Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins subsequently warned Claiborne that if left unchecked, “acts of violence” against members of the Choctaw Nation would “inevitably lead to serious & deplorable Consequences.” In response, Claiborne released a cautionary proclamation that did as much to reaffirm violence against Indians as it did to thwart it. Non-Indians were to “refrain from all manner of Offence and violence against all and singular . . . Indians” who were traveling “in a peaceable manner . . . through the settlements of this Territory.” If not, the governor cautioned, they would “disturb that friendship with our Indian Brethren, which enables the Traveller in the Wilderness to sleep secure, and the Farmer on the Frontier, to cultivate his field in safety.”  While he expressed desires to end attacks against Native people in the lower Mississippi Valley, his words supported popular Euro-American characterizations of Indian people as “savages” whose desire to massacre the “innocent” members of frontier households needed to be suppressed. McDonald clearly sought to take her chances when it came to face-toface encounters with settlers. But rather than engage in smaller-scale exchanges in chickens, produce, and baskets, she sought out more lucrative horse, cattle, and human markets. Indeed, she may have been one of the individuals of mixed ancestry who received agricultural implements through

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Dinsmoor in 1805 in order to support forays in large-scale agriculture, helping her to launch herself as one of the largest slaveholding cattle and horse ranchers in her territories as the nineteenth century unfolded.

Circulating Children through White Homes In 1830, long after his departure from his mother’s household to those of white men in the United States, James McDonald wrote a letter to his friend and future Choctaw chief Peter Pitchlynn remembering his early youth in Choctaw country. He recalled gathering with other boys on “pleasant summer evenings” to listen to his “play fellows” “tell stories in rotation.” There were “but few white people” in those days, and those with whom he did come into contact were the Euro-American traders who “mostly adopted the Indian dress and habits.” McDonald stated that he “knew nothing of civilization”— or “The ‘world far off ’ of the white people”—in these early days. His was a childhood deeply embedded in Choctaw communities and cultures. By the time he was ten or eleven years old, however, his experiences had changed dramatically. He moved roughly eighty-five miles to the southwest of his mother’s farm to live in Silas Dinsmoor’s household in the burgeoning planter town of Washington, Mississippi. There he was surrounded by white slaveholders in Euro-American dress, as well as by the African and African American people they enslaved. Yet U.S. “civilization” had been closer than James McDonald had realized as he listened to fireside stories of hunting, haunting, and adventure. By 1806—when James was five or six years old— Silas Dinsmoor was preparing to move his new slaveholding household into the McDonalds’ Pearl River region. Some of Silas’s behaviors would not differ all that much from those of many of the bicultural families already living there. Like his new Choctaw neighbors, Silas held black slaves, raised cattle, and grew crops mixed with European and Native vegetables, as well as cotton. But he also distinguished himself in other ways. He did not wear Choctaw dress, nor did he care to integrate himself into Choctaw kin and clan networks. Rather, he expected children like James to transform themselves into members of a U.S. national family by changing their dress, speech, spiritual beliefs, and, most centrally, their social, familial, and political affiliations. Indeed, Silas Dinsmoor’s career depended in part upon James McDonald’s adoption of U.S. cultural practices, economic structures, and kinship patterns.

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There are no clues as to how long Molly McDonald knew Silas before she transferred her son to his care in 1811, leaving more questions than answers. Did she immediately create ties with the Indian agent when he moved into her Pearl River territories after 1806? Or was it a fleeting encounter that led to her placement of her son in Silas’s home? Was it the Indian agent who suggested the arrangement as he struggled— and failed—to assert his authority over the men and women in her nation? Or was it McDonald herself who encouraged Silas to house and educate her youngest child as the agent returned from his household in Washington, Mississippi, to the Pearl River agency on the eve of the War of 1812? Yet even with the archival silences that surround these questions, it is not hard to speculate on some of the benefits Molly McDonald may have had in mind by transferring her son to Silas’s home. Silas could be an important ally for herself and her family, someone who could provide her with trade goods as Choctaw connections to transatlantic trade went into decline. The Indian agent could look out for her individual interests in the face of increasing U.S. encroachments and provide her child with unique educational opportunities in the face of an expanding U.S. planter presence in and around Choctaw territories. As Molly McDonald thought about a possible alliance with Silas Dinsmoor, as well as how to secure James’s future, relocating her son to his home may have been a strategic move on her part to acquire and maintain an important connection for herself and her child as the lower Mississippi Valley underwent dramatic changes resulting from U.S. settler expansion. While under Silas’s guardianship, James kept the wayward Indian agent within Molly’s orbit. And while isolated on Silas’s plantation, her child would gain lessons in the colonial systems of knowledge that would both support Molly’s acquisitive efforts and defensive resources and prepare her son for an entrepreneurial future of his own. While kept far from Choctaw territories in Silas’s Washington, Mississippi, home, James would not be influenced by the Choctaw men who resisted slave-driven cotton “civilization” through plantation raids, or by the small number of Choctaw warriors who ignored the decision of Choctaw chiefs to reject Tecumseh’s pan-Indian vision and joined the Indian unity struggles against U.S. settler expansion unfolding within the Creek Nation. In turn, James would have the opportunity to learn the values, languages, and diplomatic protocols of the settler society that was quickly edging into Choctaw homelands. These benefits, alongside James McDonald’s own claims that his mother encouraged his education in U.S. territories, raise the possibility that when Silas Dinsmoor

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ultimately left Choctaw country to establish his plantation household in Washington, Mississippi, Molly McDonald made a request of the agent: asserting her matrilineal guardianship rights over her child, she asked Dinsmoor to take her son home. Relations between U.S. settlers and Choctaw people support the speculation that Molly McDonald sent her child away. While interactions between U.S. whites and Choctaw women and men were certainly skewed by growing power and influence on the part of whites, in most cases, individual U.S. settlers and the government officials who represented them lacked the coercive power or political strength to forcibly remove the kin of prominent Choctaw people and adopt them as their own. Given Silas Dinsmoor’s eagerness to establish connections with Choctaw elites such as McDonald, taking her son without her consent would have severely impinged upon his efforts. At the very least, Molly McDonald would have had to sanction James McDonald’s migration to Dinsmoor’s plantation, if she did not, in fact, carefully orchestrate it. Indeed, it is possible that Molly McDonald had played a hand in situating her elder son, Alexander Hamilton, in the home of white settler William P. Anderson, who lived in Nashville, Tennessee, sometime in the early 1800s. In 1814 Anderson wrote a letter to Silas Dinsmoor’s successor, Indian agent John McKee, concerning a young man of “Indian blood” named “Hamilton” who he had “educated and raise[d] almost like a child.” Hamilton had served in the U.S. Army alongside infamous Southerners John Coffee and Andrew Jackson, most likely in the brutal Creek War in which Andrew Jackson would adopt the Creek infant Lyncoya. Hamilton would come to clash with Silas Dinsmoor after suspecting that, while in Washington, DC, with James McDonald in 1813, the Indian agent blocked Hamilton’s promotion to a more elite commission within the U.S. Army. Given the relationships between Hamilton and his guardian and Indian agents to the Choctaw Nation, there is little doubt that Hamilton was of Choctaw descent. Furthermore, Hamilton’s military career corresponds with memoirs by Superintendent of Indian Trade Thomas McKenney, who wrote of James McDonald’s brother’s service in the army. The fact that Anderson remained in touch with Hamilton’s mother, garnering her “approbation” concerning the direction of Hamilton’s career after the young man’s struggles with Dinsmoor, supports the prospect that Molly McDonald placed her elder son in Anderson’s care. As did the Haudenosaunee and Mohican leaders who sent their children to live in Quaker homes in the 1790s, Molly McDonald had precedents to

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draw upon when she placed her sons in the homes of U.S. whites. Archeologist Patricia Galloway argues that during the eighteenth century “leaders of tribal groups” in the region possibly “fostered their [matrilineal] nephews with the leaders of allied neighboring groups.”  If Molly McDonald was part of an elite matrilineal kinship line, her brother or uncle may have played a role in placing James McDonald with Silas Dinsmoor, who, as the U.S. representative within Choctaw territories, could support the ambitions of Molly’s kin. There are other instances in which Choctaw communities facilitated kinship ties with individuals from outside their nation. French colonists were known to place their children within Choctaw families in order to create diplomats and interpreters who could broker alliances between French and Choctaw settlements. Eighteenth-century colonial observers also remarked that the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek Nations created fanimingo chiefs by adopting influential men from neighboring communities into their own kinship networks. These foreigners were expected to advocate for their adoptive kin in international affairs. As historian Joshua Piker argues, “Creeks and their Native neighbors believed that a corporate group could adopt an individual who would serve as a mediator between his natal polity and his adopted one. . . . As someone with friends and relatives in both towns, this man united social worlds; he represented a creative melding of the familial and the political.” But while fanimingo chiefs represented a form of transnational adoption, there is little indication that fanimingos traditionally lived within Choctaw, Chickasaw, or Creek societies. They were born within the neighboring community—or were at least long-term residents of it—and remained there to secure international peace. If Molly McDonald was drawing upon this practice when she sent James to live with Dinsmoor and Alexander to live with Anderson, she significantly modified it. By placing members of her own family with prominent settlers, she was not only adopting neighboring tribespeople to speak for her. She was creating advocates out of her own sons. Adhering to the centrality of kinship in North American Indian community formation and international relations, McDonald and her adult male relations may have hoped that Dinsmoor and Anderson would see her children as adopted kin and, in turn, promote the McDonald family’s individual and national interests. As with Native communities to their north, Choctaw people and their neighboring indigenous nations had long conceptualized nation-to-nation relationships through the logics of kinship, with international diplomatic relations configured as the brothers, fathers, uncles,

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or children of Choctaw people. Since the era of European colonialism, European governments had referred to Indian nations—including the Choctaw Nation—as the “children” of imperial powers, drawing upon patrilineal ideas about generational hierarchy to characterize Indians as subservient to colonial rule. Choctaws, among other Indian societies, had been quick to adopt this rhetoric themselves, in that it both fit with Native concepts of international diplomacy and, given many Native people’s ideas about fathers and children, benefited Native communities. Hailing from a matrilineal society, most Choctaws believed that fathers were friendly relations who exerted little say in their children’s upbringing while catering to their offspring’s wishes. McDonald may have been reconfirming this relationship through the placement of her sons in Dinsmoor’s and Anderson’s care, expecting that both men would provide her children with material and intellectual resources without demanding much in return. (If this were the case, Dinsmoor would prove a fickle ally when it came to the interests of the brother of his young charge.) If she was seeking to create familial advocates in both U.S. whites and her young sons, McDonald clearly hoped her children would gain particular forms of knowledge while residing in white men’s care. This raises the question: What were James McDonald and Alexander Hamilton supposed to learn, exactly; and why could this information not be transmitted to them within a Choctaw slaveholding household? Historian James Taylor Carson offers some suggestions with respect to Greenwood Leflore, another bicultural Choctaw man sent to live with a Nashville planter for a few years. While in Nashville, Carson hypothesizes, Leflore “probably improved his ability to speak and write English, witnessed firsthand how slavery worked, and probably observed the market economy that powered the cotton boom and bust of the 1810s. Perhaps here too he heard his first sermon and learned of the racial honor that bound free men together against the slaves.” Carson’s attention to masculine codes of mastery provides a useful starting place. That Molly McDonald sent James McDonald to Washington, Mississippi, and Alexander Hamilton to Nashville, Tennessee, might be revelatory when it comes to imagining her ambitions for her sons. Both were ideal places to learn plantation patriarchy. As Carson makes clear, by the early nineteenth century the bustling planter town of Nashville was a location where Southern slaveholders modeled the racialized practices that attended chattel slavery. Located six miles east of Natchez, the town of Washington occupied the

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former plantation grounds of John Foster, who, in 1778, drew upon his connections with Andrew Ellicott, the U.S. boundary commissioner, to turn his “healthy” lands into a center for Jeffersonian republicanism in Mississippi Territory. Within a few years of Washington’s founding in 1802, those traveling the Natchez Trace on their way to and from the Gulf Coast would have necessarily passed through the town and would have quickly understood its significance. In the words of the nineteenth-century Mississippi congressman and historian John Francis Claiborne, in Washington one could find the “land office, the Surveyor-General’s office, the office of the Commissioners of Claims, [and] the Courts of the United States. . . . In the immediate vicinity was Fort Dearborn and a permanent cantonment of the United States troops. The high officials of the Territory made it their residence, and many gentleman of fortune attracted by its advantages, went there to reside.” Claiborne’s boosterism of Washington would have been slightly off in its earlier years. By 1808 the town had only thirty homes, “one store, one apothecary’s shop, a jail, and three taverns.” As one historian tells it, “All the town was strung out along one street, down which a stage rumbled westward toward Natchez each morning and returned at evening.” Yet the institutional support Washington received from Thomas Jefferson’s Republican government fixed its social and political power in the territory. Surveyors and settlers had to travel there to secure their land claims, and federal troops were stationed nearby. By 1815 it reached a population peak of approximately 1,000 residents. From its founding in 1802 until its social and political collapse in 1822, it was the place where a small group of large-scale landholding “backcountry” elites regularly convened to assert and solidify their political authority over wealthy Natchez federalists, legitimate their land claims with their federal government, and collectively articulate the cultural tastes and desires that grew out of and, in turn, worked to reproduce their racial prerogatives. Perhaps outside of Nashville, there was no better place than Washington to learn how U.S. slave society was built (Fig. 4–1). Almost nothing is known of Alexander Hamilton’s time in Nashville. James McDonald’s correspondence likewise contains no narrative of his experiences in the Mississippi planter town in which he lived. However, like the Native youth from Stockbridge and Cherokee territories who lived in Quaker homes—and the children who would reside in residential schools nearly a century later—it is possible to surmise that James and Alexander found themselves profoundly homesick, missing their mother and perhaps the aunts and uncles who had likely played a role in raising them. The care they re-

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figure 4–1. Map detail of Molly McDonald’s homelands in 1824 (showing the Choctaw Agency, the Pearl River, and the town of Washington, MS), based on Finley’s General Atlas, collection of the author. Note that most Choctaw towns and villages are not represented (see Figure 7–3).

spectively received in the homes of Silas Dinsmoor and William Anderson may have exacerbated feelings of isolation. Unlike Choctaw guardians, EuroAmericans at times enacted harsh forms of discipline on their children. Such punishments would have been potentially shocking to James and Alexander, intensifying feelings of physical isolation within a foreign context. Silas’s home—and likely William Anderson’s as well—shared certain characteristics with that of Molly McDonald, namely in that they were run by the labors of African and African American slaves. Yet even if James McDonald and Alexander Hamilton found the practice of racial slavery familiar, they were in spaces that did not value Choctaw culture and whose subjugation of people of African descent differed dramatically in both kind and scale from that in the Choctaw society they left behind. While Molly McDonald’s children likely found themselves forced to navigate any number of these difficulties, by migrating to plantation settlements

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they also learned the cultural modes and methods that produced discourses of territorial and economic “freedom” in the cotton-based economy of the Mississippi Valley. In William Anderson’s care, Alexander Hamilton honed English language and literacy skills and learned arithmetic and geometry. During his “two years and a half” in Silas’s home, James McDonald learned to speak English and “to Read, Write, & Cypher,” knowledge that his mother wanted him to further develop by traveling east in 1813. Both boys also absorbed the everyday racial relations orchestrated by the white slaveholders who surrounded them. Racial prerogatives were imbedded within interactions between “masters” and “slaves,” as well as within the clothing fashions they observed, the occasional society balls and parades they witnessed, and, undoubtedly, in the very texts of the primers from which they learned to read. They would have seen slaveholders cultivate and maintain power through their shared language about price and property and through the written words underpinning white men’s right to hold people and places as private possessions. James and Alexander would have watched as U.S. settlers maintained racial hierarchies in their plantation spaces by wielding forms of violence against their “dependents,” including physical assaults that indicated unfettered rights to black people’s bodies. Molly McDonald may have recognized that diplomatic alliances; fluency in English; skills in literacy and numeracy, surveying and measuring; and knowledge of the social, sexual, cultural, and commercial practices articulated through “white” slaveholding households were the indispensable components that made up individual and collective sovereignty in the expanding cotton economy. Molly McDonald’s decision to send her sons away was either shared or soon recognized by other elite Choctaw families. As Carson describes, in 1812 Greenwood Leflore, the twelve-year-old son of French trader and slaveholder Louis Leflore and his Choctaw wife, Rebecca Lefleur (herself the daughter of a Choctaw woman and a white trader), went to live with John Donly in Nashville, where he remained for five years. While the Leflores’ connection to Donly is unclear, the latter may have been a U.S.-based postmaster “who for twenty years . . . carried the mail through the Choctaw Nation” and apparently took a Choctaw wife. Peter Pitchlynn, the son of slaveholders Sophia and John Pitchlynn, also spent a portion of his boyhood with a white family in the Mississippi Territory (what would later become Pikeville, Alabama) at some point in the early nineteenth century. David Folsom, the son of white trader Nathaniel Folsom and a prominent Choctaw woman, sought an education in the U.S. South as well. James McDonald himself reported that

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Folsom “went to school about six months in the state of Tennessee, when about twenty years of age,” enabling him to read “easily and intelligently in any English book, and . . . write a sensible letter.” While it is certainly arguable that these young men’s residencies with white planters emerged out of their white fathers’ economic interests and political connections, it is also possible that their mothers—their rightful matrilineal guardians in Choctaw kinship traditions—supported and even suggested their migrations. Either introducing or reinforcing the idea that people of African descent as well as the Mississippi landscape itself were commodities to be traded and exploited was central to maximizing profits derived from plantation agriculture. The trade in African-descended people both within the United States and across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas, as well as the purchase and sale of land and the cash crops produced from it, required that both human beings and environmental resources become abstracted into prices and figures. This did not mean that human qualities or territorial characteristics were necessarily erased—or that they even could be. Rather, these attributes were selectively associated with certain monetary values in logbooks, bills of sale, or speculative insurance claims. Corresponding with this commodification, monetization, and exchange of human beings were calculations concerning the incomes enslaved people and selected territory would potentially produce. By learning these cultural associations and speculative economic calculations, young Choctaw men could better communicate in cotton-driven slave markets and gain a sense of the monetary values attributed to human, territorial, and agricultural property. And as they came to amass people and land as property, they would have already acquired means to protect their “private” resources from their white neighbors. That Indians and settlers in and around Choctaw country became enmeshed in the economic culture that enveloped Southeast Indian lands along with slavery and cotton by the early nineteenth century is obvious in the calculations of trade debts at Fort St. Stephens. When the U.S. government sought to acquire land, these debts signified money owed, which in turn could become commensurate with territorial space, and then, in the final link in a chain of equivalences, trade purchases could signify the necessity of land cessions. Federal impositions of trade debt were not the only ways that market systems involving numeracy and literacy permeated Choctaw country. There is evidence that written documents became widespread in confirming slave trades and delineating property rights among and between Euro-American, African American, and Choctaw people.

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A series of transactions involving William Cooper and a woman named Medlong over the span of fourteen years suggests the growing importance of written documentation in Choctaw territories. In 1803 a resident trader named John Turnbull brokered a sale between a pair of siblings named Peggy and John Kearns and William Cooper, “a Coulored man of Portugese Extraction” who lived in the Choctaw / Chickasaw borderlands, for Cooper’s purchase of a woman named Medlong, who was married to Cooper; another woman named Jenny, presumably their daughter; “& all their increase.” Cooper requested a bill of sale for his purchase. He presumably did so out of an awareness of his family’s vulnerability as African-descended people in an increasingly polarized racial landscape that positioned them as commodities to be bought and sold. Cooper’s precaution was prescient, since in 1817 it appears that someone contested Medlong’s right to freedom. Several resident traders, including Turner Brashears and a man called Mr. Samson, gave depositions confirming Cooper’s purchase. In their written testimony, both indicated that Cooper’s bill of sale was rare at the time it was produced. The deposition’s sixth question asked, “Was it customary among Indian Countrymen at the period referred to in [the] first question to give written vouchers to the contracts of this or any other nature or did they at that time require from Each other Bills of sale in the sale of Slaves[?]” Brashears responded, “It was Not a customary at the Time referd to Have vouchers to contract Nor any kind of Bills of sail what Ever.” In his own deposition Samson concurred. “I have Bought and Sold negroes about that time,” he wrote, “and never new it customary in that country.” These depositions suggest that between 1803 and 1817 “vouchers” and “Bills of sale” for slaves had become more common in Choctaw country, leading the clerk to confirm that they had been seldom used over a decade before. That Choctaw and Euro-American societies continued to engage in a frontier exchange economy through the early nineteenth century is undeniable, even when it came to the acquisition of African-descended slaves. In 1825 John Pitchlynn wrote to his son, Peter, about a man named Morgan who had “some Negros for Sal.” “[I]f you want to Purchase” them, John directed his son, “you must Put in your horses,” presumably meaning that Peter needed to offer up his horses in exchange for the individuals Morgan was selling. Yet the presence of last wills and testaments, such as that drafted in 1823 by a white man named David Choate, indicates that enslaved people and land had for some also become documentable, heritable, and distributable commodities whose monetary value and future ownership needed to be managed through written texts. “[I]n perfect mind and sound judgement,”

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Choate requested “that all my property and effects remain undivided and undisturbed till the crops of the present year . . . come in which shall then be sold and other property if necessary for the payments of my just and lawful debts.” Once sufficient “property” was sold to cover the value recorded in existing account books, most of his slaves could be freed, with a few exceptions. His Choctaw wife, Annonhay, would inherit “a negro woman named Chayne and her children,” who would be freed upon Annonhay’s death; and “unto” his “beloved sister Delilah Smith,” Choate bequeathed “a mulatto girl named Caroline,” who would also be freed at the end of Delilah’s “natural life.” Choate left “six cows and calves” to James Choate, who was described as his “half-breed Indian” son. He then willed his “plantation” lands to his “heirs,” two men named Isaac Choat David and Isaac Choat Jun. Educations in capitalist exchange were not necessarily what Choctaw families were seeking when they sent their children to live with U.S. whites. Choctaw people and resident traders were well versed in the economic rationales that drove transatlantic markets. Indeed, the U.S. government implemented its “civilization” initiatives as a means to contain Indians as market subjects out of an awareness that Indian societies were competing all too well in Atlantic economies. However, Choctaw communities did not necessarily have access to the literacy and numeracy regimes or the cultural practices that drove the U.S. markets that were taking root across the lower Mississippi Valley. As the Spanish, British, and French were increasingly replaced or marginalized by Southern white planters, Choctaw elites would have to build new diplomatic and commercial ties and acquire new market skills to secure their own standing within an expanding slave country. It is tempting to assume that those children who did have Anglo-American fathers would learn from their paternal guardians all the skills required to effectively participate in the emerging U.S. plantation economy. Presuming as much, however, obscures the complexities of European-Choctaw domestic arrangements. The children of white-Choctaw unions syncretized their household upbringings with the world that surrounded them, a world that was, at least as they saw it, distinctly Choctaw. Even if James McDonald and Alexander Hamilton had grown up with a Euro-American father present, they had also been immersed in their mother’s Choctaw kin networks and their social, cultural, and linguistic discourses. That their mother struggled with the written documents that structured the commodification of human beings is evident by James McDonald’s later correspondence. In 1824 Samuel Crawford, a U.S. slave trader, reclaimed at gunpoint a “Negro man” Molly

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McDonald had purchased from him. As he tried to recover his mother’s ensuing financial losses, James McDonald argued to John C. Calhoun, “She is a Choctaw, has had no benefit of education, and was entirely ignorant of the steps necessary to be taken for the recovery of her rights.” Many AngloAmerican fathers living in Choctaw country could not pass down literacy and numeracy skills to their sons because they simply did not have them. Greenwood Leflore’s French father may not have spoken English. By the 1820s John Pitchlynn owned dozens of slaves and ran a very lucrative lending business. But John Pitchlynn’s letters, or those of Nathanial Folsom—John Pitchlynn’s wife Sophia’s trader father—indicate that many white men had quite rudimentary literacy skills, even if they were astute market actors. A published report of missionary efforts in the Choctaw Nation further confirms that many intermarried white men did not have much “learning.” As the sons of these traders made their way in a world that increasingly required the physical documentation of property—and that valued men as the rightful holders of it—both these traders and their Choctaw wives would have seen the utility in sending boys to places where they could acquire the formal schooling that would grant them these skills. It is unlikely that either Molly McDonald or the elite Choctaw families who followed in her footsteps coldly sent their sons away to better their own chances in cotton markets. Given the forms of violence that characterized relations between Euro-Americans, Indians, and enslaved people of African descent, McDonald’s positioning of her sons in the heart of planter society and her aligning of them with planter elites would have helped secure her political and economic influence in Choctaw country while guaranteeing that her children would have a different experience of the defensive and retaliatory exchanges that passed back and forth between young Choctaw men and Mississippi settlers. McDonald may have believed that, once located in white men’s homes, her sons would be protected from vigilante settlers, even as they helped her to maintain the forms of diplomacy required to participate in slave-driven cotton production and land ownership. Like other aspiring Choctaw planters, McDonald knew as well as anyone that markets were not simply “rational” spaces characterized by equal access and opportunity. White familial alliances drove markets in land, slaves, and cotton, and the individuals who composed them worked hard to keep wealth, power, and privilege in select white hands. Ironically, by placing James McDonald and Alexander Hamilton among those who had the greatest

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stakes in disempowering Choctaw people, Molly McDonald may have believed that she helped her children to become “men” in such a world, men who would have the power to fully exploit the new market economy and the laboring bodies that built it. Indeed, if Molly McDonald was trying to keep her sons away from dangerous masculine pursuits in her own territories, she did so by exposing them to a form of masculinity that gained its own meaning through the endangerment of black people. There is evidence indicating that the matrilineal—and patrilineal—kin of some of the other Indian adoptees from the Chickasaw and Creek Nations also used the circulation of Indian children to support accumulative plantation practices in their own transitioning commercial economies. Like James McDonald, at least one of the three young men living in Thomas McKenney’s home during McKenney’s tenure as superintendent of Indian trade and Indian affairs—Arbor (or Lee Compere), William Barnard, and Dougherty Colbert—had kinship ties to individuals practicing plantation agriculture. Little is known about Arbor’s extended family (he was the nephew of Creek chief Yoholo Micco), or that of William Barnard (who may have been one of the eleven children born to a Yuchi Creek woman married to resident trader and interpreter Timothy Barnard.) Dougherty Colbert, however, hailed from a prominent slaveholding family within the Chickasaw Nation. By 1839 Chickasaw chief Levi Colbert, Dougherty Colbert’s father, owned 150 slaves on his Chickasaw plantation, utilizing these men’s and women’s labors to farm between three and five hundred acres of cotton. McKenney was not a large-scale Southern planter. He was a Quaker bureaucrat in Washington with a great interest in reeducating Indian children. He held at least one slave, however, in his city home in Georgetown, which cannot be overlooked. McKenney came to take on the schooling of both Arbor and Barnard during his “tour” of Creek territories in 1827, traveling with his enslaved servant, Ben. Perhaps Ben’s presence was an added incentive for Yoholo Micco and Timothy Barnard to place their children in McKenney’s care. The social positions and economic interests of the Native families whose children resided in slaveholding households in the early nineteenth century suggest that white adoptions of Southeast Indian boys during this time largely resulted from the efforts of Native families, who sent their male relations to live with established U.S. planters in order to infiltrate and solidify connections to the cotton economy. They were able to do so because their interests colluded, even if at times rather tenuously, with those of

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the U.S. administrators and plantation elites who wanted to “civilize” and “domesticate” Indian children within U.S. households. While extant documentary sources most frequently highlight the influence of fathers and uncles in placing Choctaw and Chickasaw boys within U.S. planter homes, Molly McDonald’s actions suggest the possibility that Native women also had a say in the futures of their children. As the primary guardians of their children, Native mothers provided both the care and the family lineages that would inform children’s sense of identity and community within Southeast Indian nations over the course of their lives, indicating the likelihood that they participated in some way in their children’s transfer to U.S. families. If Native women were largely supporting the circulation of Indian children between Indian and white worlds, their exertions reveal that contests over access to North American land and transatlantic commerce were not simply waged by men in official wars, border raids, and treaty negotiations; or in trade disputes, land claims, and transportation projects. They were fought by Native women, whose endeavors situated Native resistance strategies in the heart of the domestic sanctuaries of U.S. elites. Individuals such as Molly McDonald found ways to place their children in white homes, knowing that within these spaces their young ones could become intimately acquainted with both the labor and educational regimes that supported property rights and national sovereignty in the South. Southeast Indians such as Molly McDonald who adopted the exploitative racial practices that engendered U.S. planter imperialism sought to empower themselves against colonial dispossession, but as they did so, they also participated in a white supremacist regime that was ultimately invested in disempowering Indian people. Th rough her sons’ education in the homes of influential U.S. slaveholders, McDonald engendered diplomatic channels that would allow her to hold onto her lands, even as they became part of the state of Mississippi. This strategy quickly took on the traits of a doubleedged sword. As Native men such as James McDonald and Alexander Hamilton became empowered by their educations in the United States, federal elites would point to them to argue that they understood the logics of U.S. settler society all too well and could therefore not be “really” Indian. By the 1820s this would particularly undermine the efforts of James McDonald and other U.S.-educated Southeast Indian men to resist removal west of the Mississippi. James McDonald’s education could then only go so far to protect him, his family, and his nation from U.S. imperialism.

5 Adoption in Andrew Jackson’s Empire

On November 4, 1813, General Andrew Jackson sat in a tent at Fort Strother, his forty-six-year-old body ragged. The bar-fight bullet wound in his left shoulder ached, although it was finally starting to heal; his lungs, tender and tight, expelled thick green mucus when he coughed; his intestines cramped and burned constantly. He had lost weight in the two-hundred-mile trek from Nashville to Upper Creek territory, made in just over a month, and his lean, six-foot frame looked skeletal to those around him. From the vantage point of his current fortification in the Coosa Valley, not far from where the water of the Coosa River flowed around the small landmasses that Creek people called the Ten Islands, his Nashville plantation seemed to occupy another world. Yet his ailing body reminded him of his comforts there. He thought about his wife, Rachel, and missed his five-year-old son, Andrew Jr., whom he and Rachel had adopted from Rachel’s brother Severn and his wife, Elizabeth, a few years before. Jackson knew that his frequent absences from home had left Rachel feeling lonely and depressed, and he hoped Mr. Fields, his new plantation overseer, was fully exploiting the labors of those Jackson enslaved to make life comfortable for her. He also hoped that Mr. Fields would smoothly manage the late-fall harvest of cotton and corn. Despite his 

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new brigadier general’s salary, he felt anxious about the prices these crops would bring in New Orleans markets. He thought about his favorite racehorse, Truxton, and the stud fees the stallion could earn over the winter season. Even as Jackson dwelled on life in his plantation household, however, he realized that he had a great deal to manage at Fort Strother: he needed to find a way to feed his soldiers, arrange for the transfer of Indian captives to Huntsville, and prepare for his next attack on Upper Creek towns. He hastily penned a letter to his wife to share with her the successes of his first military campaign. “I detached Genl John Coffee with part of his Brigade of Cavalry and mounted men to destroy the Creek Town [of Tallushatchee],” Jackson wrote, and “he has executed this order in elegant stile.” Jackson subsequently explained to Rachel what he meant by this. Coffee, a long-term friend, a distant relative, and a partner in speculation in Indian land, had nearly emptied the Upper Creek town of its inhabitants: He “[left] dead on the field one hundred & seventy six, and [took] 80, prisoners[.] forty prisoners was left on the ground[,] many of them wounded, and there is no doubt but 200 was killed.” Jackson made it clear that this battle was just the beginning, an attack on one appendage of the Creek political body. Once he finally received his supplies, he would continue his mission, moving into “the heart of the creek nation.” Jackson concluded his letter home with news concerning one of the captives from Tallushatchee: “I send on a little Indian boy for Andrew [Jackson Jr.] to Huntsville—with a request to Colo. Pope to take care of him untill he is sent on— all his family is destroyed.” According to Jackson, his translator— a man named James Quarles—found a body that Coffee and his troops had missed. In this case, Coffee’s oversight proved to be Jackson’s windfall. The battle delivered him an infant Indian boy to send home as a present for his young white son. As it turned out, Jackson would soon find additional reasons for keeping the Creek boy, who would receive the name Lyncoya from the daughter of Jackson’s friend Colonel Pope. He felt an “unusual sympathy” for the child, a feeling he felt compelled to explore. Over the course of his military campaign against Creek people between 1813 and 1814, a campaign that would famously end in the Battle of Tohopeka (or Horseshoe Bend)— and the execution of over eight hundred Creek warriors—Andrew Jackson arranged to send at least three young Creek boys, including Lyncoya, home to his Nashville plantation. The question arises

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as to why Jackson would invade Creek territory, celebrate the destruction of Creek communities, and yet choose to incorporate Creek youth into his household. In the lead up to his invasion of Creek country, Jackson had defined Creek Indians, particularly those from Upper Creek towns, as “wretches” and “barbarians” who, “under the influence of, and by the orders of Great Britain,” relished in “lift[ing] the scalping knife and Tomhawk against . . . defenceless [white] women and Children.” Elsewhere, he referred to Creeks as “ruthless savages,” “[b]arbarians . . . ignorant of the influence of civilization and of government,” and as enemies who were “ferocious by nature.” If the Creeks were British-allied “barbarians” who seemed to exhibit a kind of natural inclination toward the destruction of white women and their offspring, why would Andrew Jackson place Creek boys in his household, where his own white wife and child lived? In adopting Creek children, Jackson tied his familial household to his violent forays against the Creek Nation, indicating that contests over land and kinship lay at the heart of his invasion of Creek territory. In order to expand white plantations across the South, he needed to sever Southeast Indian people from their military resources and attenuate their ability to successfully sustain their own communities in their homelands. By invading Upper Creek territories and leveling Creek villages, he hoped to permanently dismantle the social, political, and economic connections that supported Creek resistance to U.S. demands for territorial cessions, thereby making room for the white planters who coveted Creek homelands. Yet like Silas Dinsmoor before him, Jackson’s attempts to claim Indian territories generated political and personal tensions that he felt compelled to resolve. His military campaign had to be made commensurable with the narrative upon which his nation was founded—that his was a country of “freedom.” The murder and displacement of Indian people and the expansion of black servitude contradicted this national story, even if this story was, of course, in and of itself a foundational fiction of the United States. On a more personal level, Jackson’s invasion of the Creek Nation countered the ideologies that supported his individual rights as a Southern patriarch. Jackson’s claims to Indian territories and enslaved people of African descent revolved around the assumption that anyone who was not white and male needed the paternal oversight of Southern white men such as himself. In the very act of invading the Creek Nation, however, he neglected the household duties deemed essential to familial and societal order. Jackson had to fi nd a

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way to reconcile his militaristic efforts to expand the U.S. South with these national and personal mythologies. By locating Lyncoya within his plantation space, Jackson used kinship ties to alleviate these tensions. In an invasion that became notorious for its brutality, Jackson’s adoption of a young Creek boy into his plantation household transformed the meaning of the event from a unilateral act of war—largely against noncombatants—into an act of benevolence. Lyncoya represented the Southern general’s concern for the well-being of Indian people as well as his tender patriarchal commitments to his wife and son. At the same time, the child’s presence within his home reinforced assumptions that hierarchical relationships between Euro-Americans, African Americans, and American Indians were “natural.” Positioning Lyncoya in an indeterminate position between his white family and the African American men and women he enslaved, Jackson reinforced existing connections between blackness and servitude and signaled the rights of white men to plantation mastery. Jackson’s invasion of Creek territories, his assaults against Creek people, and his adoption of Lyncoya occurred during the War of 1812, when Native people and their British allies once again challenged U.S. imperial expansion through the force of arms. The Creek War unfolded within the Southern theater of the conflict—or rather, series of conflicts—that characterized the era. While Jackson described his occupation of Creek lands as necessary to halt a brewing Creek and British alliance against the United States, the Creek War actually began as a civil war between Creek people known as “Red Sticks,” who sought to thwart U.S. Southern expansion into their territories, and slaveholding Creek planters, who adopted some of the exploitative economic practices and centralized governance systems of their white imperial neighbors. Both inspired and emboldened by the actions of Shawnee-Creek prophet Tecumseh, Red Sticks—whose name derived from the red war clubs they used in battle— eventually intended to bring a war against the United States, with the help of their Spanish allies, to protect their homelands. However, Jackson’s militia intervened in Creek affairs well before Red Sticks were prepared to strike against the U.S. settlers who occupied their territories. Indeed, Jackson directed his Tennessee soldiers into Creek homelands in 1813 to take advantage of this fractious moment in Creek political history, not simply for the protection of existing white settlements, but also in order to orchestrate his own expansionist project, one he shared

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with other Southern whites. A plantation master and a prominent land speculator, Jackson sought to transform both Red Stick warriors and the controversial slaveholding Creeks they challenged into docile subjects whose rights to land and slaves he could terminate. This would allow him to transfer Native claims to Creek country to the United States and thus open Creek lands for private speculation and U.S. settlement. Lyncoya’s life in Jackson’s home would ultimately reflect the general’s uneven success on this front. Jackson quelled Creek military struggles for autonomy against the acquisitive practices of slaveholders both within and outside of their nation. In the years that followed, however, he would engage in a prolonged battle with Southeast Indian slaveholders themselves over who would claim the Southeast. Face-to-face with a young Creek child within his plantation home over the course of these contests, in the final tally, Jackson found that his “sympathy” for Lyncoya would have its limits.

Invading Creek Country Although his body rebelled and he was dogged by fears about the oversight of his plantation in Nashville, Andrew Jackson had no doubt that he was precisely where he needed to be as he moved deeper into Creek country in 1813. It had been a rough journey from Fayetteville, where he had picked up his volunteer Tennessee recruits and pushed them southward, cutting a road over Lookout Mountain in Cherokee territories and then into Upper Creek lands. The private contractors he had paid to supply his troops with food during the chilly 130-mile march had failed to make good on their initial agreement. As a result, Jackson’s volunteer militia had been living off meager rations. They were hungry, cold, and anxious to return to their farms and families, especially after the economic downturn that had recently hit U.S. settlements in the Southeast along with the outbreak of the War of 1812. Jackson’s troops might have shared with their general a sense of rage over Indian attacks against encroaching U.S. settlers in Southeast Indian borderlands, especially after the dramatic events of late August, when the group of Creek warriors who called themselves Red Sticks had attacked and killed five hundred Euro-American settlers and slaveholding Creek elites at Fort Mims, a frontier fortification in southern Creek country. At the same time, most of Jackson’s volunteers were relatively safe from Indian violence on their Tennessee farmlands, and their early zeal to invade Indian

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settlements waned as their physical discomforts increased. Jackson was disgusted by his contractors’ and his volunteer militia’s lack of patriotism. “The shamefull desertion from their posts of the Volunteer Infantry—The Violated Pledge of the cavalry & mounted infantry under their own proper signatures, and the apathy displayed in the interior of the state by the fireside Patriotts will sink the reputation of our State,” he told his wife. “I weep for its fall— and with it the reputation of the once brave and patriotic Volunteers—who a few privations, sunk from the highest elevation of patriots—to mere, wining, complaining, seditioners and mutineers.” His troops’ hesitations tarnished their masculinity in his eyes. Only in successfully completing the invasion of Creek country could they redeem it. Jackson’s campaign signaled the commencement of several long-term goals he planned to see through. He had just ordered, and won, the first battle of his military career, putting himself one step closer to a coveted military reputation, the final variable in the precarious formula for white men’s ascension into elite social and political status. He was gaining this reputation through a campaign against members of the Muscogee Nation—then commonly referred to as the Creek Nation—which was a confederacy of Muskogee- and Yuchi-speaking towns and villages located in lands that are currently claimed by the states of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. His main targets were the Red Sticks, self-defined Creek “traditionalists” who called for a united Indian front against colonial practices, particularly those that privileged private land ownership, the centralization of political governance, and racial slavery. The Creeks joined the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles as one of five tribal nations whose territories stretched for millions of acres across the southeastern quadrant of the North American continent, from the eastern banks of the Mississippi to, in 1813, the western side of the Ocmulgee River in what is now the state of Georgia. While allied with the Spanish and British armies and traders who retained a presence in the region, these nations represented “foreign” obstacles to Jackson’s ambition of expanding U.S. plantation slavery westward to the Mississippi River and southward to the Gulf Coast. Convinced that it was the right moment to initiate a concerted military campaign against the Creek Nation, Jackson had hurried his troops into Upper Creek territories, despite his poor health and insufficient provisions. He wanted to take advantage of the popular outcry over the Red Sticks’ at-

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tack on Fort Mims and the divisions among Creek people that the Fort Mims attack reflected. Red Sticks resisted the ambitions of emerging Creek elites to create a new national political order in Creek country, one that would celebrate and protect these men’s control over Creek trade relations with British, Spanish, and U.S. companies, as well as undergird their rights to hold Creek lands and African-descended people as individual plantation property. As civil war broke out over the nature and shape of Creek political governance, the Creek Nation was especially vulnerable when it came to defending its territories. Disunited and ill prepared for an assault on their homelands, Creek people had limited resources to halt Jackson’s invasion. In fact, Jackson accurately surmised that he could even recruit Creek allies to help him wage war against Upper Creek towns, the Red Sticks’ geographical stronghold. If he were to successfully defeat the Red Sticks and use his victory to force new land cessions, Jackson would curry favor among white Southern plantation elites and yeoman farmers alike. Both of these constituencies craved Southeast Indians’ fertile agricultural lands. Jackson and his cohort of friends and relatives, including John Coffee, were deeply invested in land speculation schemes involving Creek territories, as well as those claimed by the Cherokee and Chickasaw Nations. By removing Native inhabitants, Jackson and his personal networks could initiate legal rights over these territories and sell parcels for a handsome profit. During his war against the Red Sticks, Jackson acquired lands for the United States just south of Muscle Shoals, in present-day Alabama. Immediately after the war, John Coffee, who was married to Rachel Jackson’s niece, led the formation of a new land company through which he placed a successful bid to the U.S. government for this region. Afterward, in one scholar’s words, “Shares were divided among Jackson and other Tennesseans on the one hand, and wealthy Philadelphia speculators on the other.” Jackson had thought through his military plan. His momentary physical discomfort was well worth the long-term monetary, social, and political benefits he believed his actions would produce. John Coffee’s attack on Tallushatchee became notorious for the forms of violence Coffee’s troops deployed against its residents. Jackson sanitized the results of Coffee’s dispatch in his letter to Rachel by describing it as stylistically “elegant” and by converting the injuries sustained by the Upper Creek community into a series of body counts that proved the success of Jackson’s first campaign. Several members of Coffee’s troop remembered the attack

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not for its elegance, but for its extreme brutality against the women, men, and children who lived in the Upper Creek village. “We shot them like dogs,” Davy Crockett recollected of the battle years later, before accounting for a boy around twelve years old “shot down” near a house. Coffee’s lieutenant, Richard Keith Call, surveyed the devastation wrought by Coffee’s men: “We found as many as eight or ten dead bodies in a single cabin. . . . Some of the cabins had taken fire, and half consumed bodies were seen amidst the smoking ruins. In other instances dogs had torn and feasted on the mangled bodies of their masters. Heart sick I turned from the revolting scene.” Jackson’s own biographer John Reid similarly declared his repulsion at what he saw once the battle was over. He wrote his wife, “At last we have had a battle with the Creeks. . . . They made a desperate resistance, but were utterly routed. . . . I rode over the field of battle, the first I ever beheld; it is impossible to conceive so horrid a spectacle.” Many in Jackson’s volunteer army participated without hesitation in killing Indian people and mutilating their remains. For even as Coffee and Jackson condoned the massacre, the culture and policies of Tennessee’s volunteer militia reinforced soldiers’ desire to act according to their own will. In a particularly gruesome account, Davy Crockett recounted that fellow soldiers shot one woman over twenty times, burned forty-six warriors alive in a cabin, and, after the fire burned out, ate potatoes stewed in the oil of incinerated bodies. Over the course of Jackson’s war against Upper Creeks, some of Jackson’s soldiers are said to have removed skin from the bodies of the people they killed to make reins for their horses’ bridles. Jackson was not above participating in this collective desire to make human souvenirs of war. He sent clothes worn by Indians killed in Upper Towns to his female acquaintances in Tennessee and a bow and arrow to his son. And he sent children home, one of whom he described as the living relic of a massacred Indian family. In his 1918 biography of Andrew Jackson, Samuel Gordon Heiskell situated Jackson’s adoption of Lyncoya within the devastating aftermath at Tallushatchee: “the infant brought back by [Jackson] from the battle of Talluschatches,” Heiskell wrote, “was found in the arms of his dead mother,” who was killed by General Coffee’s troops. As he worked to compile his own biography of Jackson over a century earlier, John Henry Eaton got the battle wrong, but likewise provided his own romanticized account of the adoption: “At the battle of Tohopeka, an infant was found, pressed to the bosom of its lifeless mother.” According to Jackson’s own version of the

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events in a letter to his wife, his interpreter, James Quarles, “[t]ook [Lyncoya] up carried him on his back and brought him to me.” While Jackson did not record if Quarles found Lyncoya with his mother, he described the child as one of the few survivors of his assault on the Red Sticks. In a December 1813 letter to Rachel, Jackson wrote that Lyncoya was “the only branch of his family left.” In fact, Jackson implied that Lyncoya was the last of his matrilineal clan: Lyncoya’s “own female matrons wanted to k[ill him] because the whole race & family of his [blood] was destroyed.” Jackson’s description of Lyncoya as the last of his “race & family” at Tallushatchee should be regarded with suspicion. Given the chaos that followed Coffee’s invasion of the village, it seems unlikely that Jackson would have been able to determine beyond any shadow of doubt that Lyncoya was truly the only remaining member of his family or clan. To begin with, there is little indication that Jackson understood the nuances of what “race & family” meant to his Red Stick enemies. Not only were the matrilineal family and clan systems practiced by Creek people foreign to the Southern general, but also his invasion of Creek country was predicated on the fact that Creek people did not practice the “civilized” social arrangements of white families, a presumption that positioned their own familial relationships as unfitting of social or political recognition. It is more likely that, rather than providing an accurate picture of Lyncoya’s status among his living Native relations, Jackson’s description of the child as an orphan had more to do with the meaning the general hoped to attribute to his battles against the Red Sticks, his reputation among his peers when it came to his relationships with Indian people, and his own personal biography as a child in and of the South. Jackson’s narrative of his encounter with Lyncoya demonstrated his military prowess and the future this ensured for wealthy white Southerners such as himself. By representing Lyncoya as the last living member of his lineage, Jackson signaled that he had successfully defeated his enemies. Lyncoya was war booty, his eventual presence in Jackson’s Nashville plantation a living reminder of the massive casualties that signified Jackson’s military victory. As the purported “last” member of his community, the young child represented the triumph of a white planter class secured by the eradication of Indian people. Indeed, Lyncoya’s supposed kinlessness marked the emergence of a new era in which white planters alone would reproduce slavery throughout Southeast Indian country and, in turn, come to rule an expanded South.

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Situating Lyncoya as an orphan also addressed potential public outcries against the general. In painting a scene in which irrational Indian “matrons” turned their back on one of their helpless infants, Jackson found opportunity to highlight Indians’ supposed barbarity—not to mention their putative reproductive shortcomings—an impor tant move that justified assaults against both warriors and noncombatants at Tallushatchee. Jackson’s account suggested that Creek women’s matrilineal beliefs concerning family were excessively rigid, so limited that they could ignore the needs of a child in front of them, so inflexible that they would rather see a member of their community dead than survive without blood relations. This, of course, erased the fact that Creek people—as with Native people more broadly— did not necessarily require “blood” ties in the construction of kinship relations while valorizing the patriarchal kinship structures heralded by Jackson’s nation and practiced within the space of his own home. Jackson’s story of the adoption implied that his brand of kinship was more flexible and benevolent than that of his Creek neighbors. It allowed him to adopt “dependents” such as Lyncoya into his household, even as they stood distinctly outside of his direct familial lineage. Th is line of thinking would have been familiar to U.S. whites, particularly other Southern elites. Central to the celebration of white male patriarchy was the tenet that its practitioners understood how to support, protect, and harness the labors of all human beings, including white women and children, as well as enslaved people of African descent. By adopting Lyncoya, Jackson extended this logic, demonstrating that white families such as his had the capacity to sustain Indian humanity within their confines. The presence of Indian kin willing to claim their child would have undermined Jackson’s characterizations of Indian people— and the kinship systems they embraced—as “savage” and, in turn, a public and personal portrait of himself as a benevolent Southern patriarch and a Christian. Lyncoya’s status as an orphan reinforced the adoptive benevolence believed to be inherent within a patriarchal household structure and positioned Jackson in par ticu lar as a great protector and sustainer of human life precisely as he stood surveying and celebrating a massacre. Echoing Jeffersonian philanthropic discourses declaring the urgent need to rescue Indian people from reproductive practices that supposedly put Indian populations at risk of extinction, Jackson ensured that his decision to send Lyncoya home to Nashville served to construct a personal legacy in which he stood as merciful, benevolent, and just to Indian people, helping

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them to move out of an anarchic and less fecund past and into the fertile cradle of “civilization.” As he portrayed it, his troops’ violence had been in Lyncoya’s best interest. Without Indian kin tying him down or pulling him “back” in time, Lyncoya could realize his full human potential in the Jackson household. Even if white households were generally viewed as universal spaces that generated “civilized” and successful life, Jackson—like many of his contemporaries—believed that his household was particularly adept at modeling ideal domestic relations. For Jackson’s decision to bring Lyncoya home was not just circumstantial, but also providential. “[C]harity and christianity [said] that [Lyncoya] ought to be taken care of,” Jackson told Rachel. “He may have been given to me for some Valuable purpose.” Jackson would serve as Lyncoya’s Christian guardian, perhaps as the direct result of his god’s intervention. This was the bare logic of Jeffersonian philanthropy and Southern paternalism. God had meant for Jackson to destroy the village of Tallushatchee so that he could save Lyncoya from the suffering of living as an Indian within it. Lyncoya was “a Savage,” Jackson told Rachel, but one “that fortune had thrown into [Jackson’s] hands.” The power of Jackson’s household was such that it could reshape a child’s future, moving him away from a state of “savagery” to one of “civilization.” In using Lyncoya to position himself as an adoptive friend to Indian people, Jackson was carefully and consciously crafting his legacy. Just as he shaped the meaning of his actions in letters to his wife describing his intentions with respect to their new Indian dependent, he configured his and Lyncoya’s history through conversations with his white male peers. Over the following years, Jackson’s biographers would happily echo their Southern general’s narratives. John Henry Eaton, Andrew Jackson’s close friend and confidant, would write, “amidst the general carnage, [Andrew Jackson] is seen acting as a Christian, and sympathizing in others’ woes, his character is marked by virtue, and more truly ennobled.” When “the Indian women” would not take care of Lyncoya, Jackson “determined he would not entrust it with them, but become himself the protector and guardian of the child.” Th rough Lyncoya, Jackson’s militarism got a written record, one with a human face and a humanitarian legacy. This legacy was important for Jackson’s political future. His march into Creek territories came on the heels of criticisms over his unsavory participation in duels and brawls, and over the course of the war he would become known for his harsh treatments of soldiers. Although Indian people generally

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received little territorial, cultural, or political consideration in the early U.S. republic, Jackson could ill afford further tarnishing of his reputation. He would have reason to fear that his ruthless assault against Native women and children would agitate Northern religious reformers and elected officials promoting Indians’ “civilization.” Jackson’s own engagements with the “civilizing” discourse made famous in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia informed the value he placed on the Creek infant. With federal administrators articulating their interests in assimilating Native people into the United States, Lyncoya’s ongoing presence in Jackson’s home was a way to demonstrate that, despite his militaristic inclinations, he was levelheaded enough to be counted on to realize the “pacific” policies formally advanced by his national leaders. Jackson worked to prove as much by educating Lyncoya closely alongside the white children in his household. By 1816 the general was inquiring of Tennessee senator George Washington Campbell if the latter might not advertise his work with Lyncoya to Congress. In sum, Lyncoya’s orphan status allowed Jackson to broadcast a gentler, more personal image of himself outside of his emerging reputation for ruthlessness in battle and in interpersonal relationships. Indeed, the little boy further humanized the general by highlighting Jackson’s own tragic upbringing, in which Jackson himself suffered the loss of family. Jackson’s father, a Scotch-Irish immigrant, had died before Jackson’s birth in 1767, perhaps from the strenuous labors he exerted trying to convert lands unsuited to agriculture in the Carolina Waxhaws into a prosperous farm. While assisting the Revolutionary cause, Jackson’s mother and brothers died of disease, leaving the young teenager with no nuclear kin, a fact that became wedded to Jackson’s legacy as a “self-made” man. Lyncoya aroused these memories of familial and economic hardship; as Jackson wrote from Fort Strother in December 1813, he had novel feelings for the child. As a war orphan, Lyncoya echoed Jackson’s own biography: “[W]hen I reflect that he as to his relations is so much like myself I feel an unusual sympathy for him,” he told Rachel. Ignoring the fact that his actions had produced Lyncoya’s condition, Jackson passionately declared to his wife that Lyncoya’s familial losses had softened his heart.

Captivity, Slavery, and Kinship Jackson may have described his feelings for Lyncoya as “unusual,” but it was no accident that his personal response to his invasion of the Creek Nation

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revolved around the captivity and adoption of a young child. U.S. whites and Southeast Indians alike participated in this warfare and kinship practice, using it to mitigate the tensions that arose out of U.S. settler colonialism and to build and sustain their communities in the Southeast. Tied to conflicting ideas about how to reproduce and sustain humanity in a region that was increasingly becoming incorporated into the U.S. commercial economy, captivity and adoption were interwoven practices that ultimately underscored who had the rights to incorporate other people into their societies and families and how. In the final takeaway, this control over human bodies was to signify who would enjoy power, prestige, and territory in the early decades of the nineteenth century. When Andrew Jackson sent Lyncoya home to Nashville to be adopted into his family, he engaged in behaviors that had long been widespread throughout the Southeast. As Molly McDonald’s own history makes clear, Native societies in the region, including those of the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee Nations, had historically taken war captives—mostly women and children—from enemy cultures. If these captives were not immediately tortured to death or held as slaves, Native women were responsible for adopting them as replacements for deceased matrilineal clan relatives. Regardless of whether or not captives were full members of their capturers’ societies, by the time Jackson invaded the Creek Nation, heritable servitude was only practiced by a small minority of Southeast Indians, such as the plantation elites within Lower Creek territories against whom the Red Sticks revolted. While the behaviors of these Native slaveholders, not to mention the white slaveholders surrounding them, increasingly influenced both captivity and adoption practices within Southeast Indian societies, it was still possible for the descendants of slaves—if not enslaved people themselves—to be adopted as kin. When it came to the adoption of individuals born within the same tribal communities, the practice may have been less common, namely because, in matrilineal systems, children were part of an extended group of kin who shared rights and responsibilities over them, likely making formal incorporation ceremonies unnecessary. Molly McDonald, for example, housed her matrilineal nephew Robert Jones on her Mississippi plantation, but Jones never appears to have identified as being officially adopted by his aunt. Their connection as family did not seem to necessitate such formalities, at least not in the early 1800s. The U.S. whites invading and settling on American Indian lands in the Southeast likewise engaged in adoption and captivity, interwoven practices

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that were informed by their own conceptions of kinship. It was common for Southern settlers— and U.S. whites more broadly—to incorporate extended family members or the children of friends into their homes during times of need. As in Native societies, caring for these children did not always necessitate formal adoption. Southern whites—including Jackson—took in “wards” without any further legal declarations. However, in a society that was organized around the transfer of material wealth within the nuclear family unit from parents (namely, fathers) to children (most often sons), more formalized adoption practices were important when inheritances were at stake. Adoption may not have been coded into law until 1851 in Massachusetts, but last wills and testaments as well as legislative declarations legitimated this kinship practice and sanctified the economic benefits that accompanied it. Jackson himself declared to have officially adopted Andrew Jr., his chosen heir for his sizeable assets, although he never specified how he did so. Later generations claimed it was through an act of legislation, though no document exists to confirm it. U.S. whites commonly described Native captivity practices as barbaric, yet they, too, engaged in the capture of other human beings, most prominently in racial slavery. Unlike more long-standing Native captivity systems, the institution of racial slavery was oriented around inherited servitude, that is, on the legal status of “slave” being passed down from one generation to the next. Slaveholders deemed women’s bodies as the sites through which such legal status was reproduced over time, with the children of enslaved black women likewise becoming slaves, to be owned by their mothers’ enslavers. Planters such as Jackson paternalistically referred to African American slaves as “their black families,” and many fathered children with women they enslaved. Regardless of declarations of affection for real and imagined “black and white” plantation kin, however, only offspring born to white women within the space of the plantation household had automatic inheritance rights or any decision-making power over their bodies or familial relations. Black captives had no legal kinship status, not even in relation to one another. In fact, servitude relied upon the fact that no other individual— including black mothers or fathers— could compete with white slaveholders for enslaved labor, a requirement that barred enslaved people from recognized marital or parental rights. A prominent Southern slaveholder and frontiersman, Jackson knew of both Euro-American and Native captivity and adoption practices. The

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various forms these practices took among whites and Indians directly informed his experiences in Tennessee. Racial slavery had been foundational to Jackson’s claims to social prominence. Enslaved women and men established his authority as a Southern patriarch by growing his cotton crops, caring for his horses and cattle, and constructing the domestic space that was supposed to support and nurture his white family. His awareness of Native captivity practices would not have been as extensive or nuanced as his familiarity with chattel slavery. He did have some sense of them, however, one that likely surpassed the sensationalized Indian captivity narratives that were popular in his day and that became particularly appealing to U.S. whites in the era of the War of 1812. Creek warriors had taken Tennessean Nancy Caffrey and her two-year-old son from the log cabin they shared with her husband and another family four miles to the south of Nashville in 1792. Caffrey remained in the Creek Nation for two years in Kialegee, a Creek town located along the Tallapoosa River, while her son was carried to another Creek town, where he was cared for by a white captive by the name of Mrs. Williams. At least according to one account, during Nancy’s time in Kialegee she endured quite harsh labor conditions and physical punishments. Although her son remained with the Creeks for a total of five years, developing close ties with his Creek captors, Caffrey was freed in 1794 and eventually arrived back in Tennessee. Caffrey’s ties to the Nashville community may have made Jackson aware of her experiences among Creek people and inspired him to draw upon some of the Creek captivity traditions that Caffrey endured. Whether he was conscious of it or not, however, when he raided Creek country and incorporated Lyncoya into his home, Jackson engaged in behavior that shared qualities with that of his Native neighbors while innovating upon warfare, race, and kinship systems that abounded among U.S. settlers in Tennessee and the surrounding region. Following Native captivity practices, Jackson took a child from his enemies during—and as a part of—his war against them, and then incorporated the child into his own family. While Native conceptions of matrilineality did not inform Jackson’s actions, he did intend his captive to assuage feelings of grief generated by his absence from his household. In line with the patriarchal systems to which his own sense of family subscribed, he beseeched his son to accept and assimilate a war captive to compensate for—in this case—the temporary loss of a patriarch. He then subsumed the Native child within his plantation

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household, which itself was engaged in the ongoing forms of warfare required to hold black captives in perpetual bondage. Indeed, Jackson’s captivity of Lyncoya needs to be situated within the dual war zones Jackson maintained during the Creek War: the one against Creek people in their homelands and the one he waged at home against people of African descent in order to maintain the racialized kinship relations and captivity practices that gave him emotional comfort and supported his material ambitions. When Jackson left Nashville for his miserable trek into the Creek Nation, he left behind a plantation household he had worked diligently to establish. In highlighting his status as an orphan when describing his affinity for Lyncoya, Jackson alluded to more than the early emotional struggles that preceded his meteoric rise as a slaveholding Southerner in Tennessee. PostRevolutionary independence was supposed to free white men from tyrannous British elites whose aristocratic nepotism corrupted colonial governance. Yet settler expansion closely relied upon family ties. Fathers passed along acquired property—including land and slaves—to sons, who were then supposed to parlay these territorial and human resources into greater wealth. Family connections also created the social ties required for business ventures and, by the same token, the reputations necessary to account for an individual’s trustworthiness as an economic partner. Kin proved especially important within the context of slave and land markets, as extended families often lent out slaves to their relations and purchased slaves from one another— vouching for the “likeliness,” or positive economic qualities, of a given slave— and they teamed up together in land deals. If kinship was an essential tool for acquiring the material and social resources for economic success in Southern slave country, Jackson’s own humble roots and familial tragedies were economic hardships when it came to accessing the rights and privileges that white men were supposed to enjoy within the racialized and gendered political and financial systems that shaped the United States. To repair this loss of white male kin and the hereditary resources they potentially offered, Jackson had used wages acquired through early work in the law to purchase slaves and land while simulta neously generating new familial ties. In 1784 he left an indenture with a saddler in the Carolina Waxhaws to follow wealthy Southern friends to Charleston, where he studied law, before relocating in 1788 to Nashville, where he began to practice it. From the very moment he entered Tennessee at the age of twenty-one, he

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began to purchase enslaved people of African descent, with the knowledge that owning slaves was a requirement for Southern economic advancement and social prestige. His first purchase was an eighteen- or twenty-year-old woman named Nancy. In selecting Nancy as his first slave, Jackson drew upon a common practice among new slaveholders, who bought and enslaved young women with the hope that they would bear and raise children— including those fathered by slaveholders themselves— signaling planters’ views of black women’s bodies as the sites through which future human property could be gained. Jackson’s right to engage in sexual relations with Nancy, as well as dictate her future partnerships, was socially and legally guaranteed. In purchasing her, he may have hoped that she would quickly increase his slaveholdings. Within a few years, he owned at least ten slaves, though it is not known if any of these individuals were Nancy’s offspring. By the time he invaded the Creek Nation in 1813, he listed over two dozen people as slaves on his plantation roster. The full extent of Jackson’s investments in land remains murky. However, the prominent Jackson historian Robert Remini argues that Jackson “probably immersed himself in land speculation almost on his arrival in Tennessee, for land was the surest and quickest way to riches in the west.” Teaming up with the likes of fellow Tennessee lawyer and land speculator John Overton, Jackson had purchased tens of thousands of acres of land by 1796, keeping a few hundred acres in Tennessee for personal use while seeking to resell the rest for substantial profit. A default on a promissory note quickly revealed the volatile nature of the land business, putting Jackson in financial crisis in the late 1790s and early 1800s. By this time, however, he had the support of his wife’s extended family connections, through which he built a dry-goods business that (at least for a while) helped keep him financially afloat until he recouped his fortune several years later. Jackson also worked as a slave trader, a profession from which his political supporters would later work hard to distance him. As Jackson was all too aware from his calamitous land sale, financial wealth was hard to acquire or hold on to without social and familial connections with other prominent whites. Soon after arriving in the burgeoning frontier city of Nashville, Jackson had befriended the more influential families settled in the region, particularly that of his future wife, Rachel Donelson Robards, who was the daughter of John Donelson, a wealthy Virginia migrant and land surveyor. In 1794 Jackson married Rachel—who

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was separated but not formally divorced from her first husband, Lewis Robards—acquiring Rachel’s wealth as well as the wealth-generating kin and clan connections that she brought with her. Jackson’s relationship with Rachel helped to solidify his connections to some of the most influential frontier capitalists in and around the Cumberland Gap. The marriage, however, had its pitfalls. In addition to Rachel’s marriage to Robards, which created a scandal that would dog the couple as Jackson’s star rose, the two were not able to bear children together. In an era that celebrated the bearing and raising of children as a marker of a well-lived life, their lack of offspring put their social value at stake. After spending several unsuccessful years attempting to have a child, the Jacksons adopted Andrew Jr. after Rachel’s brother, Severn, and his wife, Elizabeth, had twin boys in 1809 and, evidently, were willing to part with one of them. By the time Lyncoya arrived into the Jackson household, Jackson would also have several wards in his care, including Andrew Jackson Hutchings and Andrew Jackson Donelson. Andrew Jackson Jr. was the white male heir to whom Jackson ultimately chose to impart both his advice and fortunes and on whom he imagined he could count upon to arrange his personal affairs in old age. In January 1813, less than a year before his invasion of Creek country, Jackson wrote to Rachel about his then-four-year-old adopted son: “The sensibility of our beloved son, has charmed me, I have no doubt, from the sweetness of his disposition, from his good sense as evidenced, for his age, that he will take care of us both in our declining years—from our fondness towards him, his return of affection to us, I have every hope if he should be spared to manhood, that he will with a careful education reallise [sic] all our wishes.”  Acquiring a white child in and of itself would not secure Jackson’s masculine authority or elevated status. He needed to demonstrate ordered and harmonious relationships between and among himself and his wife and children, as well as between his “white” family and his slaves. Jackson appears to have embraced the patriarchal tenets that many believed generated this harmony among white kin relations by exhibiting tender feelings for his wife and child while maintaining the hierarchical relationships with them that signaled his status as household head. As for the “harmony” with his slaves, this required ongoing violence. Indeed, physical domination over enslaved laborers and the threat of separation from enslaved kin through sale were just a few of the measures utilized to accomplish the sense of “order”

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Jackson sought for himself and his family. Jackson was able to directly account for these acts while he was at home. But ensuring desired social relations was more difficult while he was away. During his invasion of the Creek Nation, Jackson relied upon various strategies to maintain his desired household relations during his physical absence. When they did not appear to suffice, he transferred new war captives home to address the tensions and grief his vacancy had produced. As with Silas Dinsmoor’s in Choctaw territories, Jackson’s household only existed as such through the labors of black women, men, and children. According to Jackson’s contemporaries, his biographers, and Jackson himself, Rachel was the one who administered and managed daily life on Jackson’s plantation, using her acute business acumen to help her husband realize financial profit. As a Southern mistress, Rachel engaged in her own individual battles with the men and women owned by her husband, expressing her personal stakes in the system of chattel slavery through direct and indirect forms of violence. Nonetheless, Jackson was still expected to maintain both his and his wife’s authority over people of African descent by executing or ordering the deployment of various punishments against those enslaved at the Hermitage. Jackson’s letters to his wife and overseer suggest some of his preferred methods of maintaining black servitude. In the spring of 1813, after Rachel complained to one of Jackson’s confidants of having difficulties getting an enslaved man named Sandy to follow her orders, Jackson suggested that Rachel sell Sandy if that option suited her. “I am sorry Sandy has turned out such a rascal as Colo Hays advises me,” Jackson wrote, “I hope the overseer has done his duty, and amply punished him— Colo Hays has stated that Mr [Thomas] Watson will give five hundred dollars for him—I leave this entirely to yourself—it is a good price if the cash is paid in hand—but on the event of a sale there must be no credit unless there is a note payable in bank, with good endorsers.”  Jackson wanted his wife to punish Sandy’s resistance by subjecting him to an unknown future in domestic slave markets. The core of this punishment was based on separating Sandy from the enslaved community on Jackson’s plantation, with whom Sandy presumably had social, familial, and community ties, as well as the threat of an even more violent master. Jackson’s familial peace depended upon the coercive mechanisms required to maintain his absolute authority over his slaves, including his ability to destroy kinship relations and bonded communities. Like his Southern peers, Jackson saw no contradiction in the

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fact that his white family’s domestic harmony was built upon harming black people and their own families. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Jackson hoped that Rachel could “calm [her] mind” during his tenure in Creek territories by ensuring that Sandy was “amply punished” by his overseer and then “sold off for a good price.”  The violence Jackson was willing to inflict extended beyond the severing of personal ties. In 1815, when Jackson received a report that black women on his plantation “as usual commenced open war” on those who enslaved them— signaling enslaved women’s long history of resistance to servitude— one of Jackson’s neighbors assured the general that he “had brought [these women] to order by Hickory oil.” Referring to the practice of whipping slaves with a hickory stick and perhaps punning on the nickname of the plantation master, who was known as “Old Hickory,” Jackson’s neighbor assured the Southern general that he had life at the Hermitage under control. Along the same vein, when Betty, a woman Rachel Jackson counted as her personal slave, was accused by Rachel of being “guilty of some improper conduct”—“putting on some airs,” as Rachel apparently reported to Jackson—Jackson demanded that she be “ruled with a cowhide.” This, Jackson insisted, was to be the punishment of all enslaved people who “depart[ed] from proper conduct.” Weak or nonexistent prohibitions against harming enslaved household “dependents” permitted the forms of discipline wielded against black captives living at the Hermitage. Over Jackson’s years as a slaveholder, he acknowledged that his overseers frequented his slaves’ cabins at night— indicating the presence of sexual violence on his plantation—and that they exerted additional power over servants by withholding food, shelter, and clothing, at times with such austerity that people lost their lives. Jackson was not always pleased by such actions. When William Donelson, a relation of Rachel Jackson, warned Jackson of the violence Jackson’s overseer—a man named Graves Steele—inflicted on those enslaved at the Hermitage, Jackson’s response indicated an elite distaste for, and privileged distance from, the physical brutality his overseer used to maintain chattel slavery. “[S]ubordination must be maintained by [the overseer], but this can be accomplished, without cruelty,” Jackson told Donelson. He then sent through Donelson a letter warning Steele to take better care of the men, women, and children owned by Jackson. If Steele did not, Jackson stated, the overseer would be forced to reimburse Jackson for ensuing financial losses. Jackson also suggested, however, that as long as his economic interests were accounted for, he would absolve Steele of all other criminal repercussions: “an

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overseer is accountable to his employer for all losses sustained through his neglect,” Jackson wrote, adding rather cryptically, “and I do assure you, I would not if I could, make you answerable for any thing else.” In his letter, Jackson revealed that accountability translated into the economic valuation of human property. While he ordered his employee to “treat my negroes with humanity, & attention when sick; & not work them too hard, when well— that you feed & cloath them well,” he also implied that the only thing the overseer truly had to be “answerable for” were financial losses. Elsewhere, Jackson revealed the ideologies that ultimately justified violence against those enslaved at the Hermitage. An 1829 letter to Andrew Jackson Hutchings—another white ward of Jackson’s—reveals that Jackson framed physical assaults through the logics of paternalism. “Tell the negroes all howde, for me—that I am glad to hear that they are well treated, & happy, that I wish them all to behave well & they shall be well treated.” As long as slaves did what was ordered of them, Jackson indicated, they would avoid parental discipline, either by Jackson or by those he employed. Jackson counted on his overseers and his wife to ensure that those he enslaved tended to his family’s physical comforts and desires as well his own economic interests while he was away. Yet he still had to atone for the emotional comforts only he was supposed to offer as a husband and father. Over the course of his campaign against Upper Creeks, Jackson closely monitored and reconfirmed his formal kinship ties with Rachel and Andrew Jr. He sent letters to his wife describing in sentimental language the peace, harmony, and emotional security he associated with the two of them and their shared domestic space while he toiled in a foreign land that he insisted was filled with “savages.” He consistently expressed his affection for Rachel and lamented the necessity of having to leave their plantation home in order to wage a war against his enemies. He couched his feelings of nostalgia for his domestic comforts within his desire to fulfill national and political obligations. From his Fort Strother headquarters, he told his wife, “I have a pleasing hope of seeing you before long— can I get up my supplies shortly I will soon put an end to the Creek war, as soon as this is done and I can honourably, retire, I shall, return to you[r] arms on the wings of love & affection, to spend with you the remainder of my days in peaceful domestick retirement.” For the self-declared war-weary general, the “peaceful” domesticity of the Hermitage was the antidote to Creek “savagery.” Jackson insisted that patriotism necessitated his departure. Describing his military campaigns in great detail, he highlighted dangerous encounters with

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Indians and triumphant victories over Red Stick warriors, using these descriptions to portray his heroic sacrifices. Fusing sentimentality with military aggression, he acknowledged his wife’s own suffering but justified its necessity because of his greater paternal commitments. “I thank you for your determined resolution, to bear our separation with fortitude,” he wrote her early on in his occupation of the Upper Towns. “[We] part but for a few days, for a few fleeting weeks, when the protecting hand of providence if it is his will, will restore us to each others arms,” he continued, “let us not repine, [God’s] will be done, our country calls, its rights are invaded, the innocent babe, and helpless mother, massacred by the ruthless savage, e[x]cited to these horrid deeds, by the infernal engines of British policy.” Jackson sacrificed both his wife’s and his own immediate comforts, he argued, to defend U.S. national borders and protect women and children in other white households. In so doing, he justified disquieting his own domestic space. Rachel’s own correspondence indicates that his letters did not make up for her husband’s absence. Undermining Jackson’s image of perfect domestic bliss, she lamented the distance between herself and her spouse and the difficulties this presented for her. She was dogged by loneliness, struggles to assert her power and authority over the people she and her husband enslaved, and fear for her husband’s safety and health, all of which sent her into bouts of anxiety and sadness. On February 8, 1813, Rachel wrote her husband of her attempts at fortitude under these conditions: “whar er I turn my thoughts my fears my doubts Distress me, then a Little my hope revives again. that Keeps me a live was it not for that I must sink I should Die in my present situation.” Andrew Jr. also suffered from his father’s time away. While Jackson was traveling the Cumberland River in February 1813, Rachel wrote to him of a particularly difficult night. “One of them Extreem Cold nights [Andrew Jr.] got a little vext and said he wondered his pappa did not Come home & sleep with him in his big bed on sunday last Mamma said he lets go to Nashville & See if he is ther.” Where overseers and letters failed to repair the domestic discord wrought by Jackson’s wars within and outside his household, Jackson hoped an Indian child might succeed. He intended the Creek infant to endear him to his adopted white child, alleviating his little white boy’s suffering and, by extension, lightening his wife’s worries and fears. From his earliest references to Lyncoya, Jackson made explicit that the child was a gift for Andrew Jr. In his hasty note to Rachel following his invasion of Tallushatchee,

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Jackson announced, “I send on a little Indian boy for Andrew.” Jackson even made Lyncoya’s position as adopted kin within his household contingent on Andrew Jr.’s final approval. In December 1813 he told his wife in more detail, “I send [Lyncoya] to my little Andrew, and I hope will adopt him as one of our family.” Jackson presumed that by gifting Lyncoya to his white son, and giving his son some authority over the Indian child, he could please Andrew Jr. and demonstrate his affection for him. At the same turn, he might relieve some of his wife’s concerns for their son’s well-being. If Lyncoya was to soothe Andrew Jr.’s loneliness, Jackson apparently hoped other Creek children might do the same for his white wards. In February 1814 Jackson announced that, if at all possible, he would arrange for the delivery of Creek boys to Andrew Jackson Donelson and Andrew Jackson Hutchings. In effect, all of the young Andrew Jacksons at the Hermitage would get Indian boys of their own at the generous behest of their eponymous guardian. At least one of these Creek children, a boy named Charley, would make his way to Jackson’s household. The general did not account for what became of Charley; the Creek youth disappears from Jackson’s correspondence after 1814. But Jackson clearly intended the child, as with Lyncoya and Andrew Jr., to endear him to his ward. The value of sending Indian children to his white male dependents lay in the assumption that both Jackson and the young white men within his household shared masculine prerogatives over people who were not unquestionably “white.” Lyncoya was a belonging of Andrew Jr.’s; it was up to Andrew Jr. to legitimate his presence in the Jackson home by deciding to adopt him. While the other two Native boys disappear from the record, they were clearly intended to be subordinates to his white male wards, rather than children who lived on an equal footing with them. Not unlike the women, men, and children Jackson enslaved, the youth were to live under the direction of white men in order to serve their individual interests. Indeed, giving Indian children as gifts to his white male dependents was part of a broader impulse on the part of the Southern general to inculcate in his son and his wards the sense that they had the right to consume the bodies and resources of others, in this case Indian people and their material possessions, to satisfy their own wishes. Adding to the human spoils of war, Jackson sent at least one weapon home to commemorate his final victory over his opponents. A copy of a letter written after the Battle of Tohopeka in the spring of 1814 declares that he had collected a “warriors bow and quiver” for

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Andrew Jr. In sending human and inanimate gifts to the children to whom he fondly referred as “the Andrews,” Jackson was giving his white dependents a glimpse of his exploits in Indian territories, promoting a white supremacist vision in which Indian land, people, and belongings were there for the taking. Lyncoya, Charley, and the other unnamed child Jackson acquired were human counterparts to the bow and arrow destined for Andrew Jr. They were living war relics, flesh-and-blood souvenirs of Jackson’s exploits who could become integrated into and—ideally— controlled within his home. Lyncoya would ultimately spend sixteen years with the Jacksons. Like the lives of many of the men and women who were enslaved at the Hermitage, his life appears in tiny fragments and pieces in Jackson’s correspondence. The sparse records documenting Lyncoya’s experiences reconfirm his marginalized status within the Jackson family home. Lyncoya appears to have lived in the interstices of everyday life at the Hermitage, neither slave nor free, but somewhere in between. While Jackson did not directly declare Lyncoya to be his son’s property, the child’s domestic status at times resembled that of the people Jackson enslaved. Some evidence suggests that Lyncoya even replaced one of Andrew Jr.’s favored playmates, who may have been enslaved. Jackson declared that Lyncoya was the same age as Theodore, a young boy of either American Indian or African descent who died during Jackson’s invasion of Creek country. Jackson also implied that Native youth were to have the status of owned people when he told Rachel of his plan to send Indian boys to all of the Andrews. In this instance, he referred to both Lyncoya and Charley as “Pett[s],” a name that, on the one hand, may have served as a term of endearment but, given the circumstances, just as likely reconfirmed their position as subordinates of his and Rachel’s white dependents. Indeed, the term may have even been one Jackson gave to slaves whose company his family preferred. Ultimately, Jackson’s orders to Andrew Jr. with respect to Lyncoya echoed those he would give his overseers: “tell my dear little andrew to treat him well,” Jackson relayed to Rachel prior to Lyncoya’s arrival in 1814. In these real and tangible ways, Jackson distanced Lyncoya from his white kin and paralleled the young man’s position to that of his slaves. Yet even as Lyncoya’s status resembled that of the enslaved, Jackson made deliberate distinctions between Lyncoya and people of African descent, positioning the young child closer to his white family than to African American slaves, much in the way that Jefferson positioned Indians as closer to

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whites than blacks in his own musings on racial taxonomies. After deciding to send Lyncoya to his home, Jackson ordered Rachel to “[k]eep Lyncoya in the house” rather than among the people he owned, who lived in the small wooden cabins that stood just out of sight of the Hermitage mansion. Jackson was clear from early on that he wanted to make a distinction between Lyncoya’s position in his household and that of enslaved people of African descent. When Jackson ordered his wife to make preparations to travel with Andrew Jr. to join him in New Orleans, where he was preparing for the battle with the British that would make him a hero for many U.S. whites in the War of 1812, he requested that Rachel leave Lyncoya with his sister-in-law, Mary Donelson Caffery. Jackson was dismayed at Caffery’s harsh treatment of Lyncoya during the child’s stay with her. Caffery had forced the young boy to live in bleak conditions with little clothing alongside the men, women, and children she owned. Writing to Rachel from Chickasaw territories in September 1816, Jackson lamented, “how thankfull I am to you for taking poor little Lyncoya home & cloathing him—I have been hurt to see him there with the negroes, like a lost sheep without a sheperd.” Jackson might have been ner vous that Lyncoya would form bonds with African Americans owned by Caffery, bringing some of their resistance strategies back to the Hermitage. Further, Jackson’s biblical reference to a lost sheep affirmed his desire to stand as Lyncoya’s Christian savior, a position that Jackson believed would be compromised if Lyncoya labored as a slave. Despite paternalistic rhetoric concerning the contented lives of “well behaved” African Americans in captivity, Jackson was acutely aware that his status as a Christian shepherd over an Indian child required that Lyncoya remain formally free. As Thomas Jefferson made clear in his Notes, only barbaric Europeans, such as the Spaniards, were immoral enough to enslave Indian people. Prior to Caffery’s ill treatment of Lyncoya, Jackson had already declared his distaste for white men’s enslavement of Indians. By the conclusion of the Creek War, an informal economy had emerged around the exchange of Indian captives. In April 1814, less than two weeks after the Battle at Tohopeka, which marked the end of the Creek War, a Lieutenant Moore was reported to have paid twenty dollars for two young Creek men, one of whom may have been Charley. The general was opposed to this traffic in Indian people, ordering Smith to place the two youths with “Colo Perkins.” Jackson may have felt that other white men’s access to Indian captives threatened to

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jeopardize Lyncoya’s status as a rare war novelty. Yet by expressing dismay at the purchase and sale of Indian people, it is also possible that Jackson sought to distance himself from the unsavory practice of Indian enslavement unfolding under his watch. The racial and gender hierarchies that sustained plantation households allowed a young Indian boy such as Lyncoya to fit easily in the margins of Jackson’s home. Unlike white children, he was not expected to reproduce Jackson’s familial legacies; and unlike enslaved women and men, he was not expected to materialize the human and agricultural commodities that secured Jackson’s wealth and social prestige. As Andrew Jackson Jr.’s Indian adoptee, Lyncoya occupied a kind of in-between space between slavery and freedom, but one that did not threaten to permanently disrupt the plantation order. Since U.S. racial formations coded women’s bodies as the sites for reproducing blackness and whiteness and, as a result, the very categories of servitude and freedom, an Indian woman would have confounded this polarized sexual economy at the Hermitage, but not “a little Indian boy.” As long as Lyncoya remained under Jackson’s watch, there was no possibility of him directly reproducing his “Indian” status—and undermining the racialized reproductive hierarchies of Jackson’s home—through childbirth. This liminal status made the child’s own reproductive future uncertain. If he married a white woman, would he be granted the patriarchal rights of white men over his kin? Or did Jackson expect Lyncoya to marry or engage in illicit relations with one of the women Jackson enslaved, in which case Lyncoya’s wife or partner and their children would remain—and enhance—Jackson’s property? Correspondence and tutoring bills show that Lyncoya was educated alongside the young Andrew Jacksons while “the Andrews” were at home, and letters by Rachel Jackson indicate that Lyncoya lived close enough to the Jackson family to cultivate some form of an emotional bond, at least on her part, for the young child. Yet Lyncoya’s residence with Caffery indicates that he did not necessarily join the Jackson family when they traveled beyond the Hermitage grounds. Lyncoya lived in “the house” at the Hermitage, but Jackson’s very instructions to his wife to locate Lyncoya there make evident that his status as kin was neither given nor obvious. Lyncoya’s apprenticeship to a saddler after 1824 would seal his ambivalent position into a labor contract. Unlike those who Jackson enslaved, Lyncoya was not to engage in the household and agricultural labors that brought prestige and wealth

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to the Hermitage. Yet neither was he to enjoy the freedoms or privileges of Jackson’s heir or wards, ensuring that he would not, in turn, challenge their authority as white men.

Indian Masculinity in a Plantation South In 1843 Amos Kendall published one of the most popular early biographies of Andrew Jackson. In this work, he devoted a few lines to Lyncoya. The child “grew up to be a beautiful and robust young man, as well educated as the white boys of the most respectable families,” but, Kendall asserted, his “tastes were always Indian.” “He delighted in rambling over the fields and through the woods, sticking into his hair and clothes every gay feather he could find. He was always anxious to return to the Creek nation with the chiefs who, for many years after the war, continued to visit the Hermitage.” If Kendall’s account is even marginally accurate, we might derive from it one way that Lyncoya negotiated his ambiguous status as an Indian adoptee on Jackson’s plantation: he sought out those for whom he believed he had an affinity and begged for them to take him home, even if these individuals—who were likely the Southeast Indian planters who allied themselves with Jackson during the Creek civil war—in fact contributed to the destruction of Lyncoya’s own Upper Creek kin. Kendall’s account, however, ascribes essentialized notions of innate “Indianness” to Lyncoya. It implies that, even though Lyncoya had been adopted in infancy into Jackson’s household, his propensity to behave like an “Indian” could not be undone. Yet the gentle Indian habits that Lyncoya supposedly performed on Jackson’s plantation in the late 1810s and early 1820s were radically different from the violent ones that Andrew Jackson had emphasized just a few years prior. In juxtaposing Kendall’s account alongside Jackson’s final decision to apprentice Lyncoya to a saddle maker after 1823, it becomes clear that Lyncoya’s life in Jackson’s household— and his expulsion from it— converged with changing representations of Indian people and the federal policies that followed them. Andrew Jackson himself contributed to these shifting discourses— ones that transformed Indians from violent “savages” to noble free spirits—both in the language he used to describe Indians as well as through the military campaigns and coercive treaty negotiations he pursued. As he engaged in a militaristic rampage across the Southeast between his invasion of Creek country in 1813 and his invasion of

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Seminole territory in Florida in 1818, he helped to recalibrate Indian people’s political, economic, and racial positions in the Atlantic world. According to one early historian of Jackson, a few days after Jackson’s troops laid waste to Tohopeka on March 27, 1814, the Southern general read a statement to his war-torn army of roughly two thousand volunteer soldiers. He first congratulated them on their hard labors. Once he had done so, he made sure that they understood the meaning of the devastation they had just orchestrated against the Red Stick army. Referring to the carnage that ensued on the Tallapoosa River, which ran along the edge of the town of Tohopeka, and the hundreds of Red Stick men who were either killed by Jackson’s troops or drowned there as they sought to escape in the spring of 1814, Jackson declared: The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder our Women and Children, or disturb the quiet of our borders. Their midnight flambeaux will no more illumine their Council house, or shine upon the victim of their infernal orgies. They have disappeared from the face of the Earth. In their places a new generation will arise who will know their duties better. The weapons of warfare will be exchanged for the utensils of husbandry; and the wilderness which now withers in sterility and seems to mourn the disolation which overspreads it, will blossom as the rose, and become the nursery of the arts. But other chastisements remain to be inflicted before this happy day can arise. How la mentable it is that the path to peace should lead through blood, and over the carcases of the slain!! But it is in the dispensation of that providence, which inflicts partial evil to produce general good.

From this account, Jackson did not hesitate to display his beliefs that Red Sticks were a debased people in need of swift discipline. In his view, whites and Indians engaged in practices that were diametrically opposed to one another. White people were peaceful, rational, family-oriented farmers who knew their providential duties. The Red Sticks were violent and impulsive murderers of white women and children. They knew of no government, “[c]ouncil[ing]” themselves by the light of unruly midnight bonfires. They had no respect for the values of what Jackson characterized as “real” family life, and, as such, they had no interest in the agricultural practices that sustained human beings and generated prosperity. In contrast to U.S. whites, such Indian men and women wantonly wasted land and destroyed those who tried to cultivate it. Only after they were contained, restrained, or

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otherwise made to “disappear” could “a new generation” of white families bring their supposedly superior kinship and government systems, as well as their technological advancements, to the “sterile” Indian “wilderness,” making it “bloom” with life. Jackson imbued the white family with religious and temporal significance; it symbolized the most advanced order of human life. He framed the deaths of Creek people at Tohopeka as an unfortunate but necessary evil that enabled the forms of political, economic, and social reproduction engaged in by U.S. society to flourish. Jackson, however, would not have been solely referring to Red Stick fighters when he made such declarations of Indians’ barbarity. Rather, even though he allied with Creek slaveholders during these battles, he still included them in the category of uncivilized “savage.” Jackson’s convenient perceptions of all Indians as dangerous to U.S. settlement and harboring feelings of violence against U.S. whites became apparent during the treaty negotiations that formally ended U.S.-Creek hostilities. At the Treaty of Fort Jackson, Jackson demanded fourteen million acres of “first rate” Creek lands, eight million of which lay in eastern, or Lower, Creek country, the territory claimed by his slaveholding Creek allies. As Benjamin Hawkins, the U.S. Indian agent to the Creek Nation, would write, Jackson “addressed a speech to the Chiefs, among whom there was but a single hostile one; marked his line which, he said, should not be altered.” Jackson declared these lands would cover U.S. “expenses of the war” and “took the lands eastwardly to Georgia, belonging obviously to the friendly Indians.” Jackson consolidated all Creeks into enemy or indebted people, drew out the territories that he wanted from them on a map, and then demanded that the entire Creek Nation cede these lands to the U.S. government. His willful confusion of Creek political structures was so clearly in ser vice of his land hunger that even Hawkins—a federal official with great investments in attaching Creek people to U.S. interests—was disconcerted. “It struck me forcibly,” he reported, “that the general . . . should take nearly eight millions of acres from the friendly Indians over and above all the hunting grounds of the friendly upper Creeks . . . without consulting them.” By declaring his allies and his enemies to be universally subservient to the United States, Jackson demanded for his nation, and his own network of Tennessee land speculators, the largest recorded land cession ever asked of an Indian tribe in the Southeast to that point, including “roughly threefifths of the present state of Alabama and one-fifth of Georgia.” Having severed ties with surviving Red Sticks, most of whom joined the Seminoles

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in Florida, as well as the British army, which continued fighting the War of 1812 with the United States, Creek planters could do little to resist Jackson’s demands. Nor could they hope to look for European allies in the future: the territorial cession mandated by Jackson would end the possibility of Atlantic alliances. This was because Jackson had selected Lower Creek territories not only for their arable quality, but also, as Hawkins remarked, “from political motives—to prevent an intercourse between the Indians and the Spaniards and English in the Floridas.” As he aimed to pull Creek people and their lands out of the Atlantic system, Jackson designated the most acculturated Indian slaveholders unworthy of territory, hoping to devastate any opportunity for a Creek Nation that was economically independent of the United States. Between 1816 and 1818 U.S. troops invaded Florida to enforce the Treaty of Fort Jackson, accumulate additional lands for plantation settlements, and break alliances between Spanish and British merchants, Red Stick and Seminole Indians, and self-liberated African American slaves. In 1816 U.S. troops attacked “the Negro fort,” a former British military stronghold in Apalachicola occupied by self-liberated slaves. Located just sixty miles from the nearest U.S. slaveholding settlements, the fort had been a source of anger and dismay for Southern slaveholders. In 1818 Jackson assumed command of U.S. troops in Florida in what became known as the First Seminole War. He was unable to defeat allied Seminole and African American fighters, as he had hoped he would. However, his actions contributed to the Spanish cession of their Florida territories in 1821, a cession that pleased several of Jackson’s extended kin, who had bought lands there just prior to the general’s invasion. Jackson’s nephew John Donelson IV, for example, purchased 12,000 acres of land along the Pensacola Bay, likely in anticipation that Jackson’s conquest of Florida would increase their value. Jackson began to realize his political aspirations through his Florida campaign, and in 1821 he would serve nine months as governor of the Florida territories he had helped bring into the United States. After his Florida campaign, Jackson’s language with respect to Indian people morphed from the frothy and militarized speeches he had exhibited during the Creek War to paternalistic sermons emphasizing his affection for vulnerable “red children.” In other words, after he had contributed to the attenuation of Southeast Indians’ transatlantic ties with the Spanish in Florida and with the British in the Mississippi Valley in the Creek War and, most famously, at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, he began to speak of

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Native people as vulnerable children in need of protection. This paternalistic discourse was not unique to Jackson; such ideologies had served as keystones for federal Indian policies since the 1790s. However, Jackson only engaged in paternalistic language in relation to Indian people once he felt confident that he had significantly weakened their Atlantic resources. As the eminent Jackson scholar Michael Paul Rogin has discerned, it was at precisely this moment that Jackson first chose to call Lyncoya his “son.” Jackson did not stand alone in his shifting portrayals of Native people in the 1820s. During this decade, the trope of the vanishing Indian became common parlance in popular U.S. culture, finding a staging ground in widely read novels, popular plays, and paintings. As U.S. whites watched the assault on Native territorial power east of the Mississippi, not only in the Southeast, but also north of the Ohio River, they entertained themselves with fictional depictions of Indians who sadly understood that their time on the North American continent had come to a close. These Indians were not the bloodthirsty “savages” of the earlier decades of the nineteenth century. They were noble and tragic “children of nature” whose passion for reaping the harvests of the forest through the hunt had destined them to extinction. Ironically, as repre sentations of Indian people grew more pacific, “civilization”-oriented federal trade and education programs came under fire, largely as a result of Jackson’s successful military campaigns against Southeast Indians, African Americans, the Spanish, and the British. Well aware that an alliance between European and Indian powers no longer presented a threat to U.S. sovereignty, from the late 1810s until Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, a growing movement of speculators, slaveholders, and yeoman farmers in the South would call for an end to what they considered to be slow-moving and ineffective “civilization” initiatives, asserting the need to immediately deploy military-backed removal campaigns in their stead. Since Indians’ attachment to “the hunt” could not be redirected into a passion for farming, these individuals—who strategically remained silent concerning the numerous farming initiatives in Indian territories— asserted that Indians should be made to give up their prime agricultural lands to those who knew how best to use them. Jackson, of course, would infamously speak for these voices after his 1828 election to the presidency. As removal replaced “conciliatory” “civilization” policies, Jackson and a number of his contemporaries specifically rechanneled their vitriol away from the populations of violent Indians conjured up in early speeches

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and redirected it at Southeast Indian slaveholders. The increased planter power of a select group of Southeast Indian elites proved threatening to expansionist white slaveholders such as Jackson. These Native Southeasterners had managed to carve out a successful new economy for themselves, even—or especially—while territorially bound by the United States. In turn, they used liberal discourses of slavery and freedom to assert spatial authority over their territories, developing a series of centralized governance systems, as well as a network of U.S. allies, to defend tribal lands from U.S. seizure. As it turned out, Lyncoya may have been one of only a few survivors of the Red Stick town of Tallushatchee, but as these Southeast Indian slaveholders made clear, he did not mark the end of Creek resistance to white settler imperialism. Jackson’s plans with respect to Lyncoya took a sharp turn as these Southeast Indian planters rose to prominence in the years following the War of 1812. He went from promoting the young man’s political and intellectual promise to, in the words of Kendall, “[d]esiring that he should follow some mechanical employment.” Jackson had a propensity for mentoring promising young men who could ultimately support his own interests, and his plans for Lyncoya initially appear to have been in line with this strategy. Indeed, for at least a decade, Jackson had nourished hopes that Lyncoya would have some kind of successful public career outside of his plantation household, not only arranging for the child to be tutored alongside “the Andrews,” but also, at certain points, contributing to Lyncoya’s own education himself. Jackson declared his fondness for Lyncoya, a fondness that, perhaps, grew out of Jackson’s pride in his efforts to promote the child to whom he referred as “the little Indian boy.” As late as 1823 Jackson wanted to display Lyncoya’s accomplishments in Washington City, writing to Rachel of his hopes “to exhibit” the young man “to Mr Monroe & the Secretary of War” in order to secure Lyncoya’s entrance “at the military school.” And, then, at some point between 1824 and 1828, Jackson apprenticed Lyncoya to a saddle maker. Kendall argues that Jackson gave Lyncoya the choice of his vocational skill, taking “him into various shops in Nashville, that he might choose his trade.” It is certainly possible that Lyncoya had something to do with Jackson’s decision to apprentice him out of the Hermitage household. The young man— then between twelve and sixteen years of age—may have eschewed Jackson’s ambitious plans for him. Having survived Jackson’s

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violent invasions of Southeast Indian Country in the ser vice of a white planter class while spending at least parts of his life in the cabins of enslaved people of African descent, Lyncoya may have wanted nothing to do with the U.S. military or racial slavery. By choosing a future as a saddler, he may have instead looked for a manual trade more closely affiliated with the kinds of skilled masculine labors performed by some enslaved people and favored by his Red Stick forebears. Lyncoya’s rejection of Jackson’s hopes for him, in turn, may have disillusioned his adoptive “father,” adding fire to Jackson’s pro-removal rhetoric about the impossibility of “civilizing” Indians. Yet the timing of Lyncoya’s transfer to a saddler makes it seem more probable that Jackson decided to indenture his Indian “son” in response to the changing geopolitical terrain. Jackson sent Lyncoya away shortly after President James Monroe and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun failed to respond to the Southern general’s request that they realize his political ambitions for the young man. Jeffersonian ideas about Indian “malleability” had waned in Washington as “noble savagery” emerged as the predominant means of characterizing the actions and behaviors of Indian people, making Lyncoya an awkward domestic dependent rather than a useful political tool. Without federal attention, Lyncoya lost his political value. Indenturing Lyncoya may have also been a strategic response to the growing threat of Southeast Indian planters for whom, if Kendall’s account is correct, Lyncoya had clear affinities. If Jackson provided Lyncoya with the opportunities, or even simply the migratory freedoms, to leave the Hermitage and establish a plantation household of his own, Jackson would have to acknowledge in some way Southeast Indian planters’ rights to individual property and, in turn, national sovereignty. Therefore, at some point after 1824, Lyncoya may only have been valuable to Jackson when he stuck “into his hair and clothes every gay feather he could find” and “rambl[ed] over fields and through the woods,” in a sense playing the perfect vanishing Indian. By indenturing Lyncoya to a saddler, Jackson reserved for his Indian “son” the future he himself had fled in order to pursue dreams of plantation mastery. Lyncoya returned to the Hermitage in 1828 at approximately the age of sixteen, evidently dying of tuberculosis. The exact reasons why he returned are unclear. Perhaps, as he sickened on the property of the saddler for whom he worked, he was left with nowhere else to go. Maybe he went back to Jackson’s plantation household because he held strong attachments to his

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long-term guardians and wanted to feel their love and care as his body weakened. Regardless of why Lyncoya moved back to the Hermitage, his need to return to Jackson’s home must have pleased the soon-to-be president. Jackson had cultivated Lyncoya’s dependency upon his domestic space, a dependency that Jackson justified and even celebrated by asserting his— and his broader family’s—feelings of fondness, even love, for the boy. One of Jackson’s contemporaries declared that Lyncoya’s passing saddened “the general and Mrs. Jackson,” who “mourned” Lyncoya “as a favourite son.” By dying tragically in Rachel and Andrew Jackson’s home, however, Lyncoya became for Andrew Jackson the perfect disappearing Indian, one who was reliant upon Jackson and, then, when no longer necessary for Jackson’s political ambitions, who peacefully departed. Jackson’s household was just one front in the territorial strug gles over slavery in the Southeast that would come to a head over the course of the first three decades of the nineteenth century. By circulating Lyncoya through his domestic space as an adopted captive— and by removing him from it— Jackson underscored the centrality of the plantation household in the contests between Southeast Indians and U.S. whites over the meaning and shape of race, family, servitude, and sovereignty. For Jackson, plantation space was to be solely and centrally the domain of white masculine authority. Southeast Indian elites fundamentally disagreed.

6 Defending “Civilization”

As the superintendent of Indian trade, Thomas Loraine McKenney ran the U.S. government’s factory system, the federal trade program that delivered subsidized manufactures to Indian people in exchange for hides and furs. On most days, he walked into the Office of Indian Trade and commenced a focused address of the paperwork required of his bureaucratic position. In the spring of 1818, however, unexpected visitors interrupted McKenney’s workday. Two members of the Baltimore Society of Friends arrived at his office accompanied by a young man. The Baltimoreans introduced their companion and explained his history: His name was James Lawrence McDonald, and he was a seventeen-year-old Choctaw Indian who had been housed and educated by members of their Quaker Indian Committee for the previous five years at the expense of the Office of the Secretary of War. The Friends relayed their hope that McKenney might have an interest in employing McDonald and procure for him “a good private family” with whom to reside. McKenney jumped at the opportunity. Within a matter of days he wrote to the two Friends confirming that he would not only hire McDonald but would also house the “Choctaw Youth” at Weston, the lavish one-hundredacre Georgetown estate where McKenney lived with his wife, Editha, his son, William, and the four people he enslaved. As McKenney remembered this history in his memoirs some thirty years later, he had even expressed his 

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willingness to “adopt the youth” as a member of his household. Regardless of whether McKenney used the language of adoption in 1818 to describe his new relationship with McDonald, he formally arranged with both the Baltimore Indian Committee and the U.S. secretary of war to keep the young man as his familial “charge.”  Thomas McKenney’s encounter with the Baltimore Quakers and the young McDonald caused him to consider the strategic value of incorporating Indian youths into his home. Over the ensuing twelve years, as Southeast Indian families continued to send children to live in the United States, McKenney added Creek (Muscogee and Yuchi) and Chickasaw boys to his roster of Indian “dependents.” Like other white men with Native youth in their homes, McKenney calculated that he, too, could benefit from his domestic arrangements with these individuals. “Civilization” programs such as those his trade system promoted were coming under fire, and McKenney calculated that by incorporating Indian youth into his home he might preserve— and potentially even expand upon—the initiatives that employed and empowered him. England’s and Spain’s defeats in the War of 1812, and Andrew Jackson’s corresponding wars in Southeast Indian country, had unleashed new criticisms of Jeffersonian Indian policies. With Indians’ transatlantic alliances profoundly attenuated in the new postwar era, planters and a burgeoning cohort of U.S. fur traders gained both the confidence and the political influence to demand that the federal government end its support for missionary and trade programs in Indian territories and, more importantly, even the temporary and provisionary territorial guarantees these programs made to Indian nations. Wielding the racial arguments that had shaped Lyncoya’s final years in Tennessee and that would ultimately dominate antebellum characterizations of Indian people, Southern planters in particular insisted that removal replace assimilation efforts, declaring that Indians exhibited traits that were fundamentally distinct from those of whites and were thus immune to the work of Jeffersonian philanthropists. As the superintendent of Indian trade, McKenney had staked his career on Indian “civilization.” By incorporating young Indian boys into his home— and positioning his domestic space as a kind of racial testing zone— McKenney hoped to solidify his connections with other pro“civilization” elites while proving to his political opponents that Native people could in fact become a part of a U.S. national family. McKenney

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would lose his battle as Andrew Jackson and his backers rose to prominence over the course of the 1820s and scotched McKenney’s visions for Indian territories, at least for the immediate future. McKenney’s efforts, however, expose the intertwined relationship between adoption and political, economic, and sexual governance in the postwar era. Just as crucially, his records also provide a glimpse into the experiences of the Southeast Indian boys who lived in McKenney’s home.

Superintendent of Indian Trade When Thomas Loraine McKenney took up his federal appointment in 1816, he knew very little of U.S.-Indian affairs. He came from a prominent Maryland Quaker family who had investments in mercantile commerce but appears to have had little to do with the Indian Committees sprouting up in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York. The Office of Indian Trade nonetheless appealed to McKenney because it offered a way out of an unpromising career. In the years preceding his rise to his federal position, he had co-owned a dry-goods store that yielded modest wages and marginal political opportunities. McKenney had grown up with considerable wealth and privilege in his father’s household before creditors eventually carried it away. Employment in the federal government offered an avenue to recover at least some of his early social and economic advantages. McKenney had positioned himself well for a career in federal ser vice. Like other Friends who broke rank with their religious society, McKenney departed from the pacifist policies and abolitionist stances of his fellow Quakers, serving for a short time in the Kent County militia during the War of 1812 and, at some point, deciding to own slaves. Between his stint in the militia and his federal appointment, he made bids for employment as secretary of the senate and accountant for the navy. McKenney did not receive either position, but President James Madison, whom McKenney had met during the war, soon offered him the position of superintendent of Indian trade. The job was far from lucrative, paying only $2,000 per year. Yet it doubled McKenney’s previous salary and generated powerful and prestigious political connections. Elated by his great fortune, McKenney called on his Christian god to assist him in his new career. Fusing providence and contract, he penned a prayer on the back of his appointment letter, pleading, “Almighty God! This day I have sworn faithfully and honestly, to discharge the duties

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of the Superintendent of Indian Trade—but as a man in his best estate is weak and helpless, always liable to err; and continually subject to the casualties which involve his good name, and his acutest interests, I do most honestly beseech thee to grant me in all my labors of the assistance of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ our Lord.” Despite the prolixity of McKenney’s appeal, providence could provide neither a background in international relations with Indian nations nor the experience of running a federal bureaucracy, both of which his superintendency required. Yet as political controversies buffeted the federal trade program McKenney had just been hired to oversee, he continued to invoke providence as he adjusted to his role in the federal government and absorbed the central principles underpinning the federal factory system. Indeed, he grew to see the federal trade program as deeply tied to Christian virtues and values, drawing upon Jefferson’s fictional associations of Indians with “premarket” economies to assert that the machinations of capitalism would ultimately lead Indian people into more fulfilling lives. Demonstrating the enduring incoherencies that supported this logic, he pointed to Indians’ historical trade ties with Europe to assert that through the strategic use of debt and sanctions, the U.S. government could forcefully— and finally— sever Indian communities from their transatlantic alliances and then transform them into a network of small-scale Christian farmers living within the confi nes of the United States. While McKenney considered the strategic purpose for the U.S. trade program to be short and simple, the history of the factory program was in fact long and complex. Its history— and the controversies surrounding it— set the stage for McKenney’s acquisition of Indian children over the years and these youths’ lengthy tenures in his home. The federal factory system was a trade program that initially provided manufactured goods at below-market rates to Indian people west of U.S. settlements, largely in exchange for animal skins and furs. Although it had been slow to get off the ground in the 1790s, by the time McKenney inherited the program in the spring of 1816 it had expanded considerably, accruing for itself a profound legacy. Located in the Department of War and developed in concert with Henry Knox’s “conciliatory” Indian policies, the network of trading posts that comprised the system aimed to battle Indians via “peaceful”—or nonmilitary—means. Established to draw Indians away from their European commercial allies and, over time, generate economic debt

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among Indian leaders, the trade initiative provided a mechanism through which government officials sought to force Indian people to cede their homelands. Inaugurated in 1795 under the direction of President George Washington, the foundational aim of the factory system was to use commerce to attach Indian people to the interests of the United States. Washington and his Federalist administration saw this centralized trade system as a means to circumscribe European commercial interests in Indian territories, restrict the predacious trade practices of private traders that frustrated U.S. attempts to build diplomatic relationships with Indian people, and, in so doing, increase Indian people’s reliance upon the federal government. U.S. representative William Vans Murray, an early advocate of the system, summarized much of the original ambition that underlay the program—to destroy European commerce in North America and secure Indians’ commercial relationships with the United States. As he told Congress, he saw “two objects” in the program. “The first was securing the Indian friendship by a supply of their wants; second, the supplanting of the British traders in their influence over the tribes.” He reminded his fellow congressmen that, “It was no uncommon thing for great companies, when they were apprehensive of what they called interlopers, to crush all competition by making a voluntary sacrifice of a few thousand pounds sterling. By underselling, on a large scale, for a time, and even a certain loss, they secured themselves in the future from competition.” If Murray highlighted the basic mechanics of the new federal program, his collaborators proffered both the economic and ethical reasons to support its implementation. Establishing trading posts in Indian territories was a more cost-effective way to disempower Indian people than extended military campaigns against them and their Eu ropean allies. Using trade to condition U.S.-Indian relations was also more humanitarian. As would McKenney, early proponents of the trade program conjured up images of “pre-capitalist” Indian hunting economies to argue that federally sponsored commerce would introduce capitalism—and hence “civilization”—to Indian people, even as it worked to draw Indians away from transatlantic commercial networks. Effectively summing up pro-factory philanthropy— and echoing the language of Henry Knox— Philadelphia congressman John Swanwick argued in 1796 that “we have hitherto pursued war at an expense of a million and a half of dollars nearly annually; let us now try the fruits of

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commerce, that beneficient power which cements and civilizes so many nations; barbarous till they become acquainted with its influence.” While proposals for a factory system arose as early as the Continental Congress, it was not until the end of the eighteenth century, as the U.S. government began to reorient its official Indian policy from “conquest” to “civilization,” that federal administrators began to prepare the way for the far-reaching trade program McKenney would eventually oversee. In the 1780s and 1790s treaty commissioners worked to gain approval for trading posts in the territories of prominent Indian tribes whose lands stood west of expanding U.S. colonial settlements, including the Wyandots at the Treaty of Fort McIntosh in 1785, Choctaws and Chickasaws at Hopewell in 1786, and Delaware, Shawnee, Ottawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomie, Miami, EelRiver, Kickapoo, and Kaskaskia people at Fort Greenville in 1795. This was not always difficult to do, particularly as European empires began to withdraw their trade alliances throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, leaving some Indian leaders with few options when it came to accessing trade goods. The placement of the first “experimental” factories in Creek and Cherokee lands in 1796 suggests that the politics of racial slavery dictated the inauguration of government-sponsored trade. Responding to the powerful Southeast Indian commercial connections that limited Southern slaveholders’ territorial expansion, President Washington opened government-run posts at Tellico, in what is now eastern Tennessee, and Coleraine, located at the northern edge of what was then Spanish Florida. Using trade incentives to draw Creek and Cherokee people away from commercial relations with Britain and Spain, Washington and his administration hoped to weaken the European resources of these Native communities. Already isolated from Indian resistance movements to the north by white settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee, Creek and Cherokee people would then presumably be left with no other option but to accommodate U.S. interests. Although Washington put the fledgling system in motion, it was Thomas Jefferson who expanded the breadth and reach of federal trade as part of his expanded “civilization” program, putting the factory program on the map. Taking advantage of Spanish and French commercial decline in the Mississippi River Valley after the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo and the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, he transformed a small initiative with two trading posts in the South to a network of government-run commercial stations, which together

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traced an arc across Indian lands from the Great Lakes region to the Gulf Coast. No longer feeling threatened by European commercial empires, Jefferson simultaneously recalibrated the system’s focus from subsidization to debt accumulation. An 1803 letter to the first governor of the U.S. Indiana Territory explicitly set out his ambitions for expanding the program. “[W]e shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among [Indians] run in debt,” he infamously wrote to William Henry Harrison, “because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off with a cession of lands.” While a concerted study of factory-induced cessions has yet to be written, historian Daniel H. Usner Jr. has shown that Jefferson’s plan proved devastatingly effective at several locations in Southeast Indian country. By the time McKenney took up his post in 1816, Creek leaders had paid off $10,000 in accumulated debt through a cession of land between the Oconee and Ocmulgee Rivers, while Choctaw leaders owed $7,500 to the United States. The work of managing the factory posts that ranged across western Indian lands and of battling disparate trade enemies from across the Atlantic world converged in a single room in a small, three-story brick building on M Street in Georgetown. There, the pursuits of capitalism and empire took on an olfactory quality, signaling the raw materials that McKenney’s logbooks would translate into numbers and figures. While awaiting shipment to western Indian territories, industrial blankets sewn by low-wage workers in English factories gave off their woolen scents, which mixed with the sweet and pungent smell of tobacco, presumably grown by slaves. As these odors lingered in the halls of the federal building, they mingled with the “exceptional smell” caused by skins piled high on the cellar floor. The tremendous odor of these animal products may have had much to do with changing economic conditions in Indian territories. As Indian men hunted greater numbers of deer, bison, and other wild game animals to fulfill financial obligations to the United States, they perhaps had less time and incentive to wait for pelts to finish curing before trading them. This would have left minimally processed hides undergoing the odiferous process of curing in close and cramped quarters. When McKenney first walked into the single room that made up his new place of employment he may very well have been struck by the smells emanating from the cellar below. Adapting to these pungent scents would be the

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least of his worries, however. Even as the factory system remained an active network of eight military-fortified trading posts in 1816, and was funded by a rather substantial budget, its star was fading. This added to the steep learning curve McKenney faced during his early years on M Street. Not only did he have to determine how to orchestrate federal trade in Indian territories, but he also had to figure out how to support the increasingly controversial program in the halls of Congress. McKenney’s work left him responsible for over a quarter of a million dollars in capital reserves to run trading houses at Green Bay, Chicago, and Prairie du Chien in the North; at Arrow Rock (previously Fort Osage) along the Mississippi River; and at Natchitoches, Fort Hawkins, Chickasaw Bluffs, and Fort St. Stephens in the South and Southwest. Through governmentappointed traders, or factors, residing at individual posts, McKenney thus intervened in numerous and diverse economies whose networks stretched across much of the eastern half of the continent, administering trade relations with—to name a few of the Indian societies whose economies fell within his purview— Northern Algonquian, Sauk, Meskwaki (or Fox), Caddo, Comanche, Taovayas, Tawakonis, Kichais, Quapaw, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Osage people. This meant he also competed with a wide range of non-Indian communities for Indian trade, including British-Canadian and burgeoning U.S. fur companies around the Great Lakes and in the Ohio country and, in one Indian agent’s words, “[h]ordes of hunters and licentious [private] traders” from the United States to the Southwest. These latter individuals fought with the federal factories for control over Indian trade and undermined Indians’ trade resources, “lavishly destroying the game,” in one federal commentator’s words, “killing buffalo for their tongues and tallow only.” With such diverse clients and ruthless competitors, McKenney had his work cut out for him. Some aspects of his job were simply bureaucratic, while others were more complicated and unpredictable. He handed his incoming and outgoing letters to office scribes, who painstakingly transcribed his nearly illegible handwriting into large bound volumes. He sent order forms to federal factors every fall to determine the goods that would draw Indian people into government trade. Over the winter he considered ways to acquire requested items for the best price and quality. And in the spring, he had to contend with the vagaries of sending manufactures west. Throughout these seasonal activities he had to assess the political and economic terrain that surrounded factory posts. Indeed, the superintendent of Indian trade was at times a de facto overseer

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of Indian affairs, answerable directly to the U.S. secretary of war. McKenney grew to embrace this aspect of his job more than all the others. Evincing Indians’ material needs and desires as consumers of industrial products, McKenney’s orders for manufactures included over 150 different types of cloth, as well as “blankets, guns, pipe[s] . . . knives, brooches, rings, toys, [and] spectacles,” saddles, gun powder, lead, kettles, coffee, axes, “tin cups, cowbells, maul rings, hoes, frying pans, arm bands, shirts, earbobs, silk socks, tinsel hatbands, jew’s-harps,” and, most crucially, wampum, the small beads that, when woven together, documented for many Indian people both political and spiritual values and their particular manifestations in international agreements involving trade, territory, and the parameters of political exchange. These items represented just a small sampling of what McKenney sent west. In the words of McKenney biographer Herman Viola, factory exports included “almost every thing except playing cards and alcohol,” those Euro-American manufactures that government officials labeled the currency of unscrupulous private traders because they were believed to support “uncivilized” behaviors such as gambling, debauchery, laziness, and violence. (As one factory trader condescended, playing cards “put bad notions into [Indians’] heads and make bad men among them that will cheat them out of their hunts and leave their wives and children naked.”) McKenney’s mercantile experience proved useful when it came to financing, ordering, and stocking supplies, but both his clients and his goals were new. Drawing Indian people into government factories required learning their consumer histories and recognizing their commercial savvy. McKenney initially failed to grasp this, requesting factory merchandise from U.S. companies— despite their higher price—in order to avoid supporting Britain’s manufacturers. Well versed in available industrial goods, Native buyers preferred the quality and appearance of British products and rarely traded for U.S.-made substitutes, making them more difficult for factors to unload. Even when McKenney bought the goods that better suited his coveted clientele, he had to manage a chaotic shipping process, unpredictable employees, fierce competitors, and both U.S. and foreign detractors. McKenney distributed orders in hundreds of oak containers on scores of horse-drawn wagons, boats, and keelboats to federal trade houses every spring, praying that factory merchandise would not be lost or delayed by storms or freezing temperatures. Once supplies arrived at their destinations, he had to do his best to manage factors’ relationships with their Indian clients, their contests

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with private U.S. and European traders, and their often tense relationships with federal Indian agents and government soldiers, who resented being responsible for the protection and preservation of factors and the goods they peddled. Meanwhile, factors themselves did not always store their acquisitions properly, damaging the valuable pelts that kept the system up and running. High temperatures also had deleterious effects on the animal skins transported to the East. A burgeoning network of steamboats often provided the quickest mode of transportation, yet the boats seldom offered sufficient room for airing and beating skins, a necessary process to stave off mold and mildew, insect damage, and rot. The eventual arrival of skins in the East finally put them under McKenney’s direct oversight. With the help of his office clerks and hired slaves, he sorted them by their potential sales price, identifying unsellable hides and furs from stacks of high, medium, and poor quality counterparts and then preparing them for sale. He then advertised his auctions in prominent U.S. newspapers, hoping to attract a crowd of purchasers. Auctions were likely nerve-racking events, as he was desperate to recuperate the value of the commodities he had sent into Indian country months before. For despite Murray’s early claims that the factory system should operate at a loss, Congress had since decided that the program was not to run on a deficit. Sales during McKenney’s first year of employment were lucrative; covering expenses, however, became increasingly difficult as decreasing fur qualities, combined with the economic downturn following the War of 1812, directly affected factory profits. Indeed, it soon became apparent to McKenney that the factory system Madison had appointed him to oversee was in a state of political and fiscal crisis. Just as the postwar years had led to a slump in sales, the trade system was barely recovering from the war itself. During the conflict, allied Indian and British troops had destroyed or overtaken five of the trading posts in the Ohio country and Great Lakes region, depleting the initiatives’ capital funds. Further compounding these financial losses was the halt in Indian trade caused by fighting between the United States, Great Britain, and Indian nations. The factory system’s precarious finances fueled its long-standing detractors. Vocal opponents argued that federally managed trade was too expensive and created an unfair monopoly over Indian commerce, hindering opportunity for private enterprise. Some further argued that private individuals

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could more efficiently handle trade than lumbering and inefficient bureaucracies. As Connecticut congressman Zephaniah Swift told Congress as early as 1796, he “disapproved of public bodies being concerned in trade.” Commerce, he felt, was “always managed better by individuals.” Because of the controversial nature of centralized federal trade with Indians, Congress never fully articulated a definitive administrative structure for the Office of Indian Trade. It remained a floating program under the unofficial oversight of the Office of the Secretary of War, with Congress approving factory funding for just one to two years at a time, and sometimes letting factory legislation expire altogether. During these intervals, only the fact that Congress needed to explicitly terminate the factory program kept it up and running by default. In many ways, Congress’s reticence when it came to funding the factory system fit with federal ambitions more broadly. Although the program enjoyed a heyday under President Jefferson’s watch, Jefferson never intended to make it a permanent mainstay of federal governance. The very point of the factory system was to eventually make itself obsolete. Like some of the factory system’s earliest advocates, Jefferson believed that once federally sponsored trade had accomplished its major aims in certain regions, private U.S. companies could take over, having by that time accrued enough capital to compete successfully with “foreign” interests. Federal trade was also supposed to force Indian people to assimilate themselves into a white population of U.S. citizens or move west of the Mississippi, making them cease to exist as specifically Indian consumers. As Jefferson told Harrison, through the process of creating debt among Indian people, U.S. “settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Mississippi.”  Fearing that his trade program would be deemed obsolete during the tenure of his appointment, McKenney began to emphasize the work it had yet to do. Assimilating Indian youth such as McDonald into his home became one way to display the “civilizing” power of his programs. In the years before James McDonald walked into his office, McKenney came to understand that safeguarding his job required that he become a political advocate for the government’s Indian trade network in particular, as well as for the broader “civilization” program of which it was a part. Likely due to the controversy over the factory system, President Madison withheld direct public support for it, leaving it up to lower cabinet officials to promote

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it. Given the popularity of Jeffersonian ideas concerning Indian “civilization,” as well as the liberal humanitarianism that had grown popu lar in Quaker society, it is safe to assume that McKenney had prior exposure to the discourses supporting Knox’s “conciliatory” programs. Yet he also had his own supervisors to look to as he learned to defend federal trade and Indian “civilization” programs, and, given growing capital losses after his arrival, his own qualifications to manage both effectively. Even if Madison kept quiet when it came to explicitly promoting the factory system, in his 1816 State of the Union address to Congress he urged representatives to “favor the resumption of the work of civilization” halted by the War of 1812. Meanwhile, Secretary of War William H. Crawford, McKenney’s immediate supervisor, directly argued that government-run factories would promote private property ownership among Indian people, including the individual ownership of land. Ignoring the history of Indian trade with Europe, Crawford argued that the market relations promoted by federal factors, along with the efforts of Indian agents, could “not fail to introduce among [Indians] distinct ideas of separate property.” Through a combined trade and aid program, agents could use gift giving and annuities to inspire Indians to participate in new economic practices. Then, by trading at federal posts, Indian people would subsequently learn the rudiments of capitalist exchange, priming the way for their eventual adoption of landed property ownership and male-headed agriculture. “The success of such an experiment,” Crawford urged, “requires the exercise of all the influence which the annual distribution of annuities and presents, aided by that which must flow from a judicious supply of all their wants, in exchange for those articles which the chase, and the increasing surplus of their stock of domestic animals, will enable them to procure.” Through this formulation, Crawford argued that the United States would “save” Indians from what he considered to be their imminent demise, while also making room for U.S. whites. “If the civilization of Indian tribes is considered an object of primary importance,” Crawford stressed, “and superior to that of rapidly extinguishing their titles, and settling their lands by the whites, the expediency of continuing the [trade] system now in operation . . . appears to be manifest.”  While drawing on the statements and arguments of his supervisors, McKenney ultimately formulated his own position supporting federal trade and Indian “civilization,” vaunting it to factors, federal administrators, legislators, and the burgeoning troops of Christian missionaries who began

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concerted operations in Indian territories in the wake of military conflict between Indian nations and the United States. In 1817, for example, he wrote to missionary Elias Cornelius connecting the factory system and other civilization programs with Jeffersonian characterizations of Indian populations and Christian beliefs about the human soul. “It is enough to know that Indians are Men,” McKenney argued, “that like ourselves they are susceptible of pleasure, and of pain—that they have souls; . . . that like us they must live forever; and that we have the power not only to enhance their happiness in this world, but in the next also; and by our councils, and our guidance, save souls that other wise must perish!” Elsewhere, he emphasized the mechanistic and technocratic side of the imperial program. In 1818 McKenney wrote to Crawford’s successor as secretary of war, John C. Calhoun, describing how a U.S. monopoly over Indian commercial transactions would allow the government to effect sanctions against Native people who refused to cooperate with federal policy. Rather than flexing its military muscles, the United States could use Indians’ increasing reliance upon U.S. manufactures to clear the way for white settlers invading Indian lands. “I believe a nation of savages, no matter how hostile their spirit, nor how war-loving they may be,” McKenney told his supervisor, “may be kept quiet at all times, in the exact proportion as they are made to depend on those, against whom they may indulge a spirit of hostility; for their commercial privileges.” Engendering dependency was a national security concern, McKenney insisted. “[T]he Government and the Peace and lives of our Frontier Citizens, are all deeply concerned in the question of regulating and Governing our Indian neighbors.” McKenney was clear, however, that he understood trade sanctions to be more than just tools of expansion; he argued that they were also in the best interests of “the Indians themselves.” Indians “being within our limits, are intitled [sic] to our protection, and to such improving systems as best tend to render their condition less distressing than it is.”  McKenney’s appeals reveal that he had come to share the bio-political vision of “civilization” that federal administrators had advanced since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Henry Knox. More specifically, he had come to develop his own bio-commercial view of how to organize imperial governance most successfully. What made him unique was his opportunistically dogged position that a federal trade monopoly and commercial dependency were the most effective policing mechanisms to ensure that human life across the continent was both managed and maximized. The factory program

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would foster human life by using the extension or retraction of trade as a means to ensure that Indians conformed to the spatial, familial, and economic arrangements that U.S. whites largely believed ensured population increase and broad-based human survival: private, male-headed, agrarian households living under centralized patriarchal authority. Transitioning Indians into this hierarchical political economy would maximize Indian reproduction, while supporting the well-being of whites by freeing additional lands for cultivation. To borrow language from Michel Foucault, McKenney presumed the role of the state (via its federal trade posts) was to “govern . . . men’s coexistence with one another.” Commerce helped delineate the right amount of space and subsistence to the white and Indian people compelled to share the North American continent. Thus factories ensured that white settlers and Indian communities could live and increase their populations side by side. As McKenney came to view trade as the policing mechanism to force Indian nations to engage in what he considered to be more productive social, economic, and diplomatic relationships with the United States, he began to envision a broad network of federally supported mission schools (both on and off Indian territory) as an auxiliary institution that would work alongside factories to regulate and discipline individual Indian bodies, particularly those of young children. Despite their centrality in Knox’s vision of U.S. Indian policy, mission schools up to that point had received even less congressional sponsorship than had the factory system: funding had been parceled out to select missionaries, but it was haphazard, piecemeal, and limited in geographical scope. McKenney believed that if he could convince Congress to provide financial resources for a combined trade and education initiative that was ambitious and far reaching, he could extend the U.S. regulatory grasp over greater numbers of Indian people, “bettering” their social, political, and environmental conditions while simultaneously protecting the interests of white settlers. Most importantly, such a program would galvanize his political influence. As McKenney began to formulate his interwoven trade and educational program, he imagined himself as the ideal technocrat to oversee its implementation. In supporting the further institutionalization of “civilization,” McKenney’s bio-commercial politics both consolidated and justified his bureaucratic power. Tying trade to education would force his bill’s detractors to deny the support of Indian “civilization” as they dismantled the factory system. As McKenney’s biographer

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notes in relation to McKenney’s opportunism, “What congressman would oppose benevolence and Christian charity?” Tennessee congressman Isaac Thomas, chairman of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, contacted McKenney shortly after Madison’s 1816 speech supporting “the work of civilization” to inquire whether McKenney had “a plan . . . best calculated to effect the humane object recommended to Congress.” McKenney most certainly did. He eagerly outlined his proposal for a new congressional bill that would approve funding for factory posts and mission schools, as well as for a new federal position to oversee them— one that had a significantly higher salary than his own. McKenney volunteered himself for the job. McKenney and his allies soon proposed a bill to Congress that, if approved, would add eight new factories to the eight trading houses already in operation to fund McKenney’s vision for a broad network of educational institutions as well as the managerial position to oversee this joint operation.

James McDonald and the Indian Civilization Bill When James McDonald walked into the Office of Indian Trade with his Quaker guardians in late March 1818, McKenney must have felt profoundly thankful for his good luck. To McKenney, the seventeen-year-old Indian scholar was living proof that the programs he hoped to establish could be effective. Having spent five years with the Quakers, McDonald had received extensive schooling in the United States, more than most young white men of his age. What better way to advance his ambitions than to advertise the “civilizational” successes of this young man? McDonald arrived at a particularly opportune moment. Even after his teaming up with other pro-“civilization” legislators and recruiting church groups and benevolent societies to his cause, McKenney’s bill had languished in Congress. Having leaned heavily on the U.S. debt economy himself to purchase the Weston estate he had been renting, McKenney’s political and financial future depended on legislative success. If passed, the bill would install him as one of the more powerful administrators in the federal capital, as well as help him pay off his hefty loan. McKenney thought his bill had stalled in Congress because his detractors doubted that Indians were racially capable of adopting missionary teachings. As he saw it, only those who denied Indians’ humanity could overturn

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legislation so philanthropic in orientation. To McDonald’s Quaker guardians Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott, he argued that McDonald’s presence in his home would convince his opponents once and for all that “civilization” programs worked. Indeed, he saw the young man’s educational accomplishments during his years with the Baltimore Friends as undeniable evidence that Indians could be taught to live like whites. McKenney insisted that rather than focusing its primary efforts on adults, the federal government had to target how children were raised, as youth proved more malleable when it came to missionary teachings. After coming of age in mission schools, Native pupils were in an ideal position to then pass along what they had learned to the next generation, efficiently replicating the teachings of white educators. With re spect to his plan for Indian “civilization,” McKenney told the two men the day after their initial meeting that “no better argument need be offered (even tho’ there were not thousands in addition) than that which a bare reference to [James McDonald] would demonstrate.” Both McKenney and McDonald’s Quaker hosts believed that McDonald had absorbed the “principles of civilization” and was primed to propagate them to other young people in his Choctaw homelands. Around twelve years old when he came to live under the Baltimore Quakers’ care, McDonald exhibited by the age of seventeen advanced skills in reading, writing, ciphering, and mathematics. His schooling had enabled him to take on a longterm apprenticeship in a Maryland dry-goods store as well as advanced coursework in “the Art of Mensuration & of Surveying, . . . Algebra & the Elements of Euclid,” “Mechanics & Astronomy,” and “Natural & Experimental Philosophy.” In transferring McDonald to McKenney’s care, the Baltimore Friends hoped to complete McDonald’s training before his eventual return to Choctaw country. “With care (endowed as he is with talents of the first order) we should hope that [McDonald] may not only prove useful to the Government and himself,” they told McKenney, “but eminently so to the Nation to which he belongs” as well as to “all the Surrounding Nations of the Country.” McDonald was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Indians’ potential for transformation. Formal institutions funded by the U.S. government could school Indians in far greater numbers, bringing more children into the U.S. social and commercial orbit. As McKenney wrote Tyson and Ellicott, “How would the stock of Human happiness be enlarged were his Brothers of the forest kindly taken by the hand and led into the enjoyment of those intellectual resources which a good Providence has

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opened in his mind! And can the successful result of any plan of liberal character, and suited to the object be doubted?” McDonald’s presence in McKenney’s home also generated immediate financial and political benefits for the superintendent. The Office of the Secretary of War provided $330 a year to cover McDonald’s clothing, schooling, and incidental expenses. Meanwhile, McKenney made important allies with the Baltimore Quakers, who had tried for some time to place McDonald in a federal position in Washington. In early 1818 Philip E. Thomas, a prominent member of the Baltimore Indian Committee, contacted John C. Calhoun twice over the course of as many months requesting that Calhoun “examine” and employ the young man whom—under the auspices of former Secretary of War John Armstrong— Calhoun’s office had sponsored since 1813. With no reply forthcoming, the committee fi nally approached Calhoun unannounced. Uninterested in hiring McDonald himself, and well aware of McKenney’s zeal for educating Indian youth, Calhoun subsequently sent Tyson, Ellicott, and McDonald to the Office of Indian Trade with a written request that McKenney find suitable work for the young man. While funding from the Department of War for James McDonald’s care would help McKenney navigate his immediate financial considerations, allies such as the Quakers could prove an important source of public advocacy for McKenney’s political ambitions. As part of a network of Christian benevolent societies that emerged out of the Second Great Awakening of the late eighteenth century, Quakers had proceeded apace with their work in Indian country in the years following the War of 1812. Winning the war empowered the U.S. government to stake its claim more confidently over Indian territories, allowing Madison’s and Monroe’s administrations to focus on expanding U.S. infrastructural resources into Indian country, including, in the words of geographer D. W. Meinig, “a set of major highways radiating from the national capital to the national frontiers.”  These new transportation networks facilitated the movement of federal troops and bound western lands more closely with eastern markets and settlements. In light of these developments, Christian evangelists began to imagine the possibility of a continental missionary presence and, through unprecedented organizing campaigns, raised money and popular support to accomplish their goals. McKenney was eager to capitalize on their influence to help with congressional approval of his trade and educational program and would have been well aware that in working to officially fuse trade

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and education into a complementary system of governance he would formally institutionalize an alliance with the growing missionary power block over the long term. In addition to pleasing his Quaker guests in 1818, McKenney’s new relationship with James McDonald also promised to garner the attention of other mission societies, including members of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a Boston-based network of Presbyterians and Congregationalists whose modest aim was nothing short of “civilizing” non-European people throughout the globe. McKenney deeply admired the work of the influential American Board in general and of Cyrus Kingsbury, who served as head of the missionaries, in par ticu lar. In 1816 Kingsbury had applied for and received assistance from Secretary of War Crawford for work with Cherokee youth. Crawford had granted only modest support: help with the erection of “a comfortable school-house” and instructors’ lodgings, in addition to “two ploughs, six hoes, and as many axes,” and “half a dozen spinning-wheels.” This nonetheless provided Kingsbury with the startup funds to build the Brainerd School on Chickamauga Creek in the Cherokee Nation. By the following year, the ABCFM school had fifty acres planted, which “surrounded a mission house, schoolhouse, dining hall, kitchen, gristmill, sawmill, barn, stable and five long dormitories,” the last of which housed forty-seven young people between the ages of six and eighteen. Schooling at Brainerd was oriented around the strenuous work that was supposed to redirect Indian people’s attentions away from the transatlantic fur trade and toward the preindustrial forms of agrarianism that exemplified Jefferson’s pastoral vision. In addition to providing a rudimentary education in literacy, mission educators expected Native pupils to perform manual labors. Indian boys were to work in the fields or tend to the animals on the mission farm attached to Brainerd, as well as to receive instruction in mechanical trades; young girls, on the other hand, were to “spin and weave, to knit and to sew, or to take their turns in waiting upon the table or serving in the kitchen.” Kingsbury was not the first to receive federal funding for a mission school or to “teach” physically arduous labor. What thrilled McKenney, however, were Kingsbury’s reports to Secretary of War Calhoun outlining Brainerd’s adherence to an increasingly popular educational model formulated by English Quaker Joseph Lancaster. Echoing McKenney’s bio-political logics for the factory system, and indeed informed by work in actual industrial

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factories, Lancaster, whom literary scholar Patricia Crain describes as “[p]rofligate, overweight, paranoid, probably a sadist, possibly a pedophile, halfaltruist, half self-promoting snake-oil salesman,” had devised a system that “promised wholesale acculturation and social control at discount prices.” Claiming to have discovered a highly efficient model for educating landless and potentially unruly English working-class subjects, Lancaster promoted a “monitorial” pedagogy that emphasized a hierarchical and “panoptical” classroom organization utilizing inexpensive learning technologies. Lancasterian classrooms were to be led by single teachers who focused their energies on older students. These students in turn both supervised and educated their juniors, while the “absent teacher” monitored and observed these lessons. Large posters fixed to walls, along with oversized books and “telegraphic” gadgets (“signs with a series of codes on them, giving commands”), minimized expenses by incorporating a large number of students into a kind of “knowledge machine”: large-scale visual aids were supposed to interpolate youths into an esoteric set of teachings and behavioral codes unknown to the world outside of the classroom. Students were to learn how to write on large tables covered with sand, rather than with pencils and paper. Not only could these writing surfaces be easily reused, but they also eliminated the possibility for literary interiority, a luxury that white elites believed could only be entrusted to white middle- and upper-class subjects. Kingsbury did not, in fact, adhere very strictly to Lancaster’s program. He was more committed to Indians’ vocational training than to their acquisition of English language and literacy skills. In fact, Kingsbury seems to have envisioned Indians as second-class citizens (at best) who would ultimately serve as manual laborers to whites, leading the American Board missionary to eventually scrap almost all literacy training and, in some cases, even bind students out as apprentices to local white craftsmen. But having received federal money, Kingsbury was required to outline his “present mode of teaching” and therefore stressed his adherence to the newly popular Lancasterian pedagogy. These reports aligned with McKenney’s interest in efficient regulatory regimes and his desire to incorporate Indians into U.S. economic systems and social structures through trade and missionary education. While there is no evidence directly linking McKenney’s adoption of McDonald with his efforts to court American Board missionaries, his actions would certainly have garnered the attention of the evangelical society.

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Just before McDonald arrived at the Office of Indian Trade, those within the orbit of the ABCFM themselves began to adopt youth into their own homes and families. Elias Cornelius, a prominent member of the American Board, orchestrated several of these adoptions in the late 1810s. In 1817 he placed a young Osage girl captured by Cherokee warriors with Lydia Carter, a sympathetic widow of a prominent Natchez planter. Shortly thereafter Cornelius relocated the young girl—whom he named Lydia Carter in honor of her first white caretaker—to Brainerd. At Brainerd, Cornelius reported, “the missionaries would bring her up as their own child.” Indeed, after Carter arrived at the school, Reverend William Chamberlain and his wife, a mission couple stationed there, made good on Cornelius’s word. “They received her into their family, and adopted her, as their own child. She was taught to call them father, and mother, and to feel towards them as such; while they addressed her as their daughter— and as the sister of another little daughter whom they had.” Cornelius soon realized that Carter’s younger brother had also been captured by Cherokees and then sold to a white man, evidently as a slave. With the help of a young Indian man, whom Cornelius identified as “John Ross,” Cornelius “redeemed” the boy and likewise brought him to Brainerd. In his recollection of these events, Cornelius indicated that, once at the school, Carter’s brother was received as his sister had been: “By the missionaries he was named John Osage Ross, in honor of his kind deliverer. He was adopted by Mr. Hoyt, as Lydia had been by Mr. Chamberlain, and was given to God in baptism on the 12th of December 1819.” Adoption for American Board missionaries did not always have to be quite so literal. While some missionaries chose to adopt young women and men into their homes, Brainerd educators more broadly framed their relationships with all Indian youths at the mission school through kin-based language. ABCFM educators called the Brainerd community their “mission family,” positioning themselves as adoptive guardians of the children within their institution. Although it was not until 1822 that Cornelius published his full account of what he framed as Carter’s and Ross’s “redemption” from barbaric Indians and opportunistic white enslavers, McKenney was a close correspondent of the ABCFM missionaries, and had even entertained the likes of Cornelius at Weston just prior to the latter’s encounters with the young Osage children. Not long after Cornelius’s visit, McKenney was apprised of the American Board’s efforts to place Carter in U.S. families. In 1818 the United States brokered a peace between Osages and Cherokees, the terms of which guaran-

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teed the return of captives—including Lydia Carter—who had been taken during conflicts between the two nations. Cyrus Kingsbury reached out to McKenney for the superintendent’s help to keep Lydia Carter with her missionary adopters. McKenney had additional opportunities to be reminded of the ABCFM’s relationship with Carter. To promote his “civilization” legislation, McKenney had been in touch with Samuel Worcester, another prominent American Board figure, as recently as March 1818, just under a month prior to McDonald’s arrival at the Office of Indian Trade on M Street. Worcester claimed he did not have time to help McKenney at that moment, but sent him ten copies of The Missionary Herald, the ABCFM’s newsletter. McKenney subsequently forwarded these to Henry Southard, chair of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, for “such use of them as may best promote the success” of the Indian Civilization Bill Southard and McKenney had already submitted to Congress. The February issue of the newsletter included an article by Cornelius relaying the missionary organization’s encounters with the “Osage captive” and the Natchez widow. Perhaps by imitating the American Board’s adoptive missions in Indian country, the superintendent adopted James McDonald—at least in part—to flag his sympathies with their broader project. McKenney was certainly eager to position himself as an unflagging sponsor of mission initiatives, and adopting Indians would only advance this position. Indeed, by the late 1810s adopting Indians had become rather common among U.S. whites seeking to prove their investments in Indian affairs. American Board missionaries, Indian agents, Quakers, and even a bellicose Southern general had all incorporated Indian children into their homes by this point—advertising their actions wherever possible—while others had announced their eagerness to join in this practice. In an 1817 circular, members of the Kentucky Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Heathen even appealed to government officials, including McKenney, to persuade Indians to relinquish their children to the society’s care. Never one to be left behind when it came to “civilization” efforts among Indian people, McKenney made sure to have at least one Indian youth of his own. McKenney’s adoption of McDonald failed to advance the Indian Civilization Bill, which the House tabled on April 8, 1818, just over a week after McKenney made arrangements with the Quakers to take McDonald and only five days before McDonald moved into Weston. But McKenney resubmitted his proposal in the next congressional session and, on his personal

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stationery, called upon his missionary troops for their assistance in its ratification. The Baltimore Quaker Indian Committee responded, as did the Indian Committees of the Society of Friends in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Virginia, sending petitions to their congressional representatives in support of the initiative. Philadelphia’s First Baptist Church and Congregation, the Mississippi Baptist Association, and the Blue River Baptist Association of Indiana did the same. These mission organizations undoubtedly acted according to their own interests, but McKenney’s work with McDonald could not have hurt his reputation among Christian evangelists. Congress gutted McKenney’s bill, keeping the trade program separate from a national schooling system, but it nonetheless allotted a modest start-up schooling fund of $10,000 a year. While McKenney did not get his coveted bureaucratic position, his efforts made him an influential advocate of Indian “civilization” in the United States. With James McDonald in his home, he could prove to both missionaries and administrators— and even a growing number of Southeast Indian elites who visited him in Georgetown—his unflagging support for the “softer” side of U.S. imperialism.

Apprenticeship or Kinship? In his memoirs—published over twenty years after James McDonald moved on from McKenney’s Georgetown mansion—McKenney argued that McDonald was treated like white kin. McKenney wrote that he made “no distinction between [McDonald] and [his] son, in dress or attentions.” Like McKenney’s only child, William, McDonald played on the Weston grounds “in the pastimes of youth,” “had a horse at his ser vice, when he chose to ride,” sat with the McKenneys “in the coach,” attended church with the family, and went on visits with the McKenneys to see friends and “other social relations,” “whether in or out of Washington.” If this were the case, it is also likely that McDonald was waited upon by McKenney’s slaves, who served him food, drove him around the nation’s capital, cleaned his room, and washed his clothes. Yet even as McKenney asserted in his memoirs that he treated McDonald as he would his own child, his text raises flags that suggest that McDonald did not fully access the forms of intimacy or the economic practices that articulated white nuclear kinship arrangements. In a passing description,

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McKenney’s memoirs reveal that McDonald slept in quarters in a separate wing from the rest of the family, perhaps in closer proximity to the men and women McKenney enslaved than to McKenney’s wife, Editha, and their son. McDonald also did not enjoy the full economic privileges extended to white ancestral descendants. McKenney housed and educated McDonald using annual funds from the Office of the Secretary of War, not from his own salary. When the young man eventually departed from Weston, there is no evidence that McKenney continued to support him. There was never any talk of inheritance or property rights, or of McDonald’s eventual return to the McKenney household for holidays or family events. In many ways, McDonald’s position in McKenney’s home was more that of an apprentice than of kin. He was at Weston for further training, not to become a permanent member of McKenney’s family. McDonald’s life under McKenney’s guardianship reflected the superintendent’s broader ambitions with respect to Indian people. Under McKenney’s tutelage, McDonald was supposed to mirror the behaviors of elite white society while maintaining his status as an “Indian,” a marked subject who would always stand apart from his elite white mentors and peers. To borrow the language of cultural critic Homi Bhabha, McKenney desired McDonald to be “a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.” Or, put another way, “Almost the same, but not white.” McDonald did not receive the Lancasterian technical educations McKenney hoped to impart to Indian youths more generally. He worked at the Office of Indian Trade with McKenney for a while, until he revealed to his guardian that he found scrivener’s duties rather dull. McKenney then provided the young man with a personal “preceptor,” or tutor, who taught him Latin, Greek, and mathematics. Yet McDonald’s exposure to an elite U.S. education still supported McKenney’s initiatives promoting Indian “civilization.” That McDonald demonstrated an aptitude for and interest in advanced schooling must have been particularly pleasing to the superintendent, providing him with ample “proof” of Indian assimilability into the U.S. body politic. How McDonald himself felt about his time in McKenney’s home remains nearly impossible to ascertain. McDonald stated his appreciation of some of the schooling opportunities McKenney afforded him. With the Quakers, he had found the twenty months he worked in a dry-goods store “light and trivial compared with that . . . I might have received at School.” He may have also developed some fondness for McKenney and his family. In a letter

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to McKenney in April 1826, McDonald lamented the fact that the everstruggling superintendent had to finally put up the Weston estate for rent. “That is a spot the most dearly cherished in my memory of all that I have ever seen, or ever expect to see,” he told his former guardian. He sent his warm regards “to Mrs. McKenney, as also to William.” Yet by the time McDonald wrote his letter, his and McKenney’s relationship was strained and McDonald may have been merely fulfi lling formulaic pleasantries in his correspondence to the man who by then served as the first superintendent of the newly formed Bureau of Indian Affairs, an official subdepartment of the U.S. Department of War created to oversee U.S.-Indian relations after the demise of the Office of Indian Trade. As a result, McDonald was acutely aware that McKenney would have the power to influence U.S. relations with the Choctaw Nation. Even if McDonald did find some benefits with regard to his experiences in the McKenney household, he still expressed a longing for the Choctaw world he had left behind. When Silas Dinsmoor left him in the capital city in 1813, McDonald was “under the impression” that he would return to the lower Mississippi Valley with Dinsmoor “in 12 or 18 months.” Likely due to the fact that Dinsmoor was terminated from his position as Indian agent to the Choctaw Nation, nobody came for McDonald and the young man eventually settled himself to the idea of life with his Eastern hosts. By 1819 McKenney and Secretary of War Calhoun both envisioned their young pupil in a professional career in the United States. Calhoun saw him as an editor of “a paper” or a doctor and McKenney hoped to place McDonald in a profession involving, in McDonald’s words, “Law, Physic, or Divinity.” While this may have suited McDonald more than his earlier stint in mercantile employment, his first desire was to return to his Choctaw family. When McKenney initially expressed his hopes that McDonald continue his formal education in pursuit of an elite profession, McDonald expressed surprise because “[e]ither course was so opposite to any thing [he] had ever entertained an idea of following” and dismay that his training for these careers would prevent him from returning home. “I did not say anything,” McDonald explained of his initial reaction to their suggestions, “under the impression that it was considered inexpedient as yet to send me home, and that I was permitted to go to school, because I could do no better whilst here.” Yet when McKenney asked McDonald to make a decision in 1819, McDonald “decline[d] choosing the Study of either of the Learned Professions” so he could be with his Choctaw community. “It might be that after a

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sight once more of my country & of my Friends, (whom I feel as if I must see again) I might so far divest myself of Family attachments & recollections, as to return, and turn my eyes to an honourable profession with pleasure.” McDonald’s deepest hope was to resume the life he had known in the Pearl River Valley. He most wanted to “return to a Farm”—perhaps his mother’s— and, if he felt that he could relinquish his allegiances to those U.S. whites who had supported him, this is exactly what he would do. “I have been raised on a Farm,” he declared to McKenney. “I expected to return from the Federal City to a Farm. I have a partiality for a Farmer’s life, and did I believe my choice unconnected with the interests of others, I might probably give preference” to this option. However, his experiences in the East had made him feel bound to the federal government as well as the future of his own people. Given this, “The course upon which I look with most pleasure and in which, in my opinion, I could best return the obligation I am under to the Government,” he wrote, “is comprised in an Agency under the Govt. in the West.” Perhaps this would help him meet his “ambition to distinguish” himself and be “useful.” He held “a desire” to influence the lives of other young Native people such as himself. As he put it, he wanted “to free the character of educated Indian youth . . . of a proneness to relapse into Savagism,” adding rather poignantly, that he wanted to do this work “with some degree of Justice cast upon it.” Suggesting that his own trajectory had lacked this “Justice,” McDonald wanted to dedicate his efforts to the Native children who followed in his footsteps. While McDonald diplomatically refrained from detailing the various forms of injustice he experienced, Dinsmoor’s abandonment of him in the capital city, where he was compelled to live far from his family and extended community relations, would have certainly contributed to feelings of mistreatment. In the years that followed McDonald’s time with the Baltimore Quakers, McKenney’s own perceptions of McDonald may have further exacerbated the young man’s feelings of loneliness and isolation during his long tenure away from the lower Mississippi Valley. Throughout his writings, McKenney exoticized McDonald, emphasizing what he saw as the young man’s differences from whites, even as he highlighted McDonald’s assimilability into white society. His 1818 statement to the Quakers in which he described McDonald as “an exotic” putting forth “promising fruits” hardly attested to respectful treatment on the part of the superintendent. McKenney described McDonald as a foreign plant in a nursery that thrived under new physical conditions, as if he were the subject of a scientific experiment rather

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than a human being with his own unique history and a full range of sentient emotions. Later that same year, McKenney wrote to Calhoun, infantilizing the then seventeen-year-old McDonald by referring to him as “our little Indian.” In his 1840s memoirs McKenney also fetishized McDonald’s physical appearance and gestures. Remembering McDonald’s presence in his home, McKenney described the young man’s “uncommon beauty” and referred to McDonald’s “nature” as “graceful and captivating.” Elaborating, McKenney wrote, “His motions were all harmony. Whether he walked, or ran, or sat down, or rose up, it was all with a manner so unrestrained and easy, as might have led a stranger to suppose he had been taught by the most experienced posture-masters.” McKenney’s focus on McDonald’s intellectual capacities and physical attributes may have been discomforting for the young man, particularly as they may have suggested more aggressive physical desires. On the one hand, McKenney’s language reflects popular nineteenth-century frames of reference. Describing McDonald as an exotic flower or fruiting tree in the 1810s fit with a broader Jeffersonian narrative emphasizing Indians’ adaptability to multiple environments, while McKenney’s reference to his seventeenyear-old ward as a “ little Indian” was consonant with popular U.S. portrayals of Indians as enduringly childlike—particularly when it came to their relationships with U.S. whites. By the time McKenney wrote his memoirs in the 1840s, romantic discourse concerning Indians’ “inherently” symbiotic relationships with the natural world had come to dominate depictions of them. McKenney’s descriptions of McDonald’s physicality reflected the trope of the “noble savage” whose manliness—for this character was almost always male—was unfettered by the feminizing encumbrances of metropolitan society. Yet even as these narratives reflected white fantasies concerning Indian identity, they nonetheless suggest an intense scrutiny of McDonald’s behavior, raising questions about McKenney’s own. As the study of Dinsmoor’s and Jackson’s households has made clear, the prerogatives of white men—particularly white male heads of households— over those deemed their household dependents was considerable. As the patriarchs of their households, they had authority over their domestic space, allowing them to make decisions about the lives of the individuals living therein, including their sexual experiences. While there were legal protections in place regarding sexual access to white children, patriarchs owned their wives in coverture, giving them legal license to sexually possess their

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wives’ bodies whenever they saw fit. For those such as McKenney who held black men and women in bondage, the law also gave them unfettered access to enslaved people’s bodies. Indeed, the law did not recognize the enslaved as owning their own personhood—they were the possessions of masters— and, as a result, slaveholders frequently flexed their absolute legal control over the individuals they enslaved through rape and other forms of physical interventions into black people’s reproductive lives, including forced pairings with other slaves and the separations of enslaved couples and families. In the case of sexual assault, most accounts have focused on white slaveholders’ and overseers’ predation of black women, often made evident through “mixed race” children and hypersexualized characterizations of black women’s bodies, not to mention the narratives of formerly enslaved people themselves. As former slave Harriet Jacobs poignantly wrote, “No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery. The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.” In all likelihood, however, enslaved men too found themselves forced to confront white men’s sexual advances. Literary scholar Saidiya Hartman writes that “enslaved men were no less vulnerable to the wanton abuses of their owners, although the extent of their sexual exploitation will probably never be known.” There is ample evidence that American Indians also experienced sexual assault at the hands of white men, albeit not always under the purview of patriarchal households. Since the British colonial era, white men traveling in Indian country had ubiquitously predated upon the Native women they encountered; meanwhile, indentured Indian servants would have been subject to advances similar to those experienced by people of African descent living in white homes with the same lack of substantive legal protections. Historian Sharon Block argues that “[b]oth African American and Native American women were far more likely than white women to be victims of sadistic and horrific sexual violence that extended far beyond desires for sexual satisfaction into a purposeful lesson about their cultural groups’ degraded status.” While there is no evidence that those who incorporated Native youth into their homes in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century sexually abused these children, there is considerable documentation of sexual predation on the part of white adults against American Indian girls and boys during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century with the advent of Indian residential schools. Sexual violence in these spaces

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was ubiquitous, a reality that had enduring effects on generations of boarding school survivors. While turn-of-the-century residential schools had their own distinctive features that differed from earlier adoption scenarios, nineteenth-century adopters shared certain power relationships with those who ran them. Namely, they were the adults overseeing Native children’s care within white-supremacist spaces; both groups thought it was their right to intervene in these children’s social and sexual lives and, in turn, to assimilate them into the U.S. political body. Thus despite the absence of records explicitly detailing sexual assault, the possibility that nineteenthcentury patriarchs with Indian boys in their care wielded their power by means of sexual assault can not be ruled out. While hardly yielding any conclusive information about McKenney’s sexual behaviors or proclivities, McKenney’s writings concerning McDonald, combined with a close examination of his descriptions of Ben, one of the men he enslaved, are suggestive. McKenney traveled extensively with Ben during an 1827 “tour” of Indian lands in the Great Lakes region and the Southeast while serving as superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He did so under the auspices of determining whether or not conditions in Indian country merited his support of the Indian removal policies then coming into vogue among Southern political elites such as Andrew Jackson. Shortly after returning home to Georgetown, McKenney published his “findings”— as well as his experiences traveling with his enslaved servant—in a lengthy volume titled Sketches of a Tour of the Lakes, of the Character and Customs of the Chippeway Indians, and of Incidents Connected with the Treaty of Fond du Lac. Throughout McKenney’s narrative of his travels, Ben plays a prominent role, with McKenney portraying his “servant” as a timid and unintelligent man who fears Indians and the natural environment, a move that rather transparently showcases McKenney’s own masculine prowess and intellect. Yet by positioning himself as Ben’s overseer and caretaker (when it is in fact Ben who is caring for McKenney’s needs throughout their travels), McKenney simultaneously implies a certain intimacy between himself and the man he enslaves. After several pages describing their endless hours alone in tight quarters and intimate spaces such as stagecoaches and bedrooms, McKenney narrates what can be read as a veiled scene of sexual desire. Using sexualized language, McKenney describes his explorations of cavernous passages behind Niagara Falls while Ben, fearful of the dark and treacherous space, remains outside. “[A] gust of spray” forces McKenney to retreat

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from his explorations and he emerges “wringing wet” from behind the power ful cataract. Catching sight of McKenney “issue from the mist that had enveloped” him, Ben flees the scene, “till he reached the tower [nearby], when entering it he stood to get breath.” McKenney makes hot pursuit, following Ben until he catches him. “When I overtook him,” McKenney recalled, “I found him holding on to the part of the building, and looking back over his shoulder, as if doubtful whether I was safe or whether it was my sprite that he had seen issuing forth from the mist; but on recognizing me he exclaimed, with hurried and panting breath, but with deep emphasis: ‘Sir, I do hold this to be a most dangerous place!’ ” Between McKenney’s sexual imagery involving cavernous rocks, a spewing waterfall, and an erect tower and his assertion that Ben found the location extreme in its danger, it is possible to read this scene as a sexual fantasy involving McKenney’s conquest of the man he enslaves. Proving that sexual assault took place within the “private” confines of white men’s homes is in many instances difficult and, in McKenney’s case, impossible. White men flaunted their sexual authority over domestic “dependents,” but most stopped short when it came to bragging about their exploits—at least in print. Neither Ben nor McDonald left records detailing their lives in McKenney’s care, leaving their intimate experiences with McKenney largely unaccounted for. But, as was the case with all of the slaveholding men who brought Indian children home, McKenney occupied a position that granted him the power to access the bodies of black and Indian people within his household and the belief that it was his right to do so.

From “Civilization” to Removal By the time McKenney took his “tour” of the Great Lakes and Southeast Indian territories in 1827, several years had passed since his early days in Indian trade— and much had changed. James McDonald had left Weston for legal schooling in Ohio. Over eight hundred Indian youth attended twentyone mission schools stretching across western Indian territories, eighteen of which emerged directly after the passage of McKenney’s 1819 Indian Civilization Bill. And in 1822 McKenney had lost his post as superintendent of the Office of Indian Trade after private traders and fur companies— galvanized by the efforts of Ramsay Crooks of John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company— effectively rallied their congressional representatives to

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abolish the federal factory program. Despite attacks on his personal character and qualifications, McKenney weathered this storm, at least in the short term. Supporting Calhoun’s candidacy for the presidency during a two-year period of unemployment, McKenney accrued enough political capital to land himself the superintendency of the new Bureau of Indian Affairs, a position within the Department of War that McKenney himself had envisioned and proposed as early as 1818. As McKenney worked under his new title, he recalibrated his political posture. Savvy to the cultural winds surrounding him, he was aware that his calls for “civilizing” Indians east of the Mississippi had become controversial for anyone wanting a federal appointment as Jacksonian politics came to the fore. McKenney shied away from Jackson’s stance that Indians were not racially compatible with U.S. social, political, and economic values, but he did adjust his position on removal. He now argued that since whites proved hopelessly hostile toward Indian people— even, if not especially, those choosing to adopt aspects of white society—relocating Indians to lands west of the Mississippi was the only way to ensure Indians could survive while learning the behaviors that were supposed to save them from “extinction.” Even as McKenney made these personal and political adaptations, he continued incorporating young Indian men into his home. Over the course of the 1820s, a number of Southeast Indian elites came to see his home as an important location to place their sons, particularly as removal campaigns began to build. In 1824 the bicultural Chickasaw chief Levi Colbert made a trip to Washington with his son Dougherty, leaving the young man with McKenney “to be educated.” The younger Colbert spent two years in McKenney’s family under the superintendent’s supervision. McKenney sent Colbert home to his father in April 1827 with an education suitable for a future career in land surveying, along with a letter of advice on how to navigate “the breasts of the wicked.” McKenney’s 1827 “tour” of Indian country also generated new adoption opportunities. While he was in Creek territory, Yuchi chief Yoholo Micco requested that McKenney bring a nephew, a ten-year-old boy named Arbor, as well as William Barnard, a thirteen-year-old boy, back to Georgetown for schooling. Little is known about these young men’s tenures with McKenney, but if their trip home with him is any indication of future events, their life within his household was bleak. Although the superintendent had promised “the parents & friends of these boys” that he “would see to their

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education and good treatment,” on the trip east, McKenney took pleasure in an opportunity to experiment with popular beliefs that Native people were more intuitive and instinctive than whites in their relationship to land. As he relayed in his memoirs, when Arbor wanted to return home to his Creek relatives, McKenney had Ben take the little boy out of their carriage and place him on the ground to see which way he ran, before snatching him back up and returning him to his seat. McKenney’s disturbing account of his response to Arbor’s resistance to his separation from his family and community is worth retelling in full: I thought I would test the self-relying feeling which I had often heard attributed to Indians, even of this tender age, as also their trust in their instinct. I knew [Arbor] could have no knowledge of the way he had come, for he, and William, and Ben, had occupied the front seat of the stage, and had travelled backwards. I called to the driver, requesting him to stop. He did so. This was scarcely said, before the little fellow, who had learned some English at the missionary school, seized his bundle, and was, in a twinkling, out at the side of the stage, and going down over one of the fore-wheels; when, seeing him determined to go, I told Ben to reach out and take him in. He was inconsolable, and remained so till we reached Augusta, in Georgia.

After ordering Ben to wash and re-dress the young men once they reached Augusta “in a very handsome suit of clothes,” McKenney remarked, “[a] couple of prettier boys could be found nowhere.” There are no sources revealing how Arbor, Barnard, or Ben felt about these events, but they no doubt proved traumatic for the young children and for an enslaved man whose own opportunities to flee for freedom— and perhaps for kin and community, too—would be similarly thwarted. One might imagine that McKenney would be more careful in his treatment of young men with prominent diplomatic ties. But his interactions with Barnard and Arbor paralleled his desired political relationships with these children’s Native guardians, as well as with their Native nations more broadly. Like Southern slaveholders and prominent Northern politicians, including then-president John Quincy Adams, McKenney was threatened by the actions of leading Southeast Indian slaveholders, who were rapidly growing in political power and influence. Cherokee elites such as John Ridge, John Ross, and Joseph Vann were particularly vexing. The same year as McKenney’s

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fact-finding “tour” through the South, they established a national constitution that attested to Cherokee national sovereignty as well as their rights as planters, unequivocally stating the Cherokee Nation’s independent status on ancestral homelands while institutionalizing racial slavery and legitimating private property relationships within the confines of their territories. They were also building a national capital that would host a centralized governing body prepared to thwart future land cessions and support planters’ propertied privileges in land and slaves. Racial slavery—and the social and financial prestige it generated—was rapidly becoming a means to counter the dependent and servile status that federal administrators, from the most militaristic to the most “conciliatory” in orientation, demanded of Indian people, as well as to create a great deal of individual wealth within a subsection of Cherokee society. This emerging cohort understood these interwoven realities and took steps to ensure they were incorporated into the very fabric of Cherokee governance. As McKenney implied in a letter to Lee Compere, a missionary working at Withington Station in Creek country, whites were supposed to adopt Indians and “civilize” them into subordination; Indians were not supposed to adopt liberal governance for themselves and assert their autonomy from white patriarchy in the United States. In response to Creeks who allied themselves with Cherokee elites to resist removal, McKenney announced, “I know better than they— and will not spend my time with a parcel of people who let such boys as Ridge and Vann lead them by the nose. I will say what is to be done; and it shall be done. And time will come that will show that I am their true friend . . . I will yet make the Creeks a great people, but they shall mind me.” Characterizing Creeks as overly susceptible to Cherokee leaders’ influences rather than as informed political actors carefully considering the alliances and strategies that would support their national independence, McKenney made clear that his own support of Creek people was contingent on their recognition of his paternal authority. Leaders of the Creek Nation were hardly willing to submit themselves to McKenney’s demands that they comply with his new pro-removal policies. As it would turn out, neither were those who had been incorporated within white men’s homes. In 1828 McKenney broadcast his “successful” guardianship of the youthful Arbor—whom he had renamed Lee Compere after his missionary friend—and William Barnard, telling the missionary Compere to relay to “Lee’s father and friends” that the young boys were polished and

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well comported. McKenney explained that “they go to school every day with white boys who love them, . . . they have been to all our great people’s houses, and to the Presidents, and . . . they are the finest boys I ever saw.” “They both mind all I say,” he boasted, “and behave well in all things.” He planned to train them “to be officers in the Army of the Indian Territory,” the name given to the region west of the Mississippi to which the federal government planned to relocate Eastern Indian nations. If the Creek Nation yielded to his wishes, he would take equal interest in future generations, taking “a hundred of their Children and mak[ing] great men out of them.” But just as McKenney flaunted what he believed to be his excellent relationships with the young Creek boys and provisionally extended his support for similar endeavors in the future, he was engaging in a protracted struggle to make James McDonald comply with his demands for territorial cessions from the Choctaw Nation. When James McDonald told Thomas McKenney of his hopes of returning to his family in 1819, he would have to wait another four years before seeing his mother and the lower Mississippi Valley again. After finally agreeing to forgo his trip home to Choctaw country and, instead, study the law under the mentorship of Ohio statesman John McLean, McDonald left Weston in 1820 to begin his professional training in Lebanon, Ohio. Given McKenney’s expectations of Creek subservience, the superintendent likely anticipated his former ward would support federal interests after completing his studies. McDonald, however, used his educational resources to challenge the superintendent once he finally did return to his Choctaw homelands. By 1824 McKenney would find himself contending with McDonald’s legal training in face-to-face treaty negotiations, along with McDonald’s commitments to his Choctaw relations and territories. As McKenney’s encounters with McDonald would come to illustrate, McKenney ultimately abandoned his efforts to promote “civilization” policies east of the Mississippi River, pushing removal bills on Southeast Indian nations, including those of the young men he housed and educated in his Weston home, with devastating effects. In 1830, however, he balked when it came to following through on President Andrew Jackson’s attempts to unilaterally dissolve Native governance east of the Mississippi. Even McKenney—who proved willing to bend his politics to weather political winds— would only go so far. Jackson quickly fired the superintendent, effectively ending McKenney’s political career and, in the process, his role as an adoptive

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“father” to Indian youth. No longer a federal appointee—or a friend of the Jackson administration—the former superintendent of Indian affairs found himself stripped of the funds the Department of War had delegated to support his work with Indian youth since 1818. McKenney fought hard to keep his Indian wards. Losing them would hurt him fi nancially and, as he argued, break his promise to the Native families who had entrusted them to his care. Compere and Barnard— undoubtedly with McKenney’s urging—wrote a letter to Jackson supporting their guardian’s case. “He is our friend,” they told the President, “we love him. . . . He is like a father to us.” In October 1830, as McKenney prepared to leave Georgetown for New York, Jackson arranged for Compere and Barnard’s transfer to the family of their schoolteacher, James McVain. Irate, McKenney challenged Jackson’s jurisdiction over the matter. “I assumed to be the guardian of these boys,” he fumed. “I can make no transfer of this trust without the consent of their parents.” Nor could he pay for their care without government sponsorship or public charity. Jackson proved as unwilling to listen to either McKenney or the two young students as he was to the Native leaders whose lands he desired. McKenney had gambled on “civilization” and lost. Or perhaps he had simply done his job too well. His factories had played a role in attenuating Indian ties to the transatlantic markets that had allowed them to resist unilateral relocation efforts on the part of the United States, as well as in generating the economic vulnerability and trade debt that empowered the federal government to demand land cessions in the first decades of the nineteenth century. In other words, the economic imperialism he supported worked alongside U.S. military campaigns to help to make “civilization” programs appear unnecessary for U.S. expansion. His circulation of young men such as James McDonald through his home simultaneously engendered forms of Native resistance that would come to threaten Southern expansion in entirely new ways, causing powerful men such as Jackson to ramp up their demands for Southeast Indians’ relocation. In schooling McDonald, McKenney provided tools that would help McDonald join the ranks of U.S.-educated bicultural leaders who challenged the rights of Southern whites—and McKenney himself—to dictate national boundaries in the South. With the demise of the federal factory system and the firing of McKenney from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, ideas about “civilizing” Native people

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through government-sponsored schools ebbed. Jackson’s unilateral removal policies continued to gain steam, with the result that McKenney’s visions were deferred until the rise of Indian residential schools at the end of the century. While McKenney’s bureaucratic ambitions betrayed the subordinate status Indians were meant to have within the U.S. national family, and in his own, he soon learned that in Jackson’s America, even positioning Indians as lesser family members, or Indian nations as “domestic dependents” of the United States—as Chief Justice John Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court would rule in 1831—betrayed the rights of white patriarchs. Deeply threatened by the growing economic power and political mobilizations of Southeast Indian men educated in U.S. homes and institutions, Southern expansionists insisted on Southeast Indian nations’ relocation to western territories, where they could presumably no longer challenge U.S. claims to the Deep South. Over the course of his time in McKenney’s household and during his ensuing years outside of it, McDonald would come to intimately understand both McKenney’s and Jackson’s imperial frameworks. As he did so, he consistently sought to carve out a space for Indian people— and their nations—within an expanding United States, ultimately believing that Native people and U.S. whites could come to coexist.

7 Adoption and Diplomacy

In November 1820, seven years after leaving the lower Mississippi Valley for Washington, DC, James McDonald prepared to move again. He “left the school in which [he] had . . . been learning . . . Latin and Greek” over the previous eighteen months and, enjoying his first trip on a steamboat, crossed the Chesapeake Bay to visit eastern Maryland, where he spent a week saying his good-byes to the Baltimore Friends with whom he had spent so many years of his youth. An avid reader and a scholar, he also purchased new books to carry with him to Ohio. Packing them up with his library of over one hundred volumes, he finally took leave of Thomas McKenney’s Weston household. Turning west toward the city of Lebanon in southwestern Ohio, James McDonald prepared for his first lessons in the law. McDonald’s trip to Lebanon was just the beginning of the westward travels he undertook in the ensuing three years, which culminated in his return in 1823 to his lower Mississippi homelands— and his Choctaw kin. Quickly involving himself in his mother’s and the Choctaw Nation’s struggles with the United States, he then traveled back to Washington, DC, the following year, this time as part of a Choctaw delegation prepared to negotiate a new treaty with the federal government. Using the education he had acquired as a part of his training with the Friends, Thomas McKenney, and John McLean, and holding fast to his personal commitments to Choctaw concerns, he soon became a cultural and political broker between the two 

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sovereignties. He represented the Choctaw Nation as he negotiated new treaties and international agreements with U.S. federal agents, including some of the very same men with whom he had spent his formative years. McDonald’s transformation from a student and “ward” of U.S. elites to his role as Choctaw diplomat was not unique. Indeed, since the era of European colonization, Native communities had relied upon individuals with experiences within colonial settlements and extensive understandings of colonial knowledge regimes to facilitate relationships and broker agreements between indigenous nations and European empires. In the 1820s, however, a number of U.S.-educated men from the Southeast in particular rose to international prominence as they used their intimate knowledge of U.S. society and the racialized property regimes that structured it to resist Southern slaveholders’ claims to their homelands. Finding their Native communities, and their own families, struggling to maintain political autonomy and territorial sovereignty as the United States amplified its pressures for their ancestral territories, these individuals used colonial schooling to push back against federal elites. Challenging settler narratives characterizing Indian people as both “savage” and inclined to inevitable disappearance, these young leaders worked to establish a kind of middle ground in U.S.-Indian relations that would allow Native nations and U.S. settler states to live side by side. In McDonald’s particular vision, he believed that Choctaw people could secure a permanent place for themselves in the lower Mississippi Valley, even as U.S. settlers continued to occupy it. Drawing on his experiences within and across two national communities, McDonald asserted that the Choctaw Nation and the United States—including the state of Mississippi— could coexist if each made certain changes and adaptations. On the Choctaws’ part, he contended that future generations needed to undergo a process of “civilization,” as he believed he had done. They had to let go of practices that McDonald had come to associate with “Savagism” and instead adopt some of the social, racial, and economic values heralded by the U.S. elites who had fostered his own education in the United States. This meant moving Choctaw communities toward centralized systems of political governance, undertaking U.S. schooling, appreciating the values of private property, and forgoing beliefs such as witchcraft. In turn, U.S. whites, including his own contacts in the federal government, had to acknowledge and respect the Choctaw Nation’s inherent right of sovereignty. Foundational to this sovereignty were Choctaw people’s rights to their territories, as affirmed through

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treaties with the federal government, including their rights to hold lands in common. McDonald simultaneously asserted Choctaw people’s prerogatives within liberalized property regimes, particularly the ability of Choctaw elites such as his own mother to hold land and human beings as alienable property. In fact, McDonald made his most vociferous appeals for the recognition of Choctaw self-determination through the central principles underpinning the system of chattel slavery, citing his struggles to reclaim the monetary “value” of the enslaved man “stolen” from his mother to highlight the injustices Choctaw people experienced at the hands of U.S. whites. He insisted that if Choctaw men and women were to survive alongside the U.S. settlers who laid claim to the Southeast, it was imperative that state and federal legislators recognize and uphold Choctaws’ rights to hold people of African descent as slaves within the context of the broader slaveholding South. McDonald’s entrance into the role of political intermediary and diplomat was not automatic or preordained. His educational experiences within and outside of the Choctaw Nation, his attempts to build a professional career in Ohio, and his own family’s personal and economic upheavals all shaped the decisions he would come to make. However, as a new set of racialized characterizations of the differences between “whites” and “Indians” began to solidify over the course of the 1820s, many U.S.-educated bicultural Native men such as McDonald found it increasingly difficult to recuse themselves from cultural and political diplomacy. Recognizing that their own options, as well as those of their Native relations and tribal nations, were increasingly limited by the changing face of white supremacy, a number of men who shared McDonald’s educational experiences sought to narrow the perceived gaps between Native and white worlds. Theirs was an uphill battle, however, for the ambitions and visions of Native people—including Native plantation masters— and U.S. whites proved increasingly at odds. As McDonald would eventually realize, Southern expansionists were hard-set against any form of Native sovereignty in the East.

The Path of Law In Lebanon, McDonald found himself in the burgeoning settler state of Ohio and entering into the personal and professional world of John McLean. Born in 1785 to poor Scotch-Irish immigrants in New Jersey, McLean was part of

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a generation of late eighteenth-century settlers who participated in the rapid westward expansion that characterized the post-Revolutionary decades. When he was four years old, McLean’s family left Pennsylvania for the promise of “new” territories, first in West Virginia, then Kentucky, and finally in the Ohio country, where rumors of cheap land and agricultural opportunities promised economic security. As was so often the case in the boom and bust cycles of expansionist scheming, however, these promises proved fleeting. In 1797 McLean’s father purchased land due north of Cincinnati from a prominent speculator, who had failed to gain legal title to the property in question. Squatters in the eyes of the Native communities who sought to protect their homelands from U.S. settlement as well as in those of the U.S. General Land Office, the McLean family remained in a state of economic vulnerability for much of John’s childhood. By the time McDonald arrived in Lebanon in 1820, however, John McLean’s fortunes had changed. After apprenticing himself to the Court of Common Pleas in Hamilton County at the age of nineteen, he had managed to study the law under the son of a prominent military figure and, by 1806, had apparently earned enough money from his practice to purchase the printing office for a weekly newspaper, the first of its kind to be published west of the Alleghenies. In 1812, at the age of twenty-seven, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. By the end of the decade, he returned to Lebanon in order to serve as justice of the Ohio Supreme Court. As an important judicial and political figure in the burgeoning U.S. settlement, McLean was one of the more prominent men in Ohio. His rise paralleled that of Lebanon’s. Mapped out in 1802 and admitted into the Union as part of the state of Ohio in 1803, Lebanon became a popular stopping point for those traveling north from Cincinnati. John McLean’s papers fail to mention James McDonald. And only a few letters written by McDonald himself survive from this period. However, these letters do suggest that McLean offered his twenty-one-year-old law student at least some of the opportunities to which he himself had access as he advanced in his own profession. At the very least, McLean provided McDonald with the necessary resources to acquire a firm grasp of both state and federal law. After studying “under the direction of Judge McLean” for three years, McDonald was admitted to the Ohio bar in the summer of 1823. As McDonald quickly learned, however, passing the bar did not automatically translate into a successful career in the law. For if McLean provided

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McDonald with relatively equal access to the educational resources and financial opportunities he himself had enjoyed, other Ohio whites were less accommodating. As a staunch Methodist with abolitionist leanings, McLean was apparently sympathetic to the assimilationist side of U.S. imperialism and its calls for selectively integrating Native people into at least some of the regimes of knowledge and systems of economic and political authority that structured everyday life in the United States. Yet when McDonald moved to Cincinnati under McLean’s advisement, anti-Indian racism made it difficult to follow through on his plans to join a standing law firm. Writing to Secretary of War John Calhoun, McDonald informed his former mentor that he felt “compelled to abandon” his expectations of establishing a legal career in Cincinnati upon finding that he “could not form a partnership which promised much advantage.” In 1826 he further illuminated his strug gles in the legal profession. Writing to Thomas McKenney of his “confidence” in succeeding as a lawyer “were a fair field” open to him, McDonald implied that Cincinnati’s legal establishment believed American Indians to be either unsuited to or unsuitable for the practice of the law. While McDonald never provided the precise details of his exchanges with Cincinnati lawyers, the history of the state of Ohio—as well as changing national conversations around Indian identity—provide clues to the kinds of encounters McDonald may have had with Ohio’s white professional class. Incorporated into the United States after decades of struggle between united Indian nations, including those of the Miami, Shawnee, and Delaware, and the poorer white settlers who invaded the region, Ohio was populated by white women and men who had staked their claims to Indian territories by disparaging Indian people as inherently violent and “uncivilized,” ignoring the violence that both they and the federal government relied upon to maintain U.S. whites’ illegitimate occupation of Native ground. The War of 1812 exacerbated this “anti-Indian sublime,” as historian Peter Silver has termed the Indian-hating discourse wielded by Anglo-American settlers. As Native alliances with British troops and Tecumseh’s pan-Indian armies worked to prevent expansion into the Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes region, the narrative of bright and earnest U.S. families encountering dangerous, cruel, and “uncivilized” Indian people as they sought opportunity in the West became ubiquitous not only in Ohio, but also across the United States. This nationalist fiction of U.S. innocence empowered settlers to stake their claims on Native territories and

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warned U.S. whites against sympathetic alliances or close affiliations with Indian people. While these vitriolic narratives were less fashionable after the war, they nonetheless persisted alongside equally damaging discourses concerning Indian “disappearance.” The defeat of the pan-Indian resistance movements that resurged with the War of 1812 and the final demise of transatlantic alliances between Indian nations and European empires reanimated post-Revolutionary discourses concerning the “inevitable” population decline of Indians following white settlement. But rather than characterizing Indians as suitable for adoption into the early republic—and as subjects to be saved from extinction— these tropes positioned them as incapable of adopting U.S. settler cultures and, as a result, destined to self-destruction. Defining U.S. modernity against fantastical accounts of the past and present histories of American Indian people, everyday citizens positioned contemporary technologies as beyond the pale of Indian capacity. As Jackson’s biographer would imply in the 1840s, Indian people such as Lyncoya were too “natural” and thus ill suited for the elite professional opportunities available to privileged white men. These shifting ideologies concerning the place of Native people in North America likely shaped a range of polite— and not so cordial—rejections to McDonald’s inquiries for employment. It did not matter that McDonald’s educational and social achievements undermined all of the logic supporting popular characterizations of Indians. Indeed, U.S. whites’ discomfort with the prestigious educational accomplishments of individuals such as McDonald were precisely what fueled assertions that Indians were incapable of becoming modern subjects. That McDonald dressed, spoke, and wrote in a fashion that surpassed the achievements of most white men was particularly vexing, as he indicated that Native people could not only assimilate “foreign” ideologies, but could also exploit and innovate the technologies of “civilization” better than many whites. The continued presence of these living Indian people sat in uneasy tension with apocryphal accounts of their “inevitable” disappearance, proving declension narratives to be an act of wishful thinking rather than an accurate assessment of material reality. Indeed, much to the chagrin of white citizens, in the 1820s Native men threatened to out-compete white men, not only in the realm of capitalist commerce—including Southern cotton markets—but also in the “domestic” economies of sex and marriage. Two young men from the Southeast exemplified the possibilities that might unfold if Indian people or, more

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specifically, Indian men, were given equal access to the social and material resources enjoyed by well-off whites. While attending Cornwall Academy, the American Board mission school in Cornwall, Connecticut, Cherokee students John Ridge and Elias Boudinot respectively courted Sarah Northrup and Harriet Gould, white women from prominent local families, eventually marrying them and taking their new brides back to the Cherokee Nation. When news of their engagements and unions broke, the citizens of Cornwall along with individuals across the United States were incensed. Not only were Ridge and Boudinot refusing to adhere to popular maxims about “ancient” and “disappearing” Indians, but they were also reproducing Native communities through white women’s bodies. Since Cherokee identity historically descended through mothers’ lineages, the unions between Ridge and Northrup and Boudinot and Gould would eventually inspire changes in Cherokee conceptualizations of belonging and identity, especially among Cherokee elites. These marriages also threw a wrench into white racial codes. The laws of U.S. citizenship and the logics of Republican motherhood positioned white women as the bearers and nurturers of future members of the United States, not those of Native nations. Illuminating the racial anxieties marriages between Native men and white women provoked, one U.S. observer fumed that the union between John Ridge and Sarah Northrup reflected a conspiracy on the part of white missionary societies to “break down all objections of colour, and make our daughters become nursing mothers to a race of mulattoes.” Using language that vividly emphasized the relationship between race and reproduction, his remarks highlighted panics over Native social and sexual parity with whites. Members of Cincinnati law firms may have had similar concerns over McDonald’s entrance into their businesses. Once admitted into Ohio’s professional class, what was to stop him from demanding the same rights as white men? By October 1823 James McDonald had relinquished his attempts to carve out a life for himself in Ohio, at least for the time being. He had received news that his brother, Alexander Hamilton, had died, and, feeling few attachments to his life in Cincinnati, he felt compelled to return to the lower Mississippi Valley to take care of his family’s affairs. After “the disposal of some small property” he owned “in that country,” he told John Calhoun, he would pursue a career as a lawyer in “either the State of Mississippi or that of Alabama.” James McDonald would indeed wield his legal expertise after arriving in his homelands, but his plans to settle in the U.S. South dramatically diverged once he got there (Fig. 7–1).

figure 7–1. An image that is likely of James Lawrence McDonald (Choctaw), painted during his stay in Ohio, although the current description of the image refers to him as a member of the Miami Nation, Courtesy of the Ohio History Connection (H 24742). See the appendix for further details.

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Homecoming While James McDonald remembered a youth in which only a few white men lived on Choctaw lands, the territory he traversed upon his return to the lower Mississippi Valley in 1823 was dramatically different. Where farms and plantations had dotted the landscape before— and were owned by Choctaw men and women and intermarried white men— they had multiplied across the terrain and were now mostly owned solely by U.S. whites. Although Molly McDonald had stayed in place over the years, the boundaries of the state of Mississippi had crossed over her, making her farm part of the United States. Unlike the whites who had lived in Choctaw territories in the early 1800s as minorities, Molly McDonald was now a minority in her own homelands, finding herself surrounded by individuals who put the onus of assimilation and integration upon her. Living twelve miles south of the Mississippi capital of Jackson, she was subject to Mississippi state laws. Given that these laws barred both Indians and women full civic rights, as a Choctaw woman she was an outsider within her own territories. Many of the changes James McDonald encountered upon his return home were due to the ratification of the Treaty of Doak’s Stand between the Choctaw Nation and the United States. Signed only four years before, in 1820, the treaty relinquished the Pearl River Valley to the state of Mississippi as part of a monumental land cession that included 5,169,788 acres of the Choctaws’ northwestern territories—or most of the Choctaw Nation’s Western District. The Pearl River’s proximity to the Mississippi River, the region’s lucrative agricultural properties, and its west-central location in the vast stretch of territory claimed by Mississippi helped to inspire this massive land grab. The territories were so coveted, in fact, that, in the words of Choctaw historian Clara Sue Kidwell, “the upper Pearl River region became the fastest-growing section of Mississippi during the 1820s.” After these lands were surveyed in 1821 and put to market in 1822, wealthy U.S. planters rushed into the lowlands upon which Molly’s farm stood, while settlers with fewer means took root in the hillier forested regions. The establishment of the capital of Jackson in the heart of this new land cession—renamed Hinds County after Thomas Hinds, the U.S. commissioner who, along with Andrew Jackson, had pushed through the Treaty of Doak’s Stand—reflected the significance of the region to the state of Mississippi.

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The cession had a profound impact on the Choctaw Nation. The Pearl River watershed had been a major site of Choctaw settlement, and its transfer to Mississippi and distribution to surveyors, speculators, and settlers forced many people off their lands. The treaty commissioners vainly hoped that these communities would relocate to the thirteen million acres of Quapaw territory “exchanged” for the Western District. In fact, they hoped Doak’s Stand would be just one of a series of treaties that would relocate all Southeast Indian people from their homelands in the East to territories west of the Mississippi. The 1820 treaty also contained a provision that allowed the federal government to allot individual Choctaw families plots of land in the remaining Eastern territories and grant them U.S. citizenship once it had deemed them sufficiently “civilized.” U.S. whites could then claim remaining Choctaw territory, effectively dissolving Choctaw national sovereignty. Most Choctaw people refused to move west, and the allotment policy remained a future threat rather than an imminent reality. Nonetheless, the treaty brought about a staggering loss of territory and laid the groundwork for further dispossession (Figs. 7–2 and 7–3). Unlike the vast majority of Choctaw men and women living in the Western District, Molly McDonald found herself ambiguously situated with respect to her land. The 1820 treaty stipulated that “all of those who [had] separate settlements” within the ceded territory would be granted a “one mile square” reserve from the U.S. federal government. However, most Choctaw people residing in the Pearl River region did not receive tracts of land. Molly McDonald was one of only two families who legally retained their territories, albeit not in her own name. Wesley Trahern, a white trader married to a bicultural Choctaw woman named Delilah Brashears, received one of these reserves, while Molly McDonald’s son Alexander Hamilton secured the lands on which Molly’s plantation stood. Three other men, Greenwood Leflore, George Turnbull, and Alexander McRae, had petitioned for lands and “received the recommendations of the commissioners” of the treaty, but for unknown reasons their petitions had not yet been granted. The process through which Alexander Hamilton applied for and received recognition for his mother’s land claims remains murky. But like the other recipients, he was a prominent man from an elite and slaveholding bicultural Choctaw family, indicating the likelihood that gender, race, and political influence shaped territorial recognition. The fact that Hamilton, Leflore, and Turnbull were all signatories of the Treaty of Doak’s Stand is also suggestive.

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figure 7–2. Map detail of Molly McDonald’s homelands in 1825, based on the German edition of Carey and Lee’s map of Mississippi, collection of the author. Note that most Choctaw towns and villages are not represented (see Figure 7–3).

figure 7–3. Choctaw villages in Mississippi during the nineteenth century, from Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).

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Federal officials were not above bribing Native leaders with cash and manufactures or promises to recognize claims to individual territory in the hopes of winning over these individuals’ consent for larger cessions. Perhaps such strategies secured Hamilton’s signature on the final treaty document. Alexander Hamilton may have considered the land cessions as inevitable and, through his own rising leadership position in the Western District, decided to ensure that his mother would retain her property and territorial “improvements.” While it is possible that many Choctaw women and men found the reality of living within the boundaries of Mississippi untenable, the fact that the treaty yielded such a marginal number of tracts to a specific group of elite men suggests that a series of factors determined who could legally claim land in what was now declared to be west-central Mississippi. Th is strategy enabled federal officials to effectively limit the number of individuals who could own Choctaw reserves, guaranteeing the delivery of the vast majority of Choctaw lands into the hands of U.S. whites. Molly McDonald fared well compared to most other Choctaw people. If only elite Choctaw men could receive individual reserves, her eldest son worked as her intermediary, securing her place on lands she had previously claimed through matrilineal property regimes. This allowed her to continue her entrepreneurial activities with the assistance of her male relations, not to mention the labors of the African Americans she enslaved. Since Hamilton remained unmarried throughout his life, he likely lived with his mother until his death in 1823, in accordance with Choctaw matrilineal customs. Molly’s husband John Rhodes may have resided with her, too, along with her nephew, Robert Jones, who would have been roughly fifteen years of age by the time James McDonald returned home in 1823. While the specific labors of the African Americans who lived on her farm during this time remain undocumented, it is likely that they continued to grow corn, beans, squash, and cotton and tended to her horse and cattle herds. Yet even as Molly McDonald persisted in—and perhaps even amplified—her economic activities as white settlers moved into her territories, her property rights became increasingly precarious. She did not technically own her own lands, and her son did not directly own them either. They were held in trust by the U.S. federal government. Since, like all Indians, she was barred from testifying in U.S. courts, she also maintained a tenuous hold over the people she enslaved as well as all the goods they produced. In short, through her

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status as a slaveholder and her well-positioned son, Molly McDonald secured her land in the aftermath of the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, just as federal and Mississippi laws undercut her power as a Choctaw woman to hold both land and human beings as individual property. When James McDonald returned to his mother’s farm, he immediately confronted the realities that his mother faced as a slaveholding Native woman in an increasingly white-dominated world. Prior to the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, Molly had purchased an African American man from a U.S. slave trader named Samuel Crawford on credit. After paying “seven eights of the purchase money,” Crawford sent “two white men, mounted & armed with pistols” to McDonald’s farm and “forcibly” repossessed the man “& hurried out of the nation.” Alexander Hamilton had initially taken up his mother’s case, requesting restitution from the Department of War. This practice had born fruit for elite Choctaws and other Southeast Indians in the past, with federal officials granting payments to aggrieved individuals in order to manage relations between Native nations and encroaching settlers. Hamilton died, however, before Secretary of War John Calhoun had weighed in on the case. With her elder son gone and her lands now part of Mississippi, Molly struggled to gain traction for her claim. And Crawford’s financial swindle was only one of the issues Molly McDonald faced. With Hamilton gone, the status of her Hinds County farmlands was also precarious. It was not clear that her land would automatically pass to either her or her son James, or, if the United States indeed held it in trust, if it would revert to the public land market now that the original trustee had died. James McDonald was unsettled by his mother’s vulnerabilities, particularly with respect to her encounters with Crawford over the man she purchased from him. By July 1824 he was framing Molly’s transactions with the slave trader as an “outrage” and was frustrated by the hurdles she faced when it came to seeking “justice.” Her inability to effectively communicate or advocate for herself within foreign institutions made her unable to follow up with her elder son’s pursuits after his death. Indeed, unaware of “the nature of the papers transmitted” to the Department of War by Hamilton, she was left with little recourse to demand restitution. For McDonald, his mother’s rights to human property were uncontestable, thus making her deserving of compensation from the wealthy government whose citizen infringed upon her status as a slaveholder and a participant

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in U.S. market relations. “The amount of money embraced by the claim compared with that in the Trea sury,” he concluded, “is a drop in the bucket. To my mother, it is of importance . . . she does not demand it as charity, but as justice.” James McDonald’s frustrations over his mother’s experiences were soon matched by his concerns for the Choctaw Nation more broadly. After the federal government took huge swaths of Choctaw territory east of the Mississippi, Secretary of War Calhoun realized that white settlers already squatted on sections of the Quapaw / Arkansas territories transferred to the Choctaws as part of the U.S. government’s payment for their eastern homelands. By the summer of 1824 Calhoun requested yet another treaty, asking Choctaw chiefs to give these western lands back to the United States, as well as even more of their eastern territories, this time including lands along the Tombigbee River that white settlers had also encroached upon. Calhoun made his request even as the United States had failed to make good on other parts of the 1820 treaty. In the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, U.S. treaty commissioners Jackson and Hinds had promised to sell fifty-four sections of land to fund mission schools within the Choctaw Nation, fulfilling appeals on the part of several Choctaw leaders for English language and literacy training within their districts. Yet four years later, the chiefs had not seen any of the money promised to them. Counter to the feelings of obligation he had expressed to Thomas McKenney in 1819, after first returning home James McDonald had no intention of entering into U.S.-Indian affairs in general or U.S.-Choctaw relations in particular. From his letters to Calhoun and Silas Dinsmoor, it is clear that when he left Ohio for his mother’s farm his plan was to resolve his mother’s property concerns and then turn his attentions to his legal career within U.S. society. In a letter from Lebanon, Ohio, he presumed that he would inherit at least part of Hamilton’s title, which he would sell before resuming his professional efforts in Mississippi or Alabama. Six months after returning to his mother’s household, he apparently changed his mind about living in the South, writing to Dinsmoor of once more pursuing the law in Ohio after settling family business. “My first and principal object . . . is to make a complete [assessment?] of my brother’s affairs,” he told the former Indian agent. “My next will be to see that my mother is comfortably settled, either [on her farm in Mississippi] or in the Choctaw nation. When those arrangements are

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completed, I will dispose of some of my little property, and return as soon as I conveniently can [to] the State of Ohio, and commence with the practice of my profession.” The more time McDonald spent in the lower Mississippi Valley, however, the more enmeshed he became in both his family’s and his nation’s political struggles. Likely due to his ties to his mother’s elite matrilineal networks, as well as his educational experiences within the United States, he began to connect with other U.S.-educated bicultural elites, including— and especially—David Folsom. Folsom and McDonald shared much in common. Folsom spent three years, from around ages seven to ten, in the home of his sister Molly and her white Indian agent husband, Samuel Mitchell. He also spent six months in a school in Tennessee when he was about twenty years of age, and through his mother, Ainichihoyo, had the kinship ties to qualify for leadership of the Eastern District of the Choctaw Nation. Like McDonald, Folsom wanted Choctaw youths to undergo U.S. schooling, evidenced by his decision to send his two younger brothers, Israel and McKee, to Cornwall Academy—the very same institution Ridge and Boudinot had attended—probably sometime around 1823. Indeed, both McDonald and Folsom appreciated the language and literacy skills they had acquired in the United States and shared the opinion that Choctaw youths should receive schooling similar to their own—but within Choctaw territories. In 1818 members of the ABCFM had established their first mission schools in Choctaw country at Folsom’s invitation. Folsom had strong ties to Cyrus Kingsbury of the American Board and, along with Kingsbury and James McDonald, began to envision using the money that Choctaws were to receive from the sale of the fifty-four sections of land, as demarcated in the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, to start up a national high school in Choctaw territory. Indeed, the three men hoped to extend the reach of colonial education by offering advanced schooling opportunities at this “national academy.” Th is institution would be tied to American Board mission initiatives, but would provide higher learning opportunities to children who had aged out of American Board mission schools. David Folsom would host the high school and board its scholars at his Pigeon Roost plantation along “the old Natchez trace” (where he already hosted an American Board mission school, opened in 1821), and the American Board missionaries would “provide a competent teacher or teachers” to instruct the students.

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Within a year of returning home, McDonald had committed himself to Choctaw politics. It is unclear how he was selected to join the delegation traveling to Washington, DC, to respond to Calhoun’s request to renegotiate the Treaty of Doak’s Stand. A number of reasons likely commended him as an envoy, including his connections with Folsom; his possible kinship ties with Apuckshunubbee, who was also a member of the treaty party; his relationships with Washington, DC, elites; and his legal expertise—not to mention his increasingly outspoken desire to mediate his mother’s property claims. On September 23, 1824, McDonald left the lower Mississippi Valley for the second time in his life to travel to the nation’s capital. There he would make his mark as an intermediary between the United States and Choctaw people, including his own mother.

Diplomat James McDonald joined a Choctaw delegation that was deeply divided over what had come to pass in the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, as well as over the future of the Choctaw Nation. An older generation made up nearly half of the delegation. These influential chiefs had commitments to Choctaw values concerning town- and district-centered leadership and redistributive governance. Helmed by the chiefs of the three districts that made up the Choctaw Nation, Mushulatubbee of the Eastern District, Pushmataha of the Southern District, and Apuckshunubbee of the Western District, this group of leading men had come of age in the final years of the deerskin trade. They had initially achieved and maintained their positions of power through long-standing Choctaw customs, including matrilineal kinship ties (with the exception of Pushmataha), martial and hunting prowess, and the redistribution of foreign trade goods. Several had also become active participants in the more recent economies flourishing in the lower Mississippi Valley, including the trade in African American slaves, export agriculture, and stock raising. Rounding out this group of older men was British interpreter John Pitchlynn. Although not a chief of the Choctaw Nation, Pitchlynn had spent most of his life in Choctaw territories and his wife, Sophia, was related to Chief Mushulatubbee. The other half of the delegation comprised a cadre of rising young leaders, including Robert Cole, David Folsom, Daniel McCurtain, and James McDonald. These men came from overlapping backgrounds. All appear to have

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enjoyed elite matrilineal connections, priming them for leadership roles, and—unsurprisingly, given elite women’s fairly common connections with white traders—all had come of age in bicultural households. These individuals were divided, however, when it came to their political positions. Some, such as Robert Cole, staunchly supported the mechanisms by which their elders governed. Others chafed at the fact that older chiefs— particularly Pushmataha and Mushulatubbee—had relinquished territory in order to acquire the trade goods that they redistributed to maintain their political influence, even courting removal policies to maintain their access to foreign manufactures. David Folsom in particular hoped to establish a more centralized national government that would prevent further land cessions, oversee mission schooling, and pass laws that would uphold the individual property rights that supported his efforts in the Southern plantation economy. Folsom was particularly distressed over the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, the ratification of which had much to do with trade debt as well as internal battles over the presence of Christian missionaries in Choctaw territories. Angry over Folsom’s early collaborations with American Board educators prior to the 1820 treaty, James Pitchlynn—John and Sophia Pitchlynn’s son— wrote to Andrew Jackson declaring that Choctaw people were ready to remove west, fueling opportunistic demands for new land cessions from the nation. Folsom tried to block the ensuing treaty talks and, according to federal Indian agent John McKee, even announced that he was prepared to kill those who ratified a new treaty with the United States. Folsom ultimately failed to prevent Apuckshunubbee, Pushmataha, Mushulatubbee, James Pitchlynn, and Robert Cole, among others, from signing the final document. Heading to Washington, DC, with many of those who had signed at Doak’s Stand, Folsom had reasons to fear additional cessions. Both Mushulatubbee and Pushmataha had accrued more debt at the federal factory located in Choctaw country and saw the new negotiations as a way to eradicate it. McDonald’s alliance with Folsom over national schooling suggests that the two men shared political visions for their nation. As the possible nephew of Apuckshunubbee, McDonald may have also supported his uncle’s political inclinations, which at the time happened to converge with those of Folsom. Apuckshunubbee was a staunch advocate of mission schools, and McDonald’s collaborations with Folsom over a national educational system likely stood in line with his uncle’s own interests. Further, currently having no trade debt at the federal factory, Apuckshunubbee had no intentions of relinquishing

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the Quapaw / Arkansas territories for which Choctaw leaders had exchanged their Mississippi lands, putting him at odds with Mushulatubbee and Pushmataha. If McDonald was prepared to stand with his kin during the treaty at Washington, his alliance would have been short-lived. Within a month of their departure from Choctaw lands, Apuckshunubbee tragically died after falling down a bluff during the delegation’s stopover in Maysville, Kentucky. Despite the contentious histories between some of the delegates, when negotiations began in Washington on November 9, 1824, internal dissensions appear to have remained at a minimum as McDonald faced down his two former Washington mentors, Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas McKenney and Secretary of War John Calhoun. Penning one of the first documents sent from the Choctaw delegation to the two federal representatives, McDonald wrote that the Choctaw leadership agreed that a new boundary line needed to be drawn in the western territories, but he made it clear that the United States was to provide compensation for any Arkansas lands ceded and that the delegation would not part with “the most valuable portion of their [new] country.”  This set the tone for the exchanges that followed. Either together with David Folsom or in concert with the entire delegation, McDonald signed (and potentially drafted) hard-hitting letters to his Washington relations articulating Choctaw demands. Finding the initial $65,000 “compensation proposed to be given” for the Choctaw lands in question “entirely inadequate,” McDonald, Folsom, and the remaining delegates highlighted the minimum amount of money the federal government would receive in selling any ceded lands—“more than two millions of dollars”— and insisted that it was “just and right that we should require, in annuities, a reasonable portion of that.”  They also listed a series of additional requirements. The fourth article of the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, which supported the eventual allotment and incorporation of Choctaw territories and people into the United States, was to be “abolished.” They wanted the $6,000 annuity promised for schools “immediately to commence.” The reserves of Alexander Hamilton and Turner Brashears were to be “granted in fee simple to the occupants” and the landed property of the remaining approved petitioners was to be recognized. Finally, they stated four demands for the “proposed cession west of the Mississippi.” The Choctaw Nation was to receive $30,000, to be paid over two years for the territories in question, along with “nine thousand a year

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for twenty years” to support “mechanical institutions”—presumably coveted blacksmiths—“among the Choctaws.” The federal government was also to pay another $9,000 a year for twenty years for “the education of Choctaw Children in colleges or institutions out of the nation” and “three thousand a year for twenty years . . . for the education of Choctaw boys beyond the Mississippi, when they shall have settled there.”  The delegation played to the egos of their correspondents by asserting that this schooling would allow Choctaw people to accumulate material wealth like whites. Yet their demands also reflected both Folsom’s and McDonald’s hopes for new schooling initiatives that would support collective autonomy and individual property ownership within the Choctaw Nation, as well as a growing interest on the part of Mushulatubbee and Robert Cole for access to schooling outside of the nation, all while significantly amplifying Calhoun’s initial fi nancial offer. In short, McDonald and the remaining delegation insisted upon a $450,000 long-term payment plan that they believed would provide “lasting, & not transient, benefits for the sale of our lands,” particularly when it came to funding U.S. schooling. President James Monroe agreed to the new boundary lines that the delegation proposed, but he refused to provide the sum requested. In the interim, McKenney wrote a “private note” to McDonald chastising him for “how extravagant [his] proposal [was].” (Reflecting years later, McKenney struck a different tune, proudly declaring in his memoirs, “I found him so skilled in the business of his mission, so prompt, and so competent, both in verbal discussions, and with the pen, as to make it more of an up-hill business than I had ever before negotiated with Indians.”) Undeterred, McDonald cosigned a letter drawing the negotiations to a close. The delegation would remain to follow up on individual claims other Choctaws “have against the Government of the United States,” but would cease talks for a new treaty. McDonald’s participation in these forceful negotiations signaled his demand that the U.S. federal government recognize the Choctaws’ inherent rights to their homelands in the East, as well as their territorial oversight over regions the federal government had deeded to them in treaty. The elimination of the allotment policy, equitable payment for ceded western territories, and immediate payment of annuities were all part and parcel of his assertion of the Choctaws’ political, social, and territorial self-determination. McDonald himself later described to Thomas McKenney his “exertion on

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behalf of the Choctaws” during the Washington negotiations as “persevering and zealous.” Rather than facilitating the assimilationist desires of those who had provided him with his education in Washington, he used his skills to refuse Choctaw dispossession. Yet, through his support of missionary schools, McDonald also expressed the belief that Choctaw people needed to respond to the pressures of U.S. expansion by adopting certain forms of knowledge or, to hark back to his 1819 letter to McKenney, by preventing Native children from living a life of “Savagism.” As he wrote to Peter Pitchlynn in 1830, he believed Choctaw people would be better off if they left behind practices such as witchcraft, which McDonald characterized as an “absurd superstition.” Although Choctaw beliefs in the supernatural could prove life threatening to those who challenged Choctaw social order, they had also played an important role in maintaining moral standards within the nation, including the redistributive economic values that propertied elites such as McDonald were challenging. McDonald’s convictions that both U.S. systems of governance and Choctaw cultural and educational traditions needed to change were perhaps best informed and encapsulated by his mother’s experiences. Throughout the treaty negotiations in Washington during the fall of 1824, McDonald expressed his anger over his mother’s interactions with U.S. whites. The very first day negotiations began, McDonald drafted a letter to Calhoun following up on earlier correspondence concerning the enslaved man taken from her by Crawford. “The negro was clearly the property of my mother, as the documents show,” McDonald wrote to the secretary of war. But the case had apparently stalled in Washington because his mother had not “immediately prosecut[ed] the robbers.” McDonald first countered this point, arguing that she had tried to remedy the situation: “Frequent attempts were made, in an amicable way, to recover the negro. A fair proposition was made. ‘Give the negro, or return the money we paid you.’ ” Yet pursuing Crawford had appeared futile. Not only was Crawford “insolvent,” but Molly McDonald was also a Native woman seeking justice in Southern courts stacked against Indian people. Whereas white men could easily make claims against an Indian and seek redress from the nation to which that person belonged, Native people had no such options, finding their paths blocked by foreign laws and regulations, not to mention the racism underpinning Southern jurisprudence. In impassioned language, McDonald laid out his mother’s

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conundrum, connecting it to the experiences of all Native people living under the tyranny of federal and state laws: If an Indian robs a white man, and the Indian cannot or will not give satisfaction, his countrymen have to make compensation to the amount of the robbery. How easy it is for the white man to establish his claim! He is robbed; an Indian has done it—no matter what Indian;—an [application] to the agent, with the proofs, proofs of the fact, restores him the value of his property. How hard the case of the Indian! Untutored as he is, what knows he of the law? How is he to go among a people with whose language he is unacquainted, and enter into a labyrinth of litigation in which his civilized white brothers are so frequently lost? I need not continue the parallel—if parallel it may be called. Our case is certainly one of extreme hardship, and demands the attention of Government. The laws of the state in which we live, deprive us of privileges which are inseparable from the vindication of our rights.

Molly McDonald’s lack of knowledge of the English language and U.S. legal systems— systems that even challenged white men—was a first obstacle in gaining traction against Crawford. But an even bigger impediment was being barred from testifying in court. “The laws of Mississippi forbid an Indian from giving his testimony in the court of justice,” McDonald decried. “He cannot, therefore, obtain redress in the state courts, even were he sufficiently enlightened to know how to pursue the legal forms. How is a Choctaw then to establish his claim?”  Given these circumstances, Molly had little chance to make her case against a man who could gain the sympathetic ear of his fellow countrymen. McDonald saw the temporary solution to his mother’s circumstance in financial terms: “an immediate compensation ought to be made.” Her experiences, however, pointed to a larger set of issues. Choctaw people needed educations in U.S. language, literacy, and legal regimes, and the United States had to recognize the collective and individual rights of Choctaw people in treaty negotiations and in courts of law. Th at McDonald made his claims to justice over an enslaved man of African descent was telling. His assertion of Native people’s rights to property were informed by liberal systems of governance, in which free people had “private” ownership claims—including over human beings—that could only be disrupted through consensual purchase and sale. Transatlantic capitalism had ubiquitously placed “nonwhite” people, including Native people

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and people of African descent, as human property, a move that proved foundational to rapid territorial expansion and international commerce. McDonald’s own experiences with nineteenth-century chattel slavery would have driven home the point that economic autonomy in an expanding slaveholding South emerged out of owning people of African descent. His likely upbringing in a slaveholding Choctaw family, his time in Silas Dinsmoor’s and Thomas McKenney’s slaveholding households, as well as his years spent with abolitionist Quakers in the city of Baltimore—where rich entrepreneurs grew even richer with the assistance of enslaved labor—would have consistently reinforced for him the fact that wealth, privilege, and territorial power came from exerting control over people of African descent. It is crucial to read McDonald’s assertions of Choctaw property rights through the body of a black slave as exemplary of, rather than coincidental to, the racialized liberal sovereignty McDonald envisioned as a necessary part of the Choctaws’ future. If Choctaw people were to survive as property owners—rather than as those who would lose property to covetous and exploitative whites— their rights to claim black people as property had to be respected. To McDonald, Choctaw sovereignty was intrinsically bound to the mechanics of racial slavery. Scholar Tiya Miles has pointed out with regard to the history of encounters between whites and Cherokees in the Cherokee Nation that “it was an invisible third element, the presence of black people, on which the story often turned.”  McDonald’s battles with his former mentors in Washington signaled that a similar pattern was unfolding among Choctaw people as well. On one level, James McDonald was not off the mark when he articulated the intersections concerning racial slavery and Choctaw sovereignty. The fact that Molly McDonald’s status as a slaveholder was not supported by U.S. jurisprudence was part and parcel of a broader system that denied Native people—and Native nations—legal recognition. Immediately after the treaty negotiations came to an impasse in late November 1824, McDonald and Folsom made a series of claims that illuminated the fact that Choctaw people had been systematically defrauded and denied legal rights. As they pointed out, the 850 Choctaw men who had “served in the expedition to Pensacola under [General] Jackson” had “never received compensation” that was promised to them. Indians were also “frequently . . . murdered with impunity by white men” and the “murder is seldom, if ever, punished.” Annuities had not been paid, even as the federal government “reap[ed] the fruits of the ces-

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sions” to which Choctaws had agreed. And those annuities that had been delivered were distributed without the simultaneous distribution of “beef & corn,” which had been a simple act of hospitality that allowed Choctaws to eat at annuity sites. Finally, “Horses and other property [had] been frequently stolen from the choctaws by white people, and great difficulties [had] been encountered in attaining satisfaction.”  Molly McDonald’s inability to recover the man she had enslaved was tied to the broader subjugation of Choctaw people by U.S. whites. Yet as McDonald tied Choctaw sovereignty to the central logics underpinning chattel slavery, he simultaneously reoriented Choctaw sovereignty and national governance away from redistributive systems of community governance and reciprocal relationships to land and environmental resources. In their stead, he made individual rights to human property the utmost signifier of self-determination and supported a colonial racial code that made black people subjects of enslavement. Unsurprisingly, McKenney and Calhoun were ill-inclined to recognize the liberal arguments that shaped McDonald’s demands on behalf of the Choctaw Nation. And this reluctance took its psychic toll over the winter months. As he remained in Washington through early 1825 to finalize his mother’s claims and wait out Calhoun’s official response concerning the treaty, McDonald started drinking heavily. In his personal memoirs published in 1846, Thomas McKenney asserted that McDonald’s intemperance was due to “the spectre” of anti-Indian racism. “A conflict between his Indian caste,” McKenney wrote, “and his hope of overcoming it, and rising above its effects upon his prospects, shook him from his balance, and he fell before the strife, into habits of intemperance—the too usual resort of the unwary to drown sorrow, and clear away from the present the clouds of a dreaded destiny.”  While McDonald was undoubtedly affected by the prevalent contempt for Indian people that fueled demands for land cessions from the Choctaw delegation, McKenney’s account must be read with suspicion, for even as it acknowledges the anti-Indian sentiments that McDonald faced within the United States, it also erases McDonald’s particular life experiences as well as the superintendent’s own role in shaping them. The delegation’s large bar bill from the winter months, combined with McDonald’s own correspondence, confirms his considerable alcohol consumption. Writing in 1826 of his diversions in the capital city, McDonald reassured McKenney, “I think, Sir, that you need entertain no apprehension

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that my disposition had been confirmed into habit. It was a fearful experiment, and the occasional disposition of my feelings gave it a character of recklessness which must have been truly painful to every judicious friend.”  Yet as McDonald suggested, a series of specific events and encounters generated emotional struggles, which, in turn, brought on his drinking. That winter the Choctaw delegation lost another elder statesman, Chief Pushmataha, who died from respiratory disease, which would have taken a toll on the envoys’ morale. The federal government’s entrenchment would also have been a source of pain for McDonald, particularly now that he was negotiating with the very individuals with whom he had spent so many of his earlier years. Throughout his time with Calhoun and McKenney, McDonald had received an education that promised opportunities comparable to those available to free white male adults. Then Ohio elites barred him from fully enjoying those opportunities, followed by the refusal of his own mentors to recognize his tribal nation’s market-based demands for equitable payment for land. While McKenney remained icy toward McDonald in the years after the treaty—putatively due to McDonald’s intemperance— and complained of the bar bill, McKenney was also among those federal officials who left the Choctaw delegates with excessive free time by not responding to their letters, in hope of crushing their resistance to diminished annuities. If the plan was to wear down the delegation over time, it worked only in part. By the close of January 1825, McDonald and the rest of the treaty party agreed to a lower settlement of $96,000 over the span of sixteen years, the eradication of Pushmataha and Mushulatubbee’s trade debts, and $6,000 annually in perpetuity, which would be specifically earmarked for the next twenty years to help fund existing mission schools and realize McDonald, Folsom, and Kingsbury’s vision for a national academy within the Choctaw Nation. Also per McDonald’s specific demands, the federal government covered the debts owed to those Choctaws who fought in Pensacola, ended the allotment policy of Doak’s Stand, and recognized the right to sell “in fee simple” the private reserves granted in the same treaty, which essentially allowed Choctaw occupants to pass their reserves to heirs. To pay for the “spoliations” of claimants such as Molly McDonald, $2,000 was also set aside, and it was agreed that “an agent shall be appointed for the Choctaws West of the Mississippi, and a Blacksmith be settled among them.” For Choctaws, the takeaway was far more than what Calhoun and McKenney

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had initially offered, but far less than what they knew their lands were worth. As for James McDonald’s individual claims, he received title over his mother’s farm and compensation for his mother from the federal government for the man she had purchased in the amount of $684.50. James McDonald remained in Washington with Daniel McCurtain and Robert Cole for several weeks after the treaty negotiations as Cole recovered from illness. McDonald’s had been a long and difficult journey back to the federal capital, one that would weigh on his relationships with his former guardians for years. He had nonetheless accomplished what he had set out to do. He had secured his mother’s rights to human and landed property in Hinds County, Mississippi, and he had done his best to ensure that the Choctaw Nation got the most favorable treaty possible. If he hoped that his future would unfold with less conflict, he would be disappointed. After he arrived back in the lower Mississippi Valley later in 1825, Choctaw educational politics and Mississippi land grabs would continue to cast a shadow over his life.

8 Choctaw Schooling

The terms of the Treaty of Washington did not last long. Unbeknown to James McDonald, as he left the federal capital with Robert Cole and Daniel McCurtain in June 1825, his vision of a national schooling system had already begun to fall apart. Returning to Choctaw country in advance of the three men, Eastern District chief Mushulatubbee had worked with the Choctaws’ federal Indian agent William Ward to apply the $6,000 annual fund set aside by Choctaw delegates for existing mission schools and the new national academy within the nation to establish an elite boarding school for Choctaw boys outside of it. Ward reached out to his brother-in-law Richard Mentor Johnson in the Baptist Mission Society in Kentucky, who offered to open the institution in his plantation household in Blue Springs, Kentucky, well over four hundred miles to the north of Choctaw homelands. With Ward’s approval, Mushulatubbee quickly reserved most of the spaces at this boarding school, which came to be called Choctaw Academy, for prominent families within his district. Rather than enhance the level and reach of schools within Choctaw territories, as McDonald and David Folsom had planned to do with the funds from the Treaty of Washington, Mushulatubbee formalized the practice of sending Choctaw boys to the United States. Moreover, when Choctaw Academy opened the following November, Mushulatubbee dramatically increased the number of Southeast

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Indian youths who would find themselves educated in the slaveholding households that upheld the U.S. plantation economy. Mushulatubbee’s collaboration with Ward demonstrated the growing politicization of U.S. schooling as Choctaw people struggled to retain their homelands. As the cotton kingdom boomed and federal administrators and U.S. settlers pushed for more of the Choctaw Nation’s remaining territories, many Choctaw families saw access to U.S. regimes of knowledge as critical to empowering their children in U.S. markets and international politics as well as within the Choctaw Nation. Mushulatubbee joined David Folsom and James McDonald in seeing utility in formal schooling and in envisioning an institutionalized schooling system that went beyond the current one offered by American Board missionaries. But he departed from these two younger men when it came to questions concerning who would access U.S. schools, who would educate Choctaw children and the kinds of educations Choctaw youth were to receive, and where Choctaw schooling would take place. Would Choctaw boys and girls have access to a network of mission schools and an advanced academy on Choctaw lands, as Folsom and McDonald had hoped? Or would only the male relations of well-positioned families benefit from exposure to more elite colonial educations at the plantation boarding school that Mushulatubbee established in Kentucky? McDonald’s circulation through white homes in the United States had made him a staunch supporter of schools within the Choctaw Nation. His writings to his former guardian in Washington about political differences among Choctaw leaders concerning education and political governance provide an important window into contests over Choctaw educational politics as they erupted in the 1820s. James McDonald was committed to the democratization of U.S. education and believed in the importance of Choctaw oversight of children undergoing formal schooling. Choctaw leaders such as Mushulatubbee, on the other hand, had concerns about whether the mission schools endorsed by McDonald effectively fostered changing attitudes concerning race, masculinity, and labor among Choctaw elites. McDonald and Mushulatubbee both supported the practice of racial slavery and, inasmuch, wanted formal schooling to impart the language, literacy skills, and physical behaviors that would strengthen Choctaw ownership of people of African descent in the lower Mississippi Valley. Their disagreement was over whether schools run

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by missionaries within the nation could effectively offer these forms of knowledge. As they clashed over the nature and shape of Choctaw schooling, they articulated new conceptualizations of Choctaw masculinity. Both believed that Choctaw manhood mandated the ability to assert physical mastery over men and women of African descent, evincing that black people had become essential in elite constructions of gender. These shared convictions reinforced the practice of racial slavery within the Choctaw Nation and downplayed the political contributions of Choctaw women in Choctaw governance, even as ongoing differences over how slaveholding Choctaw men were to learn their racialized masculine prerogatives split Choctaw leadership apart. The extant sources highlighting debates over education indicate that slavery and schooling became intertwined concerns for leading men as the Choctaw Nation continued to struggle against territorial dispossession at the hands of U.S. whites. Indeed, in addition to widening political fissures between Choctaw leaders, Choctaw elites’ commitments to holding black men and women in bondage created international conflicts at Johnson’s plantation school in Blue Springs. Choctaw students there tried to assert power over enslaved people—and especially over enslaved women—signaling the ways in which mastery over black women’s bodies was becoming essential to some Choctaw men’s understandings of individual and collective sovereignty. As these claims to enslaved women clashed with Johnson’s own ideas about his white paternal mastery on his Blue Springs plantation, it became clear that for both white and Indian men in Kentucky, access to the bodies of black women had come to symbolize competing claims over labor and territory in the South.

Mushulatubbee’s Missionary Troubles By the time Mushulatubbee was conspiring with Indian agent William Ward in 1825 to create a boarding school in Kentucky, his relationship with the American Board missionaries had grown sour. At the time of the missionaries’ arrival in the lower Mississippi Valley back in the spring of 1818, the chief had been eager to work with the Presbyterian and Congregationalist evangelists from New England. Like most Choctaws, he had little interest in the Calvinist religious beliefs these new migrants hoped to instill in Choctaw people—or even in Christianity more broadly. Yet he believed that the English language, literacy, and numeracy skills missionary educators could impart to Choctaw youths would prove vital as the next generation

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found itself navigating the United States. Others clearly shared Mushulatubbee’s point of view. Mushulatubbee’s matrilineal relative David Folsom had initially invited American Board missionaries to set up schools within Choctaw territories, and Mushulatubbee—along with several other chiefs— recognized that the potential establishment of a school near Folsom’s residence could be an important source of power for the rising Choctaw leader, allowing him to promote and control access to the forms of knowledge that were becoming increasingly coveted within the nation. Mushulatubbee’s interactions with American Board missionaries developed slowly. Establishing their first settlement three miles south of the Yallobusha River, the earliest American Board migrants lived far from the chief ’s Eastern District towns. Located near the expanding white settlements that edged into the Choctaws’ Western District, the missionaries were, in fact, far from most Choctaw people, who largely lived near the Chickasawhay, Pascagoula, and Pearl Rivers (see Figure 7–3). John McKee, the federal Indian agent to the Choctaw Nation in 1818, had recommended the Yallobusha location for its convenience to riverine transportation and U.S. markets, not for its proximity to Choctaw settlements. Yet even with its distance from most Choctaw communities, the station received Choctaw people’s attention. Before the school had even opened, several Choctaw families traveled over 160 miles to place eight youths with the missionaries for schooling. A little over a year after the American Board’s arrival in the lower Mississippi Valley, the missionary Cyrus Kingsbury—who oversaw the inaugural station—boasted of “almost daily applications of more scholars,” more than his school could support. By 1820 the station—named “Elliot” after seventeenth-century Puritan missionary John Eliot—housed approximately 80 students, “60 . . . males, & 20 females,” on a campus that included eleven cabins, a hewed-log schoolhouse, a joiner’s shop, two corn cribs and a meat house, a mill and lumber house, granaries, a blacksmith’s shop, stable, three outhouses, 220 cattle, and at least sixty “cleared” acres. Donations by Choctaw leaders helped to create this bounty for the American Board settlement. As Kingsbury reported, “At a general council in August [1819] . . . the natives & white men residing in the nation, subscribed 85 cows & calves & more than $1300 for the benefit of this school.” After visiting the station in 1820 Mushulatubbee himself provided funds out of his annuity shares, hoping the missionaries would build a schooling establishment in his own district.

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Kingsbury’s station at Elliot appeared lavish, stoking fears among some Choctaws that the American Board missionaries used Choctaw annuities for their own creature comforts. Kingsbury and his fellow missionaries, however, were plagued by debt, illness, and labor shortages, making it difficult for them to create duplicate mission stations as quickly as many Choctaw leaders anticipated. With the promise of new funds arising from the sale of the fifty-four sections of land ceded for schooling in the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, and to avoid alienating those who had contributed to American Board coffers, Kingsbury finally established a second mission— called Mayhew— along Oaktibbeha Creek in 1820, near John and Sophia Pitchlynn’s residence in the Eastern District. In 1821 the missionary established two day schools, which were economical alternatives to costly residential mission stations. The first of these institutions, called Bethel, was in the Western District near the Pearl and Black Rivers. The second was close to Pigeon Roost, the Eastern District plantation home and trading house of David Folsom. January 1823 saw the foundation of the third mission station and residential school in Choctaw territories, located at Emmaus in the Southern District. According to Kingsbury, Mushulatubbee “brought two of his sons, & a nephew” to Mayhew in June 1822. It was not until the following June, however, that the Eastern chief got his wish for a school closer to where he lived. That summer the American Board sent Adin Gibbs, whom Kingsbury described as a Cornwall-educated “native of the Delaware Tribe,” to teach five children at Mushulatubbee’s settlement site deep in Choctaw territory. The mission school on Mushulatubbee’s property was at first a boon to the American Board missionaries’ efforts. Until Gibbs opened his school, many of the mission stations and day schools stood at the margins of Choctaw country. As with the original American Board settlement at Elliot, the new stations had been situated a good distance from the more densely populated regions of the Choctaw Nation, and many of the Choctaw families encountered at these sites were those already engaged with Euro-American value systems. Scattered around the missionaries’ schools were the plantation households and trading posts of intermarried French and British traders, along with their bicultural descendants, many of whom had chosen to continue their parents’ entrepreneurial endeavors in private property ownership, racial slavery, and export agriculture. Indeed, some of the most landed and prominent slaveholding families lived within these regions, including the Perrys and Folsoms.

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Affiliation with these individuals was of some comfort to the missionaries, who feared the inconveniences and cultural isolation they associated with life among communities they deemed “uncivilized.” Far from the New England settlements in which most of them had been raised and educated, the newcomers welcomed the ease that came with living where many spoke English and participated in colonial cultural practices. The slaveholding practices of the missionaries’ bicultural neighbors proved especially important in the evangelists’ early days in Choctaw country. Even though the American Board adopted an abolitionist stance when it came to slavery, the new arrivals hired slaves from local Choctaw planters to complete the strenuous work required to erect and maintain mission structures. Furthermore, missionaries quickly found themselves enjoying robust congregations, due to the enslaved people who quickly affiliated themselves with the American Board missions. In fact, enslaved people made up the majority of the missionaries’ congregations, finding in them an avenue through which to practice religious beliefs, articulate visions of freedom, and carve out a space of autonomy. In her work on enslaved people in the Choctaw Nation, historian Barbara Krauthamer writes, “The first cohort of enslaved evangelicals that gravitated toward the mission churches . . . in the early 1820s included a number of people who had previously belonged to Georgia’s thriving black Baptist communities” and often used Christian discourse as a means to “[cloak] visions of deliverance from bondage in the evangelical language of faithful devotion to the Lord.” Knowledgeable when it came to Scripture, black congregants did not necessarily see American Board evangelists as a source of religious authority; rather, they saw in their own church attendance “opportunities that might temporarily curb the reach of their master’s control.” Yet even as black slaves and Choctaw slaveholders bolstered New England missionaries’ early evangelical forays into Choctaw territories, the remote locations of the first mission stations had their drawbacks. While many bicultural families were not explicitly Christian, they practiced some of the cultural values missionaries hoped to impart to Native people. Some of the aspiring leaders near early mission settlements had even already spent considerable time in U.S. educational institutions. David Folsom and Peter Pitchlynn had even lived with Southern white families and attended schools in Tennessee. While black congregants helped to keep missionary initiatives alive, missionaries still coveted Indian souls. As a result, men like

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Kingsbury felt compelled to send evangelists deeper into Choctaw territories, where they would supposedly encounter the Native people whom the American Board billed as desperately in need of U.S. cultural assimilation, familial reorganization, and Christian salvation. Mushulatubbee’s plantation presented an ideal venue for fulfilling this vision. On his farm “adjoining a large prairie” and located off an “old military road” that connected Choctaw territories in the Eastern District to Lake Pontchartrain, the chief relied upon enslaved people of African descent to help him run his cattle business. Indeed, although he was not raised in a bicultural family setting, Mushulatubbee shared some of the economic and cultural values of the bicultural slaveholding families who lived on the outer edges of the nation. He engaged in the racialized forms of chattel slavery unique to the Euro-Atlantic world, owning African American people as slaves to support his endeavors in animal husbandry. Several other Choctaw households within Mushulatubbee’s district also took on the practice of owning black slaves. Even still, many Choctaw men and women near Mushulatubbee’s settlement appear to have remained wary of adopting the dress and behavioral practices that missionaries believed to be the hallmarks of “civilization.” While the establishment of a mission school at Mushulatubbee’s plantation indicated the Eastern District chief’s overall support of the board’s initiatives, many Choctaw families, and even the chief himself, objected to many of the American Board’s policies. Like many other Native communities in North America, Choctaw people largely eschewed the physical punishment of youth, preferring instead verbal rebuke and didactic lessons by elder kin. Missionaries’ penchant for harsh discipline clashed with these beliefs about child-rearing. As Kingsbury reported to Secretary of War John Calhoun in 1823, a chief who had five children residing at Elliot “and whose little daughter had been punished for misconduct, came and expressed much displeasure at the way in which the children were treated.” The close living arrangements at mission schools also proved the ideal setting for the rapid spread of disease and other illness. At the same time, mission educators faced criticism when, citing lack of room, they turned Choctaw children away. In fact, refusals to educate children proved to have a significant impact on the American Board’s standing in the Choctaw Nation. In 1821 Robert Cole, Apuckshunubbee’s potential successor in the Western District, grew angry when the missionaries at Elliot balked at taking a child

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belonging to Daniel McCurtain—who was married to Cole’s sister— since five of McCurtain’s children were already attending the school. After this rebuff of his matrilineal kin, Cole never reconciled with the American Board and soon thereafter became one of their more powerful detractors within the nation. Perhaps most controversial was the American Board missionaries’ insistence that Choctaw children labor on mission farms, inspiring more than a few Choctaw families to question why they were parting with their children in the first place. Unsurprisingly, given Cyrus Kingsbury’s desires to train Indian people as manual laborers, by the early 1820s Choctaw leaders across the nation expressed concern over the amount of time American Board educators deployed Choctaw scholars—particularly Choctaw boys—in their agricultural fields at the expense of an education in English language and literacy, as well as numeracy skills and useful technical trades, including much-needed blacksmithing. The very same chief who expressed displeasure at the punishment of his daughter complained that his children “worked too much on the farm.” The reason he had brought them to the mission school was to “read and write, and to learn trades,” not to engage in unskilled manual labor. Before the establishment of the school at Mushulatubbee’s plantation, Mushulatubbee himself had expressed similar concerns. He told Kingsbury that he was “willing” that the children “should work some, but wanted them to attend school more than they worked.” In his burgeoning campaign against the American Board after its clash with McCurtain, Robert Cole pointed to these difficult physical work conditions. In 1822 he denounced Elliot educators for making “ little boys work with heavy axes” and “lame feet.” By 1823 he declared the missionaries to be “bad things for the nation,” demanding they leave his district entirely. The stark realities of the expanding Southern plantation economy amplified concerns over fieldwork. As racial slavery became ubiquitous across the lower Mississippi Valley, including among a small group of Choctaw elites, the strenuous field labors expected of Choctaw boys had strong racial implications. Mission scholars were not only spending less time learning the three Rs when they worked outdoors, but according to some Choctaw leaders, they were being treated akin to slaves. Agricultural work had historically been the purview of Choctaw women, though Choctaw men had been known to help their female kin in preparing new fields for planting, sowing seeds, and harvesting produce. As a result, it was less the inversion of gender roles that

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bothered these leaders than it was the growing association between heavy field labor and racial servitude. It was not the small-scale “three sisters” agricultural practices of Choctaw women involving the symbiotic production of corn, beans, and squash that Choctaw boys were expected to perform, but rather the backbreaking physical toil increasingly connected with the monocultural tasks demanded of enslaved women and men of African descent. As Robert Cole continued to denounce American Board schools in 1825, he remarked that young boys were being “driven” by missionaries “in the same manner that negroes were on the plantations in the Southern States.”  Cole’s concerns highlighted not just the growing racism that came with Choctaw elites’ investments in racial slavery but also the precarious racial and economic status of Choctaw people in the South. Choctaw slaveholding was firmly entrenched among a number of the most prosperous families within the nation by the early nineteenth century, and men such as Cole wanted children to acquire the educational tools required to maintain strong positions in the slave-driven markets that fueled political and economic power in their homelands. Indeed, Choctaw families’ incentive for sending children to live and work with missionaries was to ensure that these youths maintained their territorial sovereignty as well as their individual cultural prerogatives—which for some had come to include enslaving people of African descent—not to watch Choctaws become exploited in a manner similar to black people. With Choctaw women and men already picking cotton for white Southern planters, it must have seemed to many Choctaw families that missionaries were seeking to direct Choctaw students toward such vulnerable wage labor activities rather than empower them within the expanding plantation economy. Further exacerbating the ire of slaveholding Choctaw elites was the missionaries’ denunciation of the practice of slavery itself, even as Choctaw slaveholders provided fi nancial support—not to mention enslaved labor—to keep the New England migrants’ missions afloat. The personal benefits and political power that would accrue to Mushulatubbee as a result of establishing a mission school at his own settlement appears to have trumped desires to reject the pedagogical efforts of American Board missionaries, at least at first. An American Board mission school at Mushulatubbee’s home would not only enable the chief to keep his own children close, allowing him to maintain better oversight over the missionaries’ actions, but it would also provide him with some control over access

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to colonial education and missionary trade, both of which threatened to strengthen the hand of David Folsom, his prime political opponent. Citing Mushulatubbee’s willingness to sell Choctaw lands to the U.S. federal government in order to cover his own trade debts, Folsom had called into question the Eastern District chief’s leadership. With a school already established near his own Eastern District settlement at Pigeon Roost and matrilineal ties to Mingo Puskus—the principal chief of the Eastern District in the late eighteenth century—Folsom had both the political influence and the kinship connections to challenge Mushulatubbee’s governance. Yet a series of clashes between Mushulatubbee and Adin Gibbs, the Cornwall graduate from the Delaware Nation sent to teach at Mushulatubbee’s settlement, began to make an alliance between the American Board and the Eastern District chief look increasingly impossible. Gibbs, perhaps himself the recipient of harsh physical punishment while a Native student at Cornwall Academy, provoked Mushulatubbee’s concern with his discipline of Choctaw youth. Additionally, the Native teacher’s desire to learn the Choctaw language in order to better teach the Gospel to Choctaw students countered Mushulatubbee’s wish that Choctaw children acquire English language skills and other forms of secular knowledge. According to Mushulatubbee’s later accounts of American Board schools, children under the missionaries’ tutelage—including Gibbs’s— ended up learning little that would prove of use to them. One of Mushulatubbee’s “principal objections . . . to the missionaries,” he explained to Secretary of War John Henry Eaton in 1829, was “their introduction of the Choctaw Books in their schools.” “[T]hey teach our children altogether in the Choctaw language,” he continued, “when as they should be kept from using their own language as much as possible, to make good progress.”  “[W]e have never [received] a Scholar out of their Schools that was able to keep a grogshop book,” he told President Andrew Jackson in 1830. “[W]hen we found we Could Get nothing from them we Established an academy in kentuckey under the Direction of the [president] and the Superintedence of R M [Johnson].” Mushulatubbee’s indictment of Gibbs’s mission school may very well have been informed by the latter’s educational strategies. But the chief’s conflicts with the American Board may have also been influenced by Gibbs’s condemnation of Mushulatubbee’s governance strategies within the Eastern District. Gibbs not only chafed at Mushulatubbee’s criticism of his disciplinary methods, but also the chief ’s distribution of whiskey among

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Choctaw men, even after Mushulatubbee had made a public disavowal of alcohol consumption in 1822. Gibbs was so frustrated, in fact, that within a short period of time he requested to leave the school at Mushulatubbee’s home. While initially encouraged to persevere, by June 1824 Gibbs received permission to abandon his pedagogical efforts and return to the mission at Mayhew. Infuriated, Mushulatubbee warned that he would “break up all the schools in the nation” if Gibbs did not return. After traveling to Mayhew in the company of William Ward—who had by that point assumed his position as the federal Indian agent to the Choctaw Nation— Mushulatubbee negotiated for the continuation of the school at his plantation, agreeing to conditions set forth by the board, except for the prohibition of alcohol. This established an uneasy truce, one that would fall apart upon Mushulatubbee’s return from Washington in 1825. The strategies engaged in by Mushulatubbee at the Treaty of Washington ultimately led to the dissolution of his relationship with the American Board for good. Having ceded more territory to cover new trade debts, Mushulatubbee faced considerable disapproval upon his return home, including threats to his life. Turning again to the redistributive tactics that had built up his debt to begin with, he worked to regain his supporters at the expense of other districts. Taking control of all of the annual annuities delegated to the three regional chiefs, including those of his own ally Robert Cole, who now served as chief of the Western District, Mushulatubbee distributed gifts in cash and, according to Kingsbury and Folsom, whiskey to men in his district. Cyrus Kingsbury alleged that this led to a month of drinking, fighting, and killing around Mushulatubbee’s home. Arguing that Mushulatubbee was “so overbearing” and that “there was so much drinking at the house,” Kingsbury once again closed the school on July 1, 1825. As Mushulatubbee’s relationships with Gibbs and Kingsbury grew tense between the opening of the school in 1823 and the summer of 1825, he began collaborating with Indian agent Ward to create a new schooling system that would allow him to maintain political influence and continue his children’s U.S. educations. Indeed, Kingsbury’s correspondence suggests that even before the official closing of Gibbs’s school, Mushulatubbee was looking for avenues through which to educate Eastern District boys outside of the American Board’s oversight. Having envisioned a national academy affiliated with American Board missionaries well before Choctaw delegates even left for the Treaty of Washington, Folsom—Mushulatubbee’s most vocal detractor—was

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on the verge of gaining control over a significant educational resource, not to mention a large portion of the $6,000 school annuity designated to fund the national academy. The closing of Mushulatubbee’s mission school, however, appears to have proved the final straw for the Eastern District chief, inspiring him to follow through with his plans to establish a boarding school at Richard Johnson’s Kentucky plantation. In the wake of Gibbs’s permanent departure from Mushulatubbee’s home, eight bicultural men within Mushulatubbee’s region petitioned Kingsbury to replace Mushulatubbee’s mission school with one near the home of a man named John Walker, which, if approved, would turn missionary education within the Eastern District completely over to Mushulatubbee’s nationalist rivals. With the establishment of a boarding school outside of the Choctaw Nation, Mushulatubbee would prevent this proliferation of American Board schools among the households of his opponents within it. In collaboration with Indian agent Ward, Mushulatubbee took the entire $6,000 annuity set aside for Choctaw schools, including the national academy, to establish Choctaw Academy in Kentucky, reserving most of the spots for boys of his choosing. By stripping the nation of these schooling funds, he potentially ensured himself and his supporters a monopoly when it came to accessing more elite U.S. educations. As the brother-in-law of Kentucky senator Richard Mentor Johnson, agent Ward proved a useful ally in this endeavor. Johnson saw Indian education as a means to alleviate his dire financial circumstances. Indeed, ever since Thomas McKenney had pushed his Indian Civilization Act through Congress, Johnson had hoped to run an Indian residential school, with the help of the Baptist Mission Society, at his plantation home in Blue Springs. Some of Mushulatubbee’s contemporaries saw these strug gles between Mushulatubbee and Folsom over schooling as a battle between “full blood” people and “mixed race” Choctaw elites. As Kingsbury reported in the colonial language of his day, he “understood it to be the wish of the most intelligent half-breeds and white men . . . to have such [a national academy] established in the nation, and under the direction of our board.” However, given that Mushulatubbee had the backing of men such as Robert Cole and Indian agent William Ward and that Folsom had the support of Choctaw people with little or no European ancestry, this racial framing of the battles over schools conceals more than it reveals. Pressure to yield new territories to the United States required all Choctaw people to contend with the nature

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and shape of education and political governance within their nation. As Mushulatubbee’s trade debts and regional politics led to new land sales, those who saw benefits in centralizing political governance began to gain traction within Choctaw communities. The establishment of Choctaw Academy on Johnson’s Kentucky plantation was Mushulatubbee’s last grasp at maintaining the district-oriented power relations that had long structured Choctaw governance. He could distribute access to the school in Blue Springs to those within his community who supported his leadership. Senator Johnson’s plantation household may have looked like a particularly appealing location in which to educate Choctaw boys. By sending children there, Mushulatubbee established ties with the influential politician and enabled a new generation of elite boys from his district to do the same. Further, if American Board schooling threatened to expose Choctaw youth to the racialized labors performed by people of African descent, a school run by members of the Baptist Mission Society may have seemed to offer an important alternative. The Kentucky evangelists had largely accepted slave ownership among their ranks and, as a slaveholder himself, Johnson may have initially appeared even sympathetic to slaveholding Choctaws’ efforts to educate boys in the alchemy of plantation mastery. Sending boys outside of Choctaw lands was clearly not new. However, with the establishment of the Baptist-run and all-male Kentucky school, Mushulatubbee, Ward, and Johnson amplified the number of boys circulating through U.S. slaveholding households and educational institutions. Having appropriated the schooling fund for himself, Mushulatubbee simultaneously ensured that the institutions providing advanced educations in English literacy and numeracy became the privileged domain of elite boys and men of his choosing. Mushulatubbee relied on the unscrupulous Ward to bring his ambitions to fruition. Writing to Thomas McKenney that the residential institution had the approbation of the entire Choctaw Council, Ward secured the $6,000 schooling annuity to support the proposed academy at Johnson’s plantation. Under his auspices as the superintendent of Indian aff airs, McKenney reluctantly supported the project, which his supervisor, Secretary of War James Barbour, insisted on running through the Department of War. In November 1825 Choctaw Academy opened its doors, its name an ironic twist for those who had hoped to oversee a national academy within the Choctaw Nation. Johnson eagerly welcomed twenty-one boys above the age

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of eight from Mushulatubbee’s region into his spacious home, as well as the lavish funds that would follow them. There the Kentucky senator and the self-proclaimed killer of Tecumseh promised to accommodate the Choctaw youth as he would “respectable white children.” 

National Schooling As the Mississippi days grew longer in the spring of 1826 and the sun began to warm the banks of the Pearl River, James McDonald found himself again drawn into Choctaw politics. Since returning to Jackson, Mississippi, after the Treaty of Washington, he had maintained a less public profile, continuing to finalize agreements concerning the reserve he had secured for his mother and deliberating upon his future. To be close to Molly McDonald and her Hinds County farm, he had relinquished any intentions of returning to Ohio—at least for the time being— although he had not entirely given up the idea of practicing law. Political conflicts within the Choctaw Nation, however, soon informed McDonald’s plans. In November 1825 Thomas McKenney resumed a frosty correspondence with McDonald, hoping that his former pupil could provide insights into tensions within the nation emerging over Choctaw Academy. By the following April, McDonald was touring Choctaw country at McKenney’s request, sending reports of the political aftershocks brought on by Mushulatubbee’s and Ward’s actions. In the five months since Johnson had opened Choctaw Academy at his Kentucky plantation, Choctaw politics had reached a crisis point. In appropriating shared resources for his own district, Mushulatubbee had raised the ire of leaders throughout the nation, and by undermining Folsom’s vision for an advanced school at Pigeon Roost, Mushulatubbee had fueled Folsom’s drive to unseat him. Indeed, around the time of McDonald’s tour in April, Folsom called for the Eastern chief ’s ouster. Meanwhile, as McDonald reported back to McKenney, Robert Cole of the Western District and Tapenahoma of the Southern District “each claim[ed] the privilege of sending 20 or 25 children to Kentucky.”  Ward, unconcerned that the annuity would not cover these new pupils’ travel, room, and board at Johnson’s school, approved these requests. McDonald reported that when he left Choctaw lands at the end of the month he witnessed both chiefs “assembling their children” for the trip north. Asking Ward how these children

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were to be supported, McDonald received a simple reply: “That is a point . . . which you must settle among yourselves.” Ward’s response, McDonald reported, served as “a mere mockery at our distress.”  Far from an impartial observer of these events, McDonald made his support for local schooling quite clear. Even before traveling south from Jackson, Mississippi, into the Choctaws’ remaining territories, he had vocalized his disapproval of “sending Choctaw children [out of] the nation for their education.” Agreeing with his peers that the missionaries could be “too strict” and even “intolerant” when it came to their interactions with Choctaw scholars, he nonetheless believed the American Board educators deserved credit for their “perseverance” and “unimpeachable” motives when it came to combatting what McDonald saw as Choctaw people’s “prejudices.” “Whatever the result of my inquiries,” he informed McKenney, “I am clearly of opinion that the missionaries ought to remain unmolested, undisturbed, and allowed quietly to pursue their labors with the annuity already granted them.” McDonald contended to use “such influence” as he “may possess . . . in their behalf.”  The political fallout over Choctaw Academy galvanized McDonald’s opinion concerning schooling and political governance. He emphasized the continued importance of a national academy for older students within the nation, as well as his disgust with Agent Ward, and hinted that recent events concerning education, land cessions, and annuities called for the centralization of the Choctaws’ governing institutions. The establishment of the exclusive boarding school on Johnson’s Kentucky plantation, he argued, did nothing to change the condition of schooling for most Choctaw people. The vast majority of Choctaw youth—particularly Choctaw boys—who remained within Choctaw territories had only the American Board’s missionary schools to attend, which did not accommodate older children. Choctaws needed a “school of a superior order, and upon a plan something different from the mission schools,” he contended. “Boys when they have arrived to the age of 14 or 15 years are considered too large to be admitted into the missionary schools; and it is obvious that but comparatively few of the children of the nation can be educated in Kentucky.” Remaining silent on opportunities for Choctaw girls, he concluded that to “all such deserving youths” who “failed admission into the missionary schools and lacked friends and influence to take them to Kentucky, the National Academy would open its portals, and offer the means of instruction.”  Perhaps the young boys who lined up to leave the nation reminded him of his own departure from his homelands

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at a similarly young age. If they did, it must have heightened his desires that male youth have access to advanced schooling on the lands that shaped their memories and kept them closer to kin. Even as he initially held out hope for a national academy on Choctaw homelands, McDonald denounced Agent Ward for his duplicitous participation in the educational schisms that had so recently come to a head. On Mushulatubbee’s appropriation of the cash annuities, McDonald found Ward “blameless.” However, “in the manner in which the appropriation for the support of schools had been applied,” McDonald could not “hold him free from censure.” “It is a custom which has long obtained in the nation,” he highlighted, “that whenever there is an appropriation of money, or of goods, for the benefit of the nation, it is to be distributed equally between the three districts.” McDonald believed that Ward should have “checked” Mushulatubbee on the latter’s desire for a boarding school, for the school did little for the nation as a whole. It denied most Choctaw youth access to formal schooling, and even those selected to attend would gain little benefit from their tenure in Kentucky, as they were too young to absorb the information that they needed before fairness mandated their return to their homelands. “Was it not his bounden duty, as the agent of the Government,” McDonald posed to McKenney concerning Ward’s misdeeds, “to interpose his authority to prevent such a monstrous injustice, which in effect denies two thirds of the Choctaws of the benefit of the fund for the space of 3 or perhaps 4 years? And should he not, in the conscientious discharge of his duty, have remonstrated against the policy of sending off children at so early an age of 8 years? For what business will these boys be capable should they return in 3 years,—and they cannot, in justice to others, remain longer?” It was Ward’s duty to recognize that Mushulatubbee’s actions were “unjust” and to subsequently “interfere.” As McDonald argued, Ward “should have informed himself of every particular respecting the prospects of a school in Kentucky—the price of board, tuition, &c., and he should have seen that equal justice was rendered to each district.” McDonald’s denunciation of Ward revealed his position that district governance among chiefs made Choctaws vulnerable to U.S. maneuverings. Ward “knows that the [Choctaw] nation is divided,” McDonald contended, “that it is with the utmost difficulty that the chiefs can be brought together, and when brought together, that they cannot agree.” As he wrote elsewhere, “with applications to congress from half of the States in the Union for the

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extinguishment of Indian tribes to land,” these internal divisions were particularly dangerous. As McDonald explained, in 1826 Secretary of War James Barbour had proposed “treating with individuals” who proved amenable to land cessions when “the Chiefs or proper authorities” within Indian nations refused to accommodate U.S. demands. The outcome of this would be devastating to the Choctaw Nation. “Its effect would be to foster jealousies and create feuds between different and rival families,” McDonald argued, “and might in the end produce a partial civil war.” The creation of Choctaw Academy and the fallout that ensued led McDonald to express regret for having even participated in the Treaty of Washington. Yet he also indicated his support for a different way of organizing and ordering Choctaw politics in the ser vice of Choctaw sovereignty. By the close of his travels through Choctaw country, McDonald realized that the establishment of Choctaw Academy precluded his hope for a local secondary school. With the disbursement of the $6,000 schooling annuity that Folsom and McDonald, not to mention McKenney and Kingsbury, had intended for a national academy in the nation, there were not ample funds to build and run another school within Choctaw territories. While there was still money pending from the sale of fifty-four sections of land after the Treaty of Doak’s Stand, these funds would have to be used to support Cole’s and Tapenahoma’s demands that their own communities have access to Johnson’s plantation school. As McDonald soon acknowledged, even if these lands produced “forty thousand” dollars for the Choctaw Nation, “it is very evident, that should Tuppana Hoomma and Cole, each claim the privilege of sending 20 or 25 children to Kentucky, and look to this fund for their support, it would be totally exhausted in less than four years.” Cole and Tapenahoma got their wish to send their children abroad. While Choctaw Academy kept its doors open far longer than four years, the opportunities for a secondary institution within the nation, at least for the time being, evaporated.

The Choctaw Constitution McDonald may have been ultimately unable to stop the continuation or even the expansion of Choctaw Academy. The founding of the school, however, set in motion the structural changes in the Choctaws’ political and social governance for which he and his allies had hoped, effectively bringing

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about the centralized slaveholding republic they sought to establish. Combined with news of Creek chief William McIntosh’s unilateral cession of Creek lands to the United States and congressional approval of new treaty negotiations with the Choctaw Nation, Mushulatubbee’s monopolization of annuity funds to create Choctaw Academy motivated the Eastern District Council to terminate the chief’s leadership in April 1826 and elect David Folsom to four years of ser vice in his stead. The following summer, Robert Cole found himself voted out of his brief tenure as the leader of the Western District, succeeded by his matrilineal nephew Greenwood Leflore. Along with Tapenahoma, the two new district leaders drafted a constitution that forbade a single district chief to cede land and mandated the consent of all three districts when it came to the use of collective annuities. Declaring Choctaw lands to be “common property of the whole nation,” the three men ensured that no single leader or district could make decisions on the part of all Choctaw people again. Rather than signal the death knell for established forms of Choctaw governance, the Choctaw Constitution imposed new structures on older governance systems while codifying emerging social and political relationships into law. Districts maintained long-standing practices in which influential men with par ticu lar kinship ties and martial and political achievements came to consensus decisions with their communities. At the same time, however, the constitution instituted a national committee that, alongside a national council and town captains, could draft and approve new laws for the nation, limiting any one individual’s or district’s ability to make decisions about collective resources. This more centralized and hierarchical leadership structure could thus override town-centered decision-making. The Choctaw Constitution also reflected changing ideas about race, labor, and property. The eight men from each district who were elected into the new governing body were primarily slaveholding, bicultural Choctaw elites who sought to transform not only the decision-making structure of the nation, but also the kinds of values the new leadership would uphold. With centralization came the legal legitimation of revolutionary principles concerning race, sex, and slavery. The final draft of the Choctaw Constitution has not been preserved. But an analysis of Peter Pitchlynn’s notes of the proceedings of the council meetings that led to the new legal codes shows that the document’s drafters worked both to protect their territorial

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sovereignty and to solidify racial slavery by drawing a racial color line that kept whites and Indians on one side and black people on the other. New laws prevented white men from marrying into the Choctaw Nation without a marriage license from the government, which would allow Choctaw leaders to prevent white men from marrying Choctaw women in order to gain Choctaw land and resources. They did recognize, however, these intercultural unions and even welcomed white men in relationships sanctioned by the Choctaw government: “And thus,” Pitchlynn’s journal stated, “the man will be included with us and counted with us.” While white men who met the government’s approval would enjoy full privileges in the nation, the experiences of enslaved people of African descent were to be much different. “From this time forward,” Pitchlynn wrote, “we shall be in agreement that . . . Choctaw people and the white people who are counted with the Choctaws shall not marry black slaves.” Those who broke this law would be “fined fifty dollars,” with one half of it “placed in the hands of the witness” and the other half going to the Choctaw government. In addition, if a white or an Indian man was found to have had “relations with a black female slave,” he would receive “thirty-five lashes without clothes on . . . upon his back.” If an “Indian woman or a white woman” was found guilty of “intercourse with a black slave,” her physical punishment was slightly more lenient, with “twenty-five lashes” to be “laid upon her back.” After the punishments were meted out, the couple was to “be separated.” Those found resuming relations would have the same punishments levied against them again. Pitchlynn’s journal copy of the constitution does not mention free blacks in these marriage prohibitions, which presumably means that both white and Indian women and men could legally marry free people of African descent. Yet by explicitly banning white and Indian men from marrying enslaved people of African descent while remaining silent concerning the small numbers of free blacks who continued to live within the bounds of the Choctaw Nation, those present at the council sessions may have presumed that people with African ancestry occupied the status of slave, thus conflating “blackness” with servitude. Indeed, the fact that Pitchlynn’s journal does not mention those of African descent such as the Coopers, who resided in the nation as free people, or the descendants of unions between black men and Choctaw women, suggests that the nation they envisioned did not have black citizens within it.

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By legislating against intermarriage and interracial sex between free and enslaved people, the constitution’s drafters denied kinship rights to enslaved people, assigning both them and their children to a subordinate class. In being barred from marrying or having sex with Choctaw women, enslaved black men were unable to enjoy the privileges such interracial unions created and remained vulnerable within the nation. They were not to share in the bounty of Choctaw women’s lands as did the many white men in bicultural unions who profited from the cultivation and export of commercial agriculture such as cotton or from raising and selling livestock. Nor were they to receive the protection of a wife’s clan against anyone who either accidentally or intentionally harmed them. Just as crucially, the bans sought to prevent Choctaw women from bearing the children of enslaved black men. While enslaved men may not have had the ancestral lineages that granted them membership in Choctaw society, matrilineal customs would have given their children with Choctaw women the bonds of affiliation that signified belonging and protection within and among Choctaw communities. By legally prohibiting sex and marriage between enslaved black men and Choctaw women, the drafters of the constitution worked to limit free populations of African descent. In addition, they sought to ensure that no one within the nation—including Choctaw women or the children they bore— could use their status as full members of Choctaw society to challenge enslavers’ rights to treat enslaved men as they saw fit. The prohibition of intermarriage and interracial sex between enslaved black women and Choctaw and white men also worked to preclude challenges to slaveholders’ privileges. As in the case of enslaved men, enslaved women brought into the nation had no kinship ties, unless they were adopted into a Choctaw clan. Although marriages to Choctaw men would not grant them—or their children—formal kinship status, such unions would potentially confound emerging racial codes in which enslavement was synonymous with the absence of any form of legally or socially recognized familial relations. By deeming enslaved women of African descent as inappropriate marriage or sexual partners, council members unambiguously indicated that these women were to permanently remain slaves. Any children born to unions between enslaved black women and white or Indian men would, in turn, follow the conditions of their mother. Matrilineal kinship ties would have already deemed children of unions between Choctaw men and non-Choctaw

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women as nonmembers of the nation. That the Choctaw delegation felt the need to ban both sex and marriage between Choctaws and whites and enslaved women suggests that they hoped to avoid any marital claims to enslaved black women or paternal claims to children born to enslaved mothers that might conflict with the property rights of the individuals who held these women in bondage. Just as in the slave society of their U.S. Southern neighbors, the new Choctaw republic reinforced heritable servitude by mandating that the children of enslaved women would be born slaves and not citizens or kin. The ties between slavery, interracial sex, and sovereignty were clear. Silence concerning free black men and women combined with prohibitions of heterosexual sex and marriage between Choctaw and enslaved black people or white and enslaved black people created two distinct social categories in the Choctaw Nation: Indian and white on one side, black on the other. By distancing Choctaw people and free whites within the nation from intimacy with black slaves in particular and black people in general, those attending the constitutional council meetings worked both to shore up the racialized economic system that empowered its elite families and to reveal their republic’s eligibility for self-governance in terms that U.S. federal officials would recognize. By implicitly suggesting that all people of African descent were slaves, and that those slaves had no legal opportunity to form legitimate relationships with free whites or Indians, the new legal codes suggested that the Choctaw populace affiliated itself with whites and not blacks. The men who drafted the Choctaw Constitution demonstrated that their republic’s sexual values were akin to those of their white Southern neighbors, who wielded legal codes concerning race, sex, and family as the preconditions for sovereignty. But the Choctaw Constitution was not written to please Southern whites. It explicitly declared that Choctaw people had the right to determine who was and was not a part of their nation. Just as the document barred slaves from Choctaw kinship systems, so did it bar white settlers from Choctaw lands, unless the Choctaw Nation gave its explicit approval. In addition to demanding the government’s right to approve white men as marriage partners, Pitchlynn’s journal of the meetings declared, “From this day forward those who are not slaves shall not enter and live in the Choctaw Ahepvtukla district proper. This is our decision. They [settlers] cannot reside among us. But if the committees and authorized persons grant permission, someone

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may reside there. But if it is not granted, he cannot.” Choctaw rights to govern over their proslavery republic were unassailable. Only the Choctaw government could determine which non- Choctaw people could settle in Choctaw territory. By placing limits on white immigration and simultaneously enabling black enslavement, the constitutional proceedings signaled that Choctaw slaveholders—not invading whites—were to harness the labor power of enslaved people of African descent on Choctaw lands. Unlike the U.S. South, the Choctaw republic would also guarantee the rights of Choctaw women to property, even when they were married to white men with patriarchal inclinations. McDonald’s apparent signature on at least one of the documents drafted by the constitutional council indicates that he was present at some, if not all, of the meetings that produced the constitution. It is tempting to assume that as he assisted in the governing document’s production, he weighed in when it came to Choctaw women’s claims to land and slaves. “From this day forward,” the journal states, “if a white man and Choctaw woman are married, the woman has a right to their property; they cannot sell it frivolously if they are not in agreement.” Thus no white husband could usurp Choctaw women’s matrilineal rights to household belongings, perhaps as any of Molly’s three white husbands had attempted to do with respect to her land and the people she enslaved. Even if a Choctaw woman gave her verbal approval to the transfer of her belongings to her husband, the Choctaw Nation legally prohibited it, decreeing “that when a white man and a woman have been married, if the man decides to sell the property precipitously, the wife shall be restricted from doing so.” Finally, the document suggested that the children of Choctaw women— and the nation itself—would retain women’s valuable assets, for if a white man found himself widowed, his wife’s “possessions” could not “be taken out of the Choctaw nation and taken away.” Through these legal codes, the constitution recognized Choctaw women’s long-standing relationship to Choctaw lands, their economic autonomy and authority in an increasingly racialized and patriarchal milieu, and the crucial role that matrilineality played in the preservation of Choctaw resources. The actions of those who drafted and supported the constitution signaled that they hoped the schooling of Choctaw youth would play a central role in their republic. After the ratification of the governing document, McDonald joined Choctaw nationalists, including Folsom, Charles Juzan, and Joel Nail, in a campaign to support the mission schools they believed would

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advance their nation’s political and economic opportunities and defensive strategies, not to mention prove their status as a “civilized” people. This advocacy for U.S. schooling in Choctaw territories promised to further democratize access to U.S. educations, offering schooling to less elite Choctaw men, Choctaw women, and even the enslaved people of African descent who remained in the mission schools’ orbit. Yet in the political fallout that ensued after the founding of Mushulatubbee’s residential school at Johnson’s plantation, the focus on the education of Choctaw boys made clear that the Choctaw republic McDonald and his allies envisioned would nonetheless be oriented around the prerogatives of a small subset of slaveholding Choctaw men. The growing influence of the all-male Kentucky academy over the next several years— and its co-opting of Choctaw school funds—would further ensure that, regardless of McDonald’s and his cohort’s support for mission education within their nation, it was the elite Choctaw men who found their way to Choctaw Academy who would have nearly sole access to advanced schooling.

A Plantation School Despite its controversy, the school at Richard Johnson’s Blue Springs plantation quickly became the site for well-positioned Choctaw boys and young men to receive U.S. colonial educations. Even with the support of influential nationalists such as Folsom and McDonald, mission education still appeared wanting when it came to the acquisition of language and literacy skills and adherence to solidifying ideas about race, gender, and labor among Choctaw elites. With schooling funds increasingly directed toward the new academy, a number of Choctaw families and leaders put great stock in its potential. Indian agent Ward reported to the superintendent of the school: “I frankly tell you that much is expected from these Boys upon their return to this Country.” He would later add that “many old men tell me they never had such a chance before [to receive schooling] and they want to live to see their young men do something that is noble as great . . . expectations have been made on them.” The institutional draw of Choctaw Academy became such that, by the time that Folsom, Tapenahoma, and Leflore signed the Choctaw Constitution in August 1826, sixty-three Choctaw scholars attended the academy. Creek and Potawatomi people’s willingness to send their own boys to

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Kentucky helped to further expand the academy’s rosters over the ensuing years. Thomas McKenney had initially disapproved of the school due to his alliance with Kingsbury and his frustrations with Ward and Johnson over their hasty acquisition of Choctaw students and finances. Then in 1828 he requested that his current Chickasaw adoptee, Dougherty Colbert, be transferred there. As Johnson reported, the superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs had begun “to have great confidence in the school.” In 1827 James McDonald’s own cousin Robert Jones, as well as his acquaintance Peter Pitchlynn, became Choctaw Academy students. McDonald had initially requested that these young men have access to school funds to attend institutions other than Johnson’s Kentucky boarding school. Even though Pitchlynn had been an early advocate of the school, as McDonald reported to McKenney, both Jones and Pitchlynn “prefer[red] not entering the Choctaw Academy in Kentucky.” Nearly eighteen years old at the time, Jones had spent his childhood in Molly McDonald’s home as a result of Jones’s—in James McDonald’s words—“almost orphan condition.” Since Jones was too old for mission schools, McDonald reported, “For a few months past, I have had him at an excellent boarding school, in the vicinity of Jackson, Mississippi, where I wish him to continue, one or two years longer, as convenient to my mother’s residence, where he can occasionally look to his own slender property.” As for Pitchlynn, his time in Tennessee undergoing schooling, as well as his most recent stint at mission schools, had given the young man “a higher relish and a more ardent thirst for knowledge . . . more particularly, to study some branches of the mathematics, to become acquainted with the general principles of chemistry, and to become completely master of the Grammar of the English language.” Pitchlynn himself would tell Secretary of War James Barbour that he hoped “to go to the Kentucky University [the University of Lexington] about two years & then study the Law under Colo. Johnson,” before writing to Johnson to reiterate these plans. McDonald felt that the older age of these students would allow them to quickly advance their knowledge: “Either of the young men I have taken the liberty to recommend would profit more in two years than boys of 10 & 12 years of age would in four,” he contended. While the meager amount left over in the schooling fund after the establishment of Choctaw Academy had meant the end of McDonald’s vision for a national academy within the nation, the remaining provisions could still be used to further these young men’s ambitions in U.S. schools

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of their choosing. But such provisions for schooling outside of Choctaw Academy were not forthcoming, with the result that both Pitchlynn and Jones enrolled in the Kentucky school, where they lived alongside sixty-five Choctaws, at least twenty-five Creeks, ten Potawatomi boys, and the superintendent of the school— a man named Thomas Henderson—as well as Richard Johnson and the African American women and men he enslaved. Even as Jones, Pitchlynn, and McDonald continued to petition for educational opportunities outside of Johnson’s home, evidence suggests that the location of Choctaw Academy on Johnson’s plantation largely appealed to slaveholding Choctaw elites. None of the individuals advocating for the placement of their kin within the burgeoning institution initially spoke of Johnson’s status as a slaveholder, or of the school’s unique location on his slave-run cotton farm. Indeed, the vast majority of the several Choctaw leaders who first visited the site failed to mention slaves or slavery at all, but they were clearly pleased with what they saw. For example, the British trader and Choctaw chief Charles Juzan, who was married to the sister of a chief of the Eastern District, reported after his visit to the academy in 1827 that he was “entirely satisfied with [the] school, and the situation of the scholars.” Greenwood Leflore visited the Kentucky school that same year, expressing that his “most sanguine expectations” for the school were “surpassed by the reality.” James McDonald, too, commented on conditions at the academy. By July 1826 he had grown frustrated with his experiences in Jackson. After a back and forth correspondence with McKenney concerning the superintendent’s request that McDonald weigh in on Choctaw education—this time through a report on the new academy—McDonald acquiesced, traveling to Kentucky in January 1827 and, from there, to Ohio, where he planned to try again for a career in law. McDonald found much to dislike at the residential school. He believed “the boarding & clothing of the boys . . . defective and therefore susceptible to improvement,” the age of the scholars attending the school too young, and the great number of Choctaw youths in one location antithetical to learning English language skills. Nonetheless, on the whole he thought “that a fair experiment ought to be made” of the institution and was “very favorably impressed with the talents of the teacher, and the high character of Col. Johnson.” That these early visitors to Johnson’s plantation school remained silent on the matter of slavery speaks volumes. The fact that these men failed to mention Johnson’s

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status as a slaveholder or even the specific individuals he held in bondage suggests that the practice of owning black people as chattel was so accepted— and acceptable—that it did not merit remark. As with the practice of sending young men such as McDonald, Folsom, Leflore, and Pitchlynn to live in plantation households for schooling earlier in the century, the inclination to send boys and young men to Choctaw Academy reconfirmed their racial differentiation from blacks and their rights to plantation mastery. But if Choctaw families sending their children to Choctaw Academy assumed their young men were to receive treatment paralleling that of the sons of white slaveholders, they would come head-tohead with Johnson’s own assumptions about the appropriate treatment of Native youth in his school, as well as black people’s resistance to both white and Indian assertions of racial superiority. A year after enrolling in the Kentucky school, Peter Pitchlynn denounced conditions there. Like McDonald, he found the students’ “clothing, diet, and lodging” inadequate. Delivering a letter to the Choctaw National Council, Pitchlynn reported that the boys slept on straw beds; wore wool rather than fur hats; lacked shoes, bedclothes, and appropriate religious council; and ate food of poor quality (including “fat Bacon, course corn bread & Rye coffee—badly prepared”), all while undergoing the curious stares of white visitors coming to view Johnson’s efforts at “civilization.” Most damning, Pitchlynn asserted that three or four “dirty filthy Negroes” waited on the students, treating them at times with “insolence.” Pitchlynn’s discontent intimated that Johnson failed to recognize that Indian pupils attending the academy not only needed adequate dress to keep them safe and healthy, but also the luxuries they had come to know as upper-class consumers. Clean linens, fur hats, and real coffee were essential to keeping students comfortable. So were enslaved people of African descent. Indeed, the subtext of Pitchlynn’s letter is that it was Johnson’s job to ensure that hierarchies between Indian students and black slaves remained clearly delineated. Enslaved people were to understand their status as subordinates in the emergent racial economy of a slaveholding South in which both white and Indian men could assert their authority over people of African ancestry. The opportunities that Indian education presented for an enterprising— and recreant—white man such as Johnson thwarted Choctaw guardians’ and students’ assumptions that they would be treated akin to young slaveholding white males. Johnson positioned himself as an adoptive “father” to

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Choctaw and other Indian pupils; however, as with other white men who adopted Native youth, his paternal sentiments had their limits. Because he was in dire financial straits by the time of Choctaw Academy’s founding, the income the school generated was important to the senator’s financial solvency, and Johnson did whatever he could to cut corners and pad his— as well as his superintendent, Thomas Henderson’s—pockets. He consistently sought ways to lower his overhead for the care of enrolled students, including cutting down on expenses for food, clothing, and bedding, as well as packing as many students as possible into close quarters. In 1828, upon the federal government’s (and, no doubt, McKenney’s) urging, he also eagerly looked into the Lancasterian educational system, telling his beleaguered superintendent of his hopes that Henderson could hire teachers to alleviate his numerous responsibilities at the school while maximizing the number of students enrolled there. “I have no early doubt,” Johnson told Henderson, “that in less than six months under the Lancastrian system one assistant could teach 500 boys if there were so many & there is great inclination to increase the school to 200.” That Johnson ultimately had little respect for indigenous sovereignty—or the political or economic interests of the individuals who sent their children to Choctaw Academy—is evident in his position on Indian removal. In 1832 he celebrated the possibility of Creek removal from the South, exclaiming from Washington, DC, that “the Chiefs from the nation will be here tomorrow . . . to sellout bag & baggage—for the west!!! Th is is a subject of joy to all who wish to see the nations do well.” While Johnson declared the relocation of Southeast Indian nations to the West to be in their own best interest, his position regarding removal hardly fit with the visions of most Choctaw planters, who hoped to remain in the territories in which they had been born, as well as on their lucrative plantations. Although Johnson did not seem willing to meet Choctaw elites’ expectations that their boys and young men would receive treatment according to their class status and national aspirations, he had to maintain a careful dance to keep his school open. This required ensuring that Choctaw and other Native leaders continued to send their children abroad to Kentucky while minimizing his overhead and asserting his own authority to patriarchally manage the treatment, schooling, and discipline of the Native and African American people who resided upon his property. As he wrote Henderson in 1825, “It is extremely impor tant for us to keep our eyes open & make the school

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popular with the [Choctaw] nation & with the Govt.” Undoubtedly upon Johnson’s request, trustees of the school penned a lengthy letter countering Pitchlynn’s accusations, arguing of the school that “at least 2000 lbs of Coffee is used annually and 12000 lbs of sugar” and that “[i]n every respect” the living conditions of Choctaw boys were “equal if not superior to the accommodation of our white students at the college and Schools in the Country where so many are associated together.” It was no accident that Johnson’s trustees concluded their letter by asserting Johnson’s respectability as a slaveholding patriarch, which included his attendance to the clean dress and mandatory deference of those he enslaved when it came to their serving Choctaw youth. For Choctaw Academy quickly became a proving ground and a battlefield over whether Johnson created the proper environment through which Choctaw men could absorb lessons about planter mastery. Johnson was vulnerable when it came to Pitchlynn’s attacks on his authority as a slaveholder. Indeed, the conditions at Johnson’s household made the academy a somewhat ambivalent location through which to absorb lessons in plantation management. Like many white male slaveholders in the United States, Johnson believed he had sexual rights over the black women he owned. However, unlike the vast majority of Southern slaveholders who made sexual advances on the women they enslaved, he openly acknowledged a partnership with Julia Chinn, an African American woman willed to him by his father, with whom he raised two daughters, Adaline and Imogene. As Johnson’s avowed partner, Chinn appeared to have had more authority in Johnson’s household than most other enslaved people in the South, as did her daughters, a matter that became publicized in later years as Johnson was put forward for the vice presidency. This relative openness concerning his relationship with Chinn, alongside his choice to educate and eventually marry his daughters with her to white men, stood outside the bounds of both Northern and Southern racial codes, not to mention those newly codified within the Choctaw Nation. Students at Choctaw Academy, including Peter Pitchlynn, would witness Johnson’s intimacy with Chinn and their daughters. While Imogene and Adaline helped their mother with duties at the academy, including teaching young children to draw, they appear to have lived in a manner akin to free white women, even receiving tutoring by Henderson in the evenings. In fact, Johnson took his daughters’ education quite seriously, telling Henderson that he was to use “sternness & decision” to instill in them the

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importance of learning. Chinn had a more unstable status on Johnson’s plantation grounds. Living in a stone house near Johnson’s home, Chinn oversaw plantation management during the senator’s prolonged stays in Washington, DC— engaging in the managerial labors performed by many white plantation mistresses— and played an important role in the running of Johnson’s working cotton farm and Choctaw Academy. Johnson gave his superintendent strict orders to “support her authority” when it came to matters at his farm and school. Henderson was to help Chinn attend to her domestic “matters” by assisting her “to make” other enslaved people “act with the same propriety as if [Johnson] were at home.” And when Chinn complained to the senator of having “trouble & great difficulty in making the men attend” to John Adams, “a sick Indian boy,” he ordered Henderson to “send for a constable” to “chastise them” with between twenty and twentynine “stripes . . . with a cowhide upon the naked skin.” Yet even as Chinn was empowered—and also expected—to order supplies, tend to sick children, and direct the behaviors of other slaves, she herself lived as Johnson’s slave and had no ability to legally challenge Johnson’s prerogatives concerning her body or her labors. Indeed, even if Chinn had made the decision to enter into a sexual relationship with the man who owned her, or had even developed bonds of affection for him, her life choices were constrained by the realm of opportunities available to black women living within the confines of chattel slavery. By engaging in a relationship with Johnson, Chinn may have hoped to better her living conditions and those of her children. Yet because Johnson never freed her, she remained vulnerable to his whims. When Johnson opened Choctaw Academy in 1825, for example, he was prepared to turn her home into living quarters for more than twenty Choctaw scholars. And Johnson could legally inflict the harsh disciplines against her that he directed or personally deployed against other black men and women at his farm. When Pitchlynn critiqued the appearance and behaviors of Johnson’s slaves, he was challenging Johnson’s authority as a Southern patriarch, Johnson’s partner’s household management, and perhaps even the comportment of Johnson’s avowed kin. All three would have undermined the elite Kentucky citizen’s sense of manhood. Like most enslavers, Johnson projected an image of paternal benevolence toward his slaves. To be accused of violating this benevolence by forcing slaves to wear dirty and insufficient clothing countered his personal sense of patriarchal beneficence and propriety.

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Pitchlynn’s accusations also insinuated that the senator mistreated the women whom he acknowledged as his mistress and daughters, which would be read as another attack on Johnson’s masculine duties. Unsurprisingly, Johnson’s response to Pitchlynn underscored his paternal sensibilities. He emphasized the quality clothing he provided those who worked within his home, even describing himself as an anomaly among Kentucky slaveholders in his generosity. Johnson argued, “As to the waiters being filthy I am compelled to say that it is a gross misrepresentation.” Referring to Lucy “& her two children,” who waited “upon the tables in the upper room,” and Patience, “a woman of 28 years of age & an elderly woman named Jenny aided sometimes by a Negro Boy & sometimes a Negro man,” all of whom waited on children, Johnson insisted that the “women & Girls dress as neat & with as good clothing as any of the independent farmers wives in this part of the country.” Indeed, Johnson contended that his care of enslaved people, including Chinn and their children, was “a fact so notorious, that no person who has any regard to truth will deny this statement.” Johnson’s relationships with Chinn and their daughters, Adaline and Imogene, turned especially poignant during the latter half of the 1820s as contests over plantation mastery between Johnson and Southeast Indian students came to revolve around competing claims to enslaved women’s bodies. Within a few years of the academy’s 1825 opening, Johnson began to complain about Native youths’ sexual advances toward the women living on his plantation. In 1827 Choctaw scholars David Wall and Peter King tried to force their way into Johnson’s home “after the girls” there. In another instance, a Creek boy “went into the Brick house” in which Julia Chinn evidently resided. And in still another episode, Johnson commented that one of the Choctaw students “ought to have been dismissed in disgrace when he went into [Johnson’s] house after Lucinda,” another enslaved woman at Blue Springs (who was perhaps the Lucy to whom Johnson referred in his defense of his slaves’ dress and propriety). Johnson cared little about what the enslaved women themselves thought about these advances—whether they welcomed or resisted them. Rather, he framed Choctaw students’ behaviors as assaults upon his masculinity and his ability to “keep order” over his plantation household. Racialized and patriarchal property laws mandated that, as the male household head, Johnson had both the authority and the responsibility to “control” his plantation spaces, including the buildings that housed him and those he enslaved and the yards and fields

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where enslaved people worked. Inasmuch, he alone had the right to enter these places freely and to dominate the bodies of the enslaved people contained therein. Native boys’ infiltration of these spaces and subsequent pursuit of black women challenged Johnson’s legal rights over his plantation territories, his sexual entitlement to his human property, and even—perhaps especially—his patriarchal authority with respect to his “family,” which in slaveholder parlance included all his slaves, but in Johnson’s case also included Chinn and the children he shared with her and publically claimed as his own. Indeed, Johnson’s avowed intimacy with Chinn may have given extra weight to Johnson’s rage over Native students’ violation of social and sexual “order” on his Blue Springs farm. When he acknowledged Julia Chinn, Adaline, and Imogene as his partner and children, respectively, Johnson broke slaveholder customs mandating the public disavowal of sexual relationships with black women; in a sense, he was violating plantation “order” himself. Students’ pursuit of enslaved women further undermined his authority, already made suspect by his own public breaches of appropriate public performances when it came to master-slave relations. While Johnson’s reports of young Native men’s advances toward enslaved women were vague as to the nature of sex and desire across sexual color lines, extant evidence suggests that in some cases black women sought social, political, and sexual alliances with Choctaw Academy students and that in others, students asserted their perceived rights over black women’s bodies through sexual assault. The self-liberation of two enslaved woman with two Choctaw Academy students in June 1835 offers examples of women who consented to relationships with Native youth, or even initiated them as they sought out opportunities for freedom. One of the enslaved women fleeing Johnson’s plantation, Parthene, appears to have been Johnson’s chosen replacement for Chinn after Chinn died during a cholera epidemic in 1833. Parthene’s flight with “Colonel Johnson’s check for $1000, and cash to the amount of $300”— according to the New-York Spectator— certainly indicates that she had privileged access to Johnson’s affairs. If Johnson had pursued a sexual relationship with her, she made clear that she would rather face the dangers that would follow her after fleeing from Johnson’s household with a Native partner than spend her days in sexual servitude with the man who owned her. Just before Parthene and her companions’ flight, Johnson himself expressed his belief that other enslaved women chose to enter into liaisons with Native men when he reported that he sold

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young black women at Blue Springs “down the river” because of their relationships with students. There is evidence, however, raising the possibility that Choctaw students may have also sexually assaulted black women. The Choctaw Constitution’s ban on interracial marriages between enslaved black women and Choctaw men indicates that slaveholding Choctaw families such as the ones who sent their children to Choctaw Academy were not likely to recognize the black women enslaved on Johnson’s plantation as legitimate sexual partners for their sons or, by extension, as individuals empowered with rights over their own bodies. The young men attending the school may have had different opinions about race and sex than did the drafters of the constitution. However, Johnson’s repeated complaints of Choctaw students’ attempts to break into his house and into Chinn’s personal quarters supports the possibility that Choctaw youths were exerting their own rights to control plantation space by engaging in the predatory sexual practices that signaled patriarchal mastery, namely the rape of black women. Johnson’s daughter Adaline complained to her father of “obnoxious Boys” at the school, and Johnson expressed his frustration with students granting themselves the “authority to watch & Keep order . . . inside of the yard.” Johnson told Henderson his feelings “on that subject as to such a fellow as Sam[uel] Long” who was “prowling about” Johnson’s house at night, presumably with the intention of keeping “order.” “To allow any to watch,” Johnson declared, “it is just like appointing profligate young men to go into the Houses of black people to keep order, which is done by drawing away their husbands if they have no pass & then get into their places.” Johnson inferred that youths such as Long were like acting like the Southern white overseers who notoriously used their access to slave quarters to assault enslaved women. Scant information exists about the history of sexual violence within the Choctaw Nation. Southeast Indian women’s ownership of land, their control over the crops they produced from it, as well as their ability to leave unfavorable partnerships, all suggest that the men within their societies did not have the power or the authority to assert absolute domination over them. Some historians have proposed that sexual violence may not have been categorically objectionable within Choctaw society, however. Drawing upon either the writings of the Dutch naturalist, surveyor, slaver, and land speculator Bernard Romans or those of James Adair, a resident white trader in the Chickasaw Nation, these historians posit that rape had perhaps been

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used as a form of punishment against adulterous women within the Choctaw Nation as well as against foreign women who passed through Choctaw territories without Choctaw people’s consent. Both Romans’s and Adair’s narratives of eighteenth-century Choctaw life are often used as primary sources in Choctaw history, given both men’s extended durations within the Native Southeast; however, both men were also ethnocentric observers of Native society and believed Choctaw people to be, as they put it, “barbarians” or “savage.” Both men failed to indicate whether they witnessed the sexualized punishments about which they wrote firsthand or if they received their information from the local Euro-Americans with whom they spoke, which raises the possibility that the information was in fact conveyed to them. If this was the case, from their vantage point they had little incentive to properly account for, understand, or verify such “knowledge,” making it difficult to fully accept their claims at face value. Yet even if rape did not traditionally play a punitive role within Choctaw society, it did occur in the era of European and U.S. colonization, particularly as racial slavery took hold within the Choctaw Nation. Pitchlynn’s records of the Choctaw Constitution include prohibitions against sexual assault, stating that “If a woman is unwilling, and a man violates her by raping her the law specifies that he shall be charged with thirty-five lashes with a switch.” That Choctaw leaders felt the need to draft this legislation makes clear that sexual violence had occurred within their communities and that they sought to curtail it. Since the constitution was explicit about race and servitude when it came to unions between men and women, it is possible that men such as Pitchlynn included all women—including those enslaved—within their prohibition against forcible sex. The fact that punishment for rape and free men’s sexual relations with enslaved women were the same suggests that those who penned the legal document saw both actions as equally abhorrent sexual crimes. Yet given that those who wrote the constitution were also predominantly slaveholders—or, in the case of McDonald, the children of slaveholders—they may have inversely believed that enslaved black women, who did not legally own their own bodies, had no power to consent to—or refuse—Indian men’s advances, essentially placing them beyond legislative prohibitions or protections. Choctaw students may have seen sexual violence as a way to assert their rights as future slaveholding heads of households or to punish women such as Lucy who refused and resisted servility to Choctaw scholars, or to anyone

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else. In either instance, such actions would have indicated that they held views about black women’s physical labors and sexual availability that were akin to those of slaveholding whites. If Choctaw students were forcing themselves on the women at Johnson’s plantation, it helps explain the tensions that smoldered between slaves and students over the course of the late 1820s and 1830s. Johnson angrily wrote of students “throwing stones at my people” on one occasion, while the discord that Pitchlynn reported in the dining hall in 1828 between black slaves and Indian students suggests that people of African descent at Blue Springs were not necessarily fond of the new arrivals. The influx of residents would have significantly increased their labors, and they had little reason to find common ground with students who expected to be waited on by black people. But enslaved people’s treatment of Choctaw scholars may have also signaled collective resistance to the students’ own violent behaviors. While Johnson often remained opaque in his correspondence concerning interactions between Choctaw students and enslaved women, his concerns about the behaviors on the part of Choctaw and other Southeast Indian scholars in Blue Springs made clear that sexual claims to black women became central in contests over who had the right to assert manly authority in the South. In terms of Johnson’s masculine authority over his plantation and his school, it made no difference if black women and Native boys found opportunity and perhaps even comfort with one another or if Choctaw pupils were unwelcome pursuers who believed that their status as elite men from slaveholding families gave them the right to claim black women’s bodies as their own. In both cases, the fact that the young men at the school could not claim legal ownership over the women Johnson enslaved made any sexual relationship with them a violation of his household authority. Johnson declared that he was not opposed to Choctaw men engaging in sexual relations with black women, just those women belonging to him and his farm. As he told Henderson, “If the Boys find women or any body out side of my yard I would say nothing to them[.] but to permit them to go into my Brick House & get into my beds with my negro wenches or to permit any of them to be [illegible] into my house or [c]ellars After the Girls are things which I can not & will not bear.” Only Johnson had the legal right to claim the bodies of the women he enslaved or to determine with whom they could form partnerships. Johnson felt these affronts to his paternal authority deeply. “Whether I leave black or white to keep house in my absence it is as sacred by the Laws &

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constitution as if I was in it myself,” he told Henderson, before expressing his deep mortification that “a scandalous and forcible entry” of his house had—for him—not been suitably addressed. Johnson felt duped that Choctaw youth had proven unwilling to respect his rights as a slaveholder to maintain exclusive access to the women in his household. He and Henderson were “acting to them as kind Parents,” Johnson lamented in 1830. “[T]hat I should have my dwelling House invaded, my family degraded & my peace destroyed by a few Scoundrels” was unacceptable. Johnson had believed himself to be a benevolent adopter of Indian youth. But just as his paternalism had limits, so did his scholars’ deference to it. The young Native men on Johnson’s plantation expressed their own ideas about Choctaw masculinity and plantation mastery. Largely the sons of slaveholding Choctaw families, these youth were declaring their license to claim black women for themselves. The absence of Choctaw girls and young women at the academy in the 1820s and early 1830s reinforced the institution’s position as a training ground in elite Choctaw masculinity. Whether or not Choctaw chiefs sought to place female scholars at the school, Secretary of War John Henry Eaton had adamantly refused to even entertain the topic, with Johnson reporting to Henderson, “It will be perfectly useless to attempt to get the Government or the nation to have any thing to do with sending females out of the nations of Indians into the states. It would give me great pleasure to do any thing in my power to help you but when I hinted at such a course as to have some females attached to the school, the sec of war would not even converse on the subject.” Long-standing Choctaw customs had encouraged men’s migration outside of Choctaw territories for hunting, warfare, and as part of their transition into manhood, whereas Choctaw women were often more closely constrained within Choctaw territorial boundaries. Yet the prohibition against the education of Choctaw women within the United States effectively excluded them from plantation educations— and the diplomatic relationships that evolved out of them—in the U.S. South. This primed elite Choctaw men to assume managerial control over Choctaw territories as well as a primary role in Choctaw diplomacy. Although mission schools emphasized gender roles in which men held property and women lived as “dependents” within men’s households, Choctaw women at these schools at least received some access to the language and literacy skills that would allow them to navigate a world in which reading and writing became important to the conveyance of property.

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In documents detailing his opposition to Choctaw Academy, McDonald never mentions Choctaw women. Perhaps he believed the role of literate Choctaw men was to protect the matrilineal rights of Choctaw women, as he had done for his mother and as the drafters of the Choctaw Constitution had done when they barred white men from assuming patriarchal control over Choctaw women’s property. But by remaining silent on Choctaw women’s access to the elite school in Kentucky, McDonald nonetheless buttressed the proscription against women’s access to the forms of schooling that were seen as a source of empowerment and autonomy for slaveholding Choctaw families. Although the school kept its doors open until 1848, by the mid-1830s the popularity of Choctaw Academy had begun a slow decline, with some Native leaders choosing to withdraw their children due to concerns that these youth were not receiving useful educations. According to one report, Cherokee leaders conveyed that “[t]hey were under the impression that the boys sent to the [said] Academy from other tribes, have generally returned from it without having obtained sufficient Education to qualify them for an efficient discharge of any important duty whatever; and are therefore apprehensive, if their Sons are permitted to remain there, that their fond hopes will be entirely disappointed.” Even more troubling—as James McDonald himself may have feared—many children were deeply traumatized by experiences of ill treatment at the school. Some found it so difficult to reintegrate themselves into their tribal communities in the wake of their distressing years at the academy that they took their own lives. Disapprobation for the academy was such that, by the early 1840s, enrollments had sharply declined. In 1848 Choctaw Academy closed. In Choctaw Academy’s heyday, Choctaw leaders meant for it to become a training ground for Choctaw masculine authority. It did prove pivotal for at least some of its attendees, particularly those from the families of Choctaw slaveholding elites. Many of these early attendees became successful slaveholders in their own right and came to lead the Choctaw Nation in the decades after removal. Indeed, after most Choctaws were forcibly relocated to the Indian Territory (the Western region that in 1907 became known as the present-day state of Oklahoma), James McDonald’s cousin Robert Jones came to own over 227 slaves— some put estimates as high as five hundred—and four Red River plantations worth around $1.5 million, a position that would influence his criticism of American Board leadership for

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promoting the abolition of slavery in the Indian Territory. Jones (also known as “Old Bob Jones”) garnered a reputation after emancipation for treating the formerly enslaved people who remained on his property “like dogs.” As did McDonald, Jones wielded his plantation education to diligently work for Choctaw sovereignty, ultimately joining the Confederacy during the Civil War to defend both his right to hold slaves and the territorial integrity of the Choctaw Nation in the Indian Territory. Yet Jones’s success was due only in part to the lessons he received in Blue Springs. Choctaw Academy was a late stopover for James McDonald’s cousin. He had spent much of his young life in the household of Molly McDonald. The plantation school solidified perspectives on race, land, and sovereignty that had already been instilled in him by his illustrious slaveholding aunt. Long before Jones achieved great wealth in the Indian Territory, the growing success of Choctaw slaveholders in transnational markets and the domestic slave trade, combined with these individuals’ insistence on remaining in their ancestral homelands east of the Mississippi, unleashed a series of new—and particularly unrelenting—assaults on Choctaw sovereignty. That any Native people experienced economic wealth at all led to accusations on the part of pro-removal whites that slaveholding nationalists such as Folsom and Leflore proved far too “civilized” to be truly “Indian.” Pitchlynn’s concerns in the late 1820s over the relationships between black slaves and would-be Indian masters, as well as the material conditions at the school Mushulatubbee had helped to establish, signaled the ways in which racial formations remained in flux, even as white supremacist ideologies concerning Indian and African American “inferiority” were hardening. That is, Pitchlynn’s critique of the academy suggested the possibility that Choctaw people could live alongside and compete with neighboring slaveholding whites, asserting their sovereignty in their new republic through the ownership of African American slaves. At the same time, Pitchlynn’s dismay over the resistance of black slaves and the poor clothes and sleeping quarters provided by Johnson to Choctaw students indicated the fragility of this vision. Enslaved women and men of African descent were quick to challenge any notion that they were to remain subordinate to Choctaw youth, or to Johnson himself. And Southern whites such as Johnson might have declared themselves as “fathers” to Indian boys but failed to clothe and care for them properly and were hardly willing to abide Choctaw youths’ challenges to white men’s self-declared social and sexual authority over the people they

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owned. Andrew Jackson’s election to the presidency in 1828 tipped the scales when it came to U.S. racial formations in the favor of Southern whites. Johnson— and Jackson himself—had learned to fear the presence of slaveholding Indian nations east of the Mississippi over the course of their adoptions of Indian youth. Jackson’s presidency would work to ensure that individual and national attempts to adopt Southeast Indian nations east of the Mississippi into the U.S. national family would come to an end.

9 Adoption and the Politics of Indian Removal

Within a matter of months after David Folsom, James McDonald, and Greenwood Leflore helped draft the Choctaw Constitution, their government found itself facing new demands for land. In the fall of 1826 President John Quincy Adams sent Andrew Jackson’s former general John Coffee, along with General Thomas Hinds and Missouri governor William Clark, to the lower Mississippi Valley to request that the Choctaw Nation sell all their remaining homelands east of the Mississippi and relocate to the West. If the Choctaws refused, the U.S. commissioners were to bring up a second proposal. They would ask to purchase a strip of the Choctaws’ easternmost lands along the Tombigbee River, territory coveted by the state of Mississippi’s Monroe County. In the first days of November the treaty commissioners arrived in Choctaw country, where a group of thirteen young leaders— including James McDonald— awaited them. Coffee, Clark, and Hinds were on edge from the start. Soon after entering Choctaw territories they heard a rumor that the new Choctaw leadership had pledged to do what Creeks had done the year before: execute those in their nation who agreed to sell land to the United States. While James McDonald dispelled this report as “grossly misinformed,” he disclosed that his nation’s Western District had justifiably passed a resolution to bring “severe 

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penalty” upon “any man” who accepted “money as a bribe to sell his country.” This set the stage for the talks that followed. Unwavering in his communications with the three federal commissioners, McDonald reported that Choctaw people would not leave their southeastern homelands. When the U.S. representatives moved on to the topic of Tombigbee lands, the answer was likewise a “decided negative.”  This refusal on the part of the Choctaw Nation to relinquish territory to the United States signaled that the politics of adoption was reaching a turning point. Between the 1790s and the early 1820s, a number of leading whites had hoped that Native youths schooled in white homes and institutions would return to their tribal nations, rise to political prominence, and then satisfy U.S. ambitions to obtain Indian lands. Meanwhile, the Native families of these same youths had sent their children to live in the United States with the hopes that the upcoming generation might utilize U.S. systems of power to achieve influence for themselves and their Native communities within a changing North American landscape. At this critical juncture, Folsom, McDonald, and Leflore appeared to be acting as their Native families had anticipated. Namely, they were using their colonial educations to push back against U.S. expansion. They joined other Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee men who had been schooled in U.S. homes, plantations, and educational institutions and who, upon their return to their homelands, drew on liberal property and governance regimes to support their own political and economic authority as well as that of their nations. Using their educational experiences in the United States, these men expanded upon their private economic resources and cultivated international political influence to assert individual and collective sovereignty over their homelands. The political trajectories of the Native adoptees who circulated through U.S. spaces make clear that these U.S.-educated men had a direct impact on both state and federal legislation in the lead up to Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the coerced treaties that followed—which together provided the United States with its mandate to forcibly relocate Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole communities, as well as many Northern Indian nations, west of the Mississippi River. At the same time, these individuals’ confl icts with expanding U.S. settlements illuminate the ways in which ideas and practices concerning race, kinship, and reproduction continued to shape U.S.-Indian affairs through the early antebellum era. Indeed, Indian removal and the ideas about reproduction that

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underpinned “civilization” and assimilation policies were intricately connected. Frustrations on the part of Southern expansionists with the cadre of Native leaders opposing land cessions in the 1820s inspired a shift from coercive programs aimed at the incorporation of Indian people and their homelands into the U.S. body politic to policies that advocated for Indians’ immediate and direct expulsion from regions coveted by the United States. Those supporting removal took Jeffersonian positions on imperial governance and warfare to their ultimate end point. Like Jefferson, they insisted that those who refused to incorporate themselves into U.S. society—or, in a sense, “disappear” as Indians by becoming part of the U.S. national family— had to remove themselves from lands deemed part of U.S. “domestic” territory. They cared little for the fact that U.S. society had never welcomed Native people as equal citizens, or that both assimilation and removal directly disregarded Indian people’s inherent rights to their homelands. The racial codes that supported large-scale relocation policies framed Native communities as either unprepared or undeserving of either consideration. According to the most vocal Southern whites, Indians proved unable or unwilling to adopt the central tenets of white “civilization” and thus needed to relocate west for everyone’s best interest, including their own. Demonstrating the pernicious persistence of Jeffersonian fictions that cast Indians as “hunter-gatherers,” those supporting removal argued that, once west of the Mississippi, Indians could continue to practice their “ancient” pursuit of wild game without interference on the part of white settlers while leaving their fertile agricultural lands to the U.S. citizens who supposedly knew how to use them better. Distance from the foreigners who crowded into Native territories would allow Indians to continue to survive as a population and, in turn, enable U.S. communities to expand their own numbers through the agrarian systems and familial arrangements that were declared to most efficiently and effectively foster human life. Using established arguments about population and governance, removers insisted that the forms of interracial kinship espoused by “civilization” programs threatened the reproductive futures of Native people and whites alike because Indian territories were not reverting quickly enough into male-headed farms. In much the same way that pan-Indian movements had shaped Knox’s and Jefferson’s foreign policies concerning Indian nations around the turn of the nineteenth century, the nationalist commitments of Native leaders who had been educated in U.S. homes and institutions directly informed the

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turn to Indian removal and the rhetoric that supported it. To unseat the Southeast Indian planter-nationalists who blocked Southern expansion— and, indeed, to undercut the efficacy of the interracial intimacies between whites and Indians that had enabled these Native leaders to gain international political and economic traction—removers combined their fictional accounts of Indian “hunting” societies and their declared concerns with Indian population decline with a close scrutiny of the financial and governance practices of U.S.-educated Southeast Indian elites. Rather than support the expansionist ambitions of the United States, Southern imperialists argued, the familial arrangements that had unfolded through adoption only engendered new political challenges to the extension of the U.S. slaveholding South and the assimilation of Indian people. They framed this opposition to U.S. territorial acquisition as inherently selfish on the part of Indian adoptees because it thwarted the land transfers that removers declared to be in ser vice of U.S. and Native interests. In order to sidestep the fact that Southeast Indian leaders were supporting Native sovereignty struggles, removers recalibrated the parameters of racial identity to preclude those who had themselves adopted certain U.S. social and economic practices from claiming indigeneity altogether. In other words, Native people who embraced the Southern plantation economy, the centralization of Southeast Indian nations’ governance systems, and their nations’ rights to remain on their homelands were not truly Indian at all, but rather political usurpers of tribal governments who hindered the procreative visions of U.S. whites and cared little about the interests of “real” Indian people. By the mid-1820s those supporting Southeast Indians’ relocation to the trans-Mississippi West sought to recalibrate federal “civilization” policies and the popu lar ideas about adoption that fueled them by insisting that Indian people were not appropriate members of the U.S. national family and thus needed to live far from U.S. settlements. But in so doing, they had to face down a young cadre of Native leaders who insisted on their rights to remain in their homelands and on the possibility that U.S. whites and Native people could live side by side within distinct but interconnected sovereign communities. Through their extended tenures within the United States, these indigenous leaders knew a great deal about U.S. society and had accrued significant allies within it as well as within other Indian nations, all of which allowed them to build an international movement against removal. In fact, the more Southern whites worked to dismantle the assimilatory initiatives

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that had supported the politics of adoption over the previous three decades, the more they found themselves facing an increasingly orga nized opposition to relocation policies. As the late 1820s and early 1830s unfolded, debates over Indian removal, “civilization,” and Native sovereignty erupted within and across Indian territories and the United States. Embroiling congressional representatives, Christian missionaries, women’s reform movements, pro- and anti-removal legislators, slaveholding settlers, and—most centrally—Native adoptees, these struggles would indelibly transform U.S.-Indian relations.

Indian Removal When Folsom, Leflore, and McDonald encountered John Coffee and his fellow commissioners in Choctaw territories in 1826, Southern states were in the midst of their latest round of assaults on Southeast Indian sovereignty. In 1825 New York state had opened its Erie Canal on lands wrested from Haudenosaunee people, signaling that the commercial transportation networks promised in the wake of the War of 1812 had arrived in the North— at great expense to the Native communities who lived there. Meanwhile, new high-powered steamships plied the continent’s internal waterways, integrating far-flung settlements into the cycles of national capitalist commerce. Pointing to these so-called technological improvements, elected U.S. officials in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama intensified their demands for Indian territories. Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee people not only prevented U.S. Southerners from expanding the production of cotton, these Southern whites asserted, but their presence also hindered plans to build the roads and canals that would link inland plantations to broader commercial markets. The federal government also hoped to construct a national roadway through Southeast Indian homelands. Between 1825 and 1830 Congress promoted the construction of “a great interior artery” that would connect U.S. settlements on Haudenosaunee lands in Buff alo to Washington, DC, and then to New Orleans. U.S. statesmen made these claims to Southeast Indian lands in a world profoundly shaped by the reverberations of the War of 1812. With Southeast Indian nations blocked from transatlantic trade, surrounded by U.S. settler communities, and no longer posing a military threat to U.S. settler expansion, Southern leaders were emboldened to insist on their states’ immediate

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rights to indigenous territory. As these Southerners understood well, the only thing that prevented Southern states’ unilateral acquisition of Southeast Indian lands was the federal government’s continued reliance upon land cessions made in treaty agreements between the United States and Indian nations. The very presence of Coffee, Clark, and Hinds in the lower Mississippi Valley in 1826 attested to the most recent political maneuverings on the part of Mississippi’s elected officials to acquire the treaty-based cessions that would give their settlers access to the alluvial agricultural lands, pine-ridged forests, and boggy swamps that approximately twenty-five thousand Choctaw and Chickasaw people called home. The three commissioners were there to demand that the Chickasaw and Choctaw Nations “consensually” transfer their lands to the federal government so that the state of Mississippi could legally claim these territories as its own. As U.S.-educated Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee leaders organized against new land cessions in the postwar years, they proved that the various strategies previously utilized by treaty commissioners to extract treaty-based territorial cessions had become increasingly ineffective. While hardly alone within their nations in their opposition to removal, a number of these leaders used the growing political influence and economic power they derived from slave-driven export agriculture to effectively thwart coerced compliance with U.S. imperial visions. By centralizing their tribal governments, they prevented the federal government from bribing individual chiefs to relinquish territory. By the same token, they used the same centralized leadership to support their interests in private property in land and slaves. Th is allowed them to reinforce their economic standing within a broader Southern slave society, a move that prevented treaty commissioners from leveraging trade debt and commercial vulnerabilities to force the surrender of Native homelands. Further troubling to land-hungry Southerners were the white missionaries who worked closely with Native planter elites, providing them with English language and literacy skills, the tools and ideologies that supported private property and export agriculture, as well as the international social networks that could potentially rally against fraudulent treaty agreements and land cessions. Such Native engagements with plantation agriculture, liberal governance, and mission schooling made it appear to pro-removal whites as if their dreams of a white supremacist cotton kingdom would be perpetually deferred. Indeed, as early as 1816 Andrew Jackson would query in a letter to U.S. Secretary of War William Crawford,

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“Agreeably to the present course adopted, I would ask, when will Indian claims be extinguished on our borders?” If in 1826 Mississippi’s leadership anticipated that federal treaty commissioners’ use of “conciliatory” techniques would effectively wrest land from Indian people, they, like Jackson, were quickly disappointed. As the treaty negotiations unfolding between the Choctaw Nation and Coffee, Clark, and Hinds demonstrated, Choctaw leaders were holding their ground when it came to commitments to curbing territorial cessions. In their report on the treaty talks, John Coffee and his fellow U.S. representatives asserted that the new Choctaw government silenced minority opinions on the subject of smaller-scale land sales as well as those on widespread removal. They wrote that when the Choctaws’ Native interpreter David Mackey “attempted to express his views in favor of a cession” in a late-night council among the nation’s most influential men and their white supporters, “Mr. James L. McDonald . . . rose, and observed, that Mr. Mackey would not be allowed to speak.” Another Choctaw man named Jesse Brashears, they continued, “withdrew himself” from the Choctaws’ treaty delegation “on account of the violent hostility which was manifested towards him for having expressed himself friendly to a cession.” Even more troubling to the three U.S. representatives, they suspected that Choctaw chiefs had entered into “crossresolutions” with Chickasaw leadership “not to cede any part of their country.” The Chickasaw Council had held up their end of the bargain, refusing to relinquish lands to Coffee, Clark, and Hinds in treaty sessions unfolding just prior to the men’s arrival in the Choctaw Nation. Centralized governance—not to mention the silencing of dissenting voices—was not part of long-standing Southeast Indian traditions of town-centered consensus politics. As James McDonald himself had told the commissioners early on in the treaty negotiations, “[t]he privilege of speaking freely and candidly our sentiments on any subject is highly prized by us.” In this case, however, silencing the minority opinions of those who would assent to removal policies proved successful against Southern land hunger. Indeed, having acquired Indian land through ruthless massacres of Creek people during the War of 1812, John Coffee now left the lower Mississippi Valley with no new territories for Mississippi—or the United States. For Coffee and his peers, the politics of adoption were clearly to blame for this impasse. All too aware that U.S.-educated Choctaw men had led the charge against new cessions, they railed against the ways that these adop-

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tees had deployed their educational resources. Speaking to James McDonald during the 1826 treaty sessions, the federal commissioners insisted, “The United States was a great nation, and the Choctaws had experienced nothing but justice and liberality from the Government. She had fostered and protected this people. She had educated several of her children.” That McDonald and the acculturated chiefs he assisted at the treaty grounds now supported Native sovereignty was to them a sign of ingratitude, for “the very men for whom [the United States] had done the most,” the commissioners declared, “are now doing every thing in their power to defeat the views and plans of the Government.” According to Coffee’s assessment, adopted Indian youths were supposed to pay for their U.S. educations with cessions of land, not strive to maintain Native holds upon it. As Choctaw and Chickasaw leaders frustrated Coffee, Clark, and Hind’s treaty delegation, the three federal commissioners suggested the utility of policy proposals forwarded by Andrew Jackson over the course of the previous decade. Distressed by his failed attempts to extract removal treaties from the Chickasaw Nation in 1816, Jackson proposed that the federal government abandon treaty making with Indian people altogether. Indian sovereignty was never truly respected by those U.S. whites in power, he argued; it was only begrudgingly acknowledged as a result of Indians’ defensive strengths. In other words, early federal administrators had engaged in treaty negotiations with Indian nations only because they lacked the military resources to seize the lands they wanted. “The arm of the Government was not sufficiently strong,” Jackson insisted, “and the policy of treating with [Indians] was adopted from necessity.” After shrewdly highlighting the exigencies that had in fact shaped early federal Indian policy, the Southern general demanded a signal shift in U.S.-Indian relations. In the postwar years, the United States had gained the upper hand in conflicts with Southeast Indian people. As a result— according to Jackson—it was time to end pretenses of diplomacy and instead grant individual states the prerogatives to do what they wanted with the Native territories that fell within their chartered borders. Jackson justified this unilateral dissolution of Native sovereignty by arguing that those who had been acculturated—or adopted—into U.S. domestic economies were never truly Indians. Since the majority of the most internationally visible U.S.-educated, anti-removal nationalists among the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee Nations were of partial European

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ancestry, Jackson claimed that these men were not actually indigenous to America. Their white parentage made them—in Jackson’s words—“halfbreeds.” Real Indians, he implied, could not learn commercial markets so well or resist the federal government’s wishes so effectively. In his formulation, Indian “blood” predestined Native people to survive through hunting and gathering. As he told Secretary of War William Crawford in 1816, “the real Indians” were “the natives of the forest.” Only those who had “mingled” with “whites” could adopt the tenets of modernity. The implication of this emerging racial formation was that transnational adoption worked only for those who were not truly Native to begin with. Jackson’s own apprenticeship of Lyncoya appeared to confirm this point. Lyncoya’s Indian ancestry supposedly inclined the youth toward “habits” that made him unsuited for self-governance. Jackson’s policy proposals and the racial ideologies undergirding them countered three decades of federal policy that had promised self-determination to Native people who—regardless of ancestry—worked with U.S. educators and government officials to adopt property regimes and governance systems idealized within the United States. Through this sleight of hand, the Southern general insisted that the adoption of Euro-American “civilization”—not to mention collaborations with white missionaries to achieve it—was a sign of cultural and racial corruption and therefore erased claims to individual and collective sovereignty. As the Tennessean would argue in 1816, the Chickasaw government that resisted land cessions had been co-opted “by designing half-breeds and renegade white men who have taken refuge in [Chickasaw] country.” When the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations rebuffed Coffee, Clark, and Hinds’s treaty commission ten years later, the three commissioners immediately drew upon the rhetorical strategies initially forwarded by the Tennessee general and, in so doing, endorsed his arguments against negotiating with Southeast Indian governments. “The [Choctaw] government seems to be in the hands principally of half-breeds and white men,” they disdainfully reported to the U.S. secretary of war after their failed talks. The implication was that Choctaw and Chickasaw leadership ignored “the interest of the poor Indians,” those of sole Native ancestry who the three men insisted needed to be relocated to the vast landscapes of the West if they were to survive by hunting. Unlike the chosen leaders of Southeast Indian nations, only the U.S. government cared about saving these Indians from “extinction.” While

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still hampered by federal laws mandating that all land cessions be negotiated through federal treaties, Coffee, Clark, and Hinds spotlighted the imperial limitations of the United States’ continuation of nation-to-nation agreements. They were not alone in their support of Jackson’s proposed policy shift. Indeed, even before leading Choctaw elites had ratified the 1826 constitution that would support Folsom, Leflore, and McDonald’s actions in the November treaty talks, Mississippi legislators signaled that they were ready to implement Jackson’s suggested measures to acquire Chickasaw and Choctaw lands. In 1825 Mississippi governor Gerard Brandon asked his state assembly to propose a bill to Congress funding new removal treaties and to simultaneously explore state-derived solutions to open up Choctaw lands for U.S. cotton production. Congress approved a bill supporting the former—the very one that led Coffee and his fellow delegates to travel to Choctaw and Chickasaw lands in 1826. Meanwhile, a committee assembled by Mississippi’s House of Representatives went even further. Anticipating Choctaw and Chickasaw resistance to land cessions and relocation, the committee proposed legislation granting Mississippi the right to extend its laws over Indian lands within its borders, a move that would effectively extinguish the Choctaw and Chickasaw governments while allowing state legislators to reserve lands deemed “surplus” within the Choctaw Nation for U.S. settlers and transportation projects. Given that Mississippi— along with the states of Georgia and Alabama—banned Indians from testifying in court, the extension of its laws over Native territories would also allow U.S. settlers to engage in nothing less than a state-sponsored land grab. Mississippi’s latter proposal failed in the House by a vote of thirteen to sixteen shortly before the 1826 treaty negotiations, but it was a harbinger of times ahead. Within two years of Mississippi’s attempts to dissolve Choctaw and Chickasaw sovereignty, and just a year after James McDonald helped his nation resist the demands of John Coffee and his fellow delegates, Georgia took over the charge to terminate Native governance in the South. The state’s particular justification for doing so harked back to 1802, when Thomas Jefferson’s presidential administration had made a “compact” with Georgia to “extinguish . . . Indian title” to lands within the state’s presentday boundaries in exchange for Georgia’s own “cession” of territory between the Chattahoochee and Mississippi Rivers. Georgia had no rights to any of these territories, as these were Indian homelands over which the Southern

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state asserted imperial sovereignty after France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War (see Figure 1-1). As one Cherokee commenter put it, “This claim of Georgia was destitute of lawful foundation, either natural or divine, but existed in a royal Grant of an English Sovereign, who had never seen it.” Jefferson’s administration did not promise a timeline for fulfilling its end of the new imperial agreement, simply stating that it would acquire these Creek and Cherokee territories “as early as the same can be peaceably obtained, on reasonable terms.” For a moment, it appeared as if U.S. adoption policies might help the federal government realize Georgia’s claims. In the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs, federal commissioners bribed Taskanugi Hatke, a chief also known by the name of William McIntosh, and two other leaders in the Creek National Council to approve the cession of the Creeks’ remaining lands in Georgia. The three chiefs privately signed this treaty in opposition to the will of the vast majority of the Creek Nation’s population and its elected leadership. Congress quickly ratified this illegal document and, after careful deliberation, the Creek Nation—per its laws—put McIntosh to death for treason. Although McIntosh was not the recipient of U.S. schooling, he was a major figure among British-descended proslavery Creek elites who actively embraced private property ownership, racial slavery, and plantation agriculture. As U.S. federal administrators had hoped would be the case with Native adoptees, they were able to use the lure of individual wealth, as well as a flimsy promise of personal protection, to induce McIntosh and his cohort to sign off on the illegal transfer of territory. Federal treaty commissioners may have achieved success due to McIntosh’s commitments to Anglo-American economic values—and perhaps his belief that U.S. expansion was inevitable—in their acquisition of Creek lands for the state of Georgia; events unfolded quite differently, however, within the Cherokee Nation. Even though the federal government had successfully pressured Cherokees to cede much of their land in the decades after the 1802 compact, by the mid-1820s Cherokee chiefs were unanimous in their refusal to relinquish their remaining territories. Acting on behalf of the U.S. federal government in 1823, McIntosh himself had been unsuccessful in bribing elected Cherokee leaders to sell to the United States regions claimed by Georgia. By October 1827 one U.S. treaty commissioner railed against Cherokee leaders for opposing removal, characterizing them as a mixed-race minority whose refusal to relinquish territory opposed the wishes of “real

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Indians.” Within a year of the Choctaws’ ratification of a national constitution and just eight months after John Coffee found himself blockaded from land sales by the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations, the Cherokee National Committee ratified its second national constitution on July 4, 1827. Drafted by Cherokee chief John Ross—who had been educated in mission schools as well as a U.S. academy in Tennessee—this new governing document both consolidated the racialized economic ambitions of slaveholding Cherokee men and, in the words of historian William McLoughlin, “demonstrate[d] to the world that politically—as a nation—the Cherokees were now fully civilized and republicanized . . . capable of self-government according to the same kinds of laws and legal system” as U.S. whites. As Georgia whites came up against the political organizing of leading Creek and Cherokee slaveholding elites, they declared that the time had come for Indian removal, with or without the federal government’s assistance, a move that ultimately brought Andrew Jackson’s policy initiatives—and, indeed, Andrew Jackson himself—into national focus. Incensed by the Cherokees’ institutionalization and codification of national sovereignty in the East, they insisted that Cherokees vacate the state. After President John Quincy Adams delivered a noncommittal response to the Cherokee Constitution, Georgia’s legislators launched into action. In December 1827 state officials passed a resolution declaring that if Cherokees refused to sign away their title to lands coveted by Georgia’s settlers by June 1830, state legislators would extend their laws over “the whole of the lands in controversy” regardless of congressional opinion. “The lands in question belong to Georgia,” their resolution imperiously declared, “She must and will have them.” Georgia’s white populace celebrated the state’s decision. According to the Cherokees’ federal Indian agent, the poorer whites who made up the bulk of Georgia’s citizens believed themselves “the Rightful owners of the soil,” positioning Cherokee people as “mere Tenants at will.” When Andrew Jackson ran for the presidency on a pro-removal platform in 1828, these very same Southerners elected him by a landslide. The famous Nashville general did not disappoint. Immediately after taking office in 1829 he informed Congress in his State of the Union speech that all Indians east of the Mississippi needed to emigrate voluntarily to lands set aside for them in the trans-Mississippi West or, “if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws.” As these events unfolded over the course of the 1820s, the topic of Indian removal came to dominate U.S. national debates and shape questions of

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“states’ rights,” not to mention the political concerns of Native nations whose ancestral homelands stood in the balance. On the U.S. side, battles raged in Congress over white Southerners’ controversial threats to act outside federal jurisdiction and over President Jackson’s equally contentious position on mass relocation. The question of adoption was central to these arguments. Were Jackson’s policies consistent with the federal government’s promise that, once deemed “civilized,” Indian people and their tribal nations would be recognized as viable members of the U.S. national family? Pro-removal whites comprehensively rejected these more “liberal” paradigms. They wielded the specter of the “half breed” to eschew kin-based intimacies between whites and Indians, insisting instead on the need for Indians’ physical separation from a changing Southern landscape. By the close of the 1820s Native adoptees such as McDonald and the sovereign nations from which they hailed would be forced to reckon with hardening racial lines and new threats to frustrate Native attempts to use U.S. notions of “civilization” to keep the United States at bay.

The State of Adoption One of the central locations in which U.S. debates over antebellum Indian affairs arose was in the halls of Congress. Fiercely divided over Jacksonian removal policies and Southern unilateralism, congressional representatives on the House and Senate floor spent years sparring over the future of federal Indian policy. The fault lines in these contests were not always predictable. By and large, however, those from western states supported the forced relocation of Indians farther west, reflecting their own ambitions to remove populous indigenous nations from lands coveted by their constituents. Those from New England and the mid-Atlantic, on the other hand, tended to oppose removal, even as their legislatures undermined the rights of Native communities living within Northern state boundaries— a fact that was not lost on their pro-removal opponents in Congress or the Native people who fought dispossession at the hands of Northern whites. Although Andrew Jackson’s removal policies would come to affect Native people across both the North and the South, Georgia’s threats against the Cherokee Nation— combined with the bellicosity of Southerners in general—inspired congressional legislators to focus specifically on whether Southeast Indians could—or should—be literally and metaphorically adopted into the kinship structures that designated the parameters of Anglo-American freedom.

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Assumptions about population and reproduction shaped the discursive terrain upon which pro- and anti-removal legislators fought these battles. Like their predecessors in the 1790s, nearly all federal legislators framed their positions on adoption and Native sovereignty in the 1820s around the belief that the people who were most deserving of territory were those willing to orga nize themselves within nuclear-oriented patriarchal households, the spaces that supposedly produced the greatest number of human beings. President James Monroe would encapsulate the persistence of such ideas within his era when he argued in 1817 that North American territories would ultimately— and justly— end up in the hands of the “more dense and compact” populations that emanated out of his nation’s patriarchal agrarian spaces. He insisted that “the earth was given to mankind to support the greatest number of people of which it is capable, and no tribe or people have a right to withhold from the wants of others more than is necessary for their own support and comfort.” The government that was considered most capable of supporting and nurturing the densest populations was the one with the right to rule. Whereas congressional representatives shared ideas about population and governance, they disagreed over whether Indian people in their present circumstances were capable of adopting the familial arrangements that were believed to maximize humans’ reproductive potential. Displaying the mercurial nature of the ideologies driving imperial policy, congressional advocates of Southeast Indian removal emphatically argued that Indians could neither adopt nor be adopted into the familial regimes that ordered the expanding U.S. republic—at least not yet. Some explicitly described Indians as racially incapable of assimilation. Yet a number of other pro-removal legislators also focused their attention on the supposed failure of federal “civilization” programs to reconstitute Indian men and women into agrarian patriarchal households. For decades, they pointed out, the United States had sent missionaries into Indian communities in order to assimilate Indian people into the U.S. body politic. This policy, they insisted, had left Indians in a state of destitution. Indeed, removers contended, it was assimilation programs themselves that were contributing to Indian people’s “inevitable” march toward “extinction.” For years the U.S. government had whittled away at Indians’ land base through coercive treaty negotiations, Democratic representative Oliver H. Smith of Indiana argued, leaving Native people with little more than a small patch of earth to live on and the cash from annuities acquired from land sales to sustain them. Smith contended that the combined effects

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of land loss and the payment of federal annuities had together rendered Indians unwilling to work in any capacity and dependent upon “spirituous liquors,” both of which made them even more vulnerable to population decline. “[Y]our annuities are melting them away, like snow under a meridian Sun,” Smith asserted. “You may as well attempt to moralize, civilize, or christianize a maniac,” he concluded, “as an Indian who has no inducement to reform.” Smith acknowledged that annuities served as payments for Indian lands purchased by the United States and (meagerly) compensated for the circumscribed economic opportunities many Indian communities navigated in the wake of territorial dispossession. Nonetheless, he argued for terminating federal treaties and moving Southeast Indians west, where they could be “civilized” far from the traders who sold them liquor. Smith’s arguments concerning Indians’ supposed alcohol dependency and population decline were similar to those of other U.S. whites, who likewise insisted that alcohol consumption would lead to Indians’ “extinction.” In 1816 Analectic Magazine published a thought piece that argued that alcohol “enervated” Indian men. Reiterating Jeffersonian logics concerning race, sex, and reproduction, the article declared that Indians’ “other passions have dwindled into insignificance, or have been totally swallowed up, by their insatiable desire for the pleasures of drinking. Such is not the state of society in which we are to expect frequent marriages and numerous families.” Ignoring the fact that whites consumed far more alcohol than did Indian people (with apparently little impact on their reproductive capacities), such commentators drew upon widely held and long-established assumptions among Euro-Americans that Indian populations were uniquely—and negatively— affected by any exposure to liquor and the U.S. whites who peddled it. Ohio congressman William McLean—the brother of James McDonald’s former mentor, John McLean—joined Smith in his denunciation of federal “civilization” programs in the East. Like Smith, he recounted wrongs on the part of the United States to explain why his government’s attempts to adopt Indian people failed to serve Native people’s welfare. By refusing to stem the tide of white migration, McLean argued, the United States had not granted Indian people enough time to “civilize” before land-hungry settlers chased them off. McLean concluded that “the praise-worthy zeal of many pious Missionaries has long been exerted for the civilization and christianization of the Indians. But it is a la mentable truth, that, with

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very few exceptions, their labors of love and mercy have wholly failed.” According to McLean, Indian removal would end this history of sequential displacement, allowing Native people to remain in place long enough to assimilate U.S. domestic values, revive their populations, and, eventually, become adopted into the U.S. citizenry. In the meantime, the United States was to act as a paternal guardian over Native people in the West, preparing them for inclusion. Secretary of War Peter B. Porter would echo McLean’s position in 1828, stating “In [Indians’] present destitute and deplorable condition, and which is constantly growing more helpless, it would seem to be not only the right, but the duty of the Government to take them under its paternal care; and to exercise over their persons and property, the salutary rights and duties of guardianship.”  Highlighting what they considered to be foolhardy logics propping up the politics of adoption, many removers insisted that what proved most damaging to Indian populations in the East were not in fact annuities, liquor, or land loss, but the interracial intimacies that arose as a result of Indians’ proximity to whites. Time and again removers strongly critiqued the forms of race mixing encouraged by federal “civilization” programs, believing they had deleterious effects on Native communities. Drawing upon the trope of the “noble savage,” House representative Adam King of Pennsylvania asserted that those Indian people who lived near white settlements became only “halfcivilized,” adopting the worst aspects of U.S. “civilization”: “white vice.” Stuck between two worlds, Indians, he insisted, were sinking into decline. “[T]he wild Indian of the woods,” he argued, “had more nobleness of character than the half-civilized Indian, who, for the most part, contract the vices of the lower classes of whites, and became drunken and thievish, . . . unfit for the duties appertaining to civilized life.”  Florida representative Joseph White concurred. Indians “imitate all the bad habits of the worst part of our population,” he declared. He even believed that interracial sociability led to a loss of virility on the part of Native men. Once they began to mingle with whites, he asserted, “[t]hey lose the native independence of the savage, and, instead of imitating the white man, in any thing which is proper, they lose all energy, become drunkards, and vagabonds, and depend more on stealing from the whites, to save them from starvation, than the chase.”  These were hardly the masculine patriarchs that Jeffersonians declared could support women and children within their households, White implied. While failing to mention Native women, the implication of his argument was that

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such precarious existences would ultimately hinder Indian communities’ abilities to raise families. Just as physical proximity supposedly brought about “white vice” in Indian men, so too did it inspire interracial sexual intimacies that had devastating outcomes for the whole of humankind. Holding a Bible in his hand, House representative John C. Weems of Maryland focused on what he believed to be the immediate Christian implications of interracial sex, claiming Indians to be the descendants of Hagar and Abraham and, by extension, inappropriate sexual partners for the white Americans who crowded onto their lands. Weems claimed “to feel something like an amor to keep the Indians where they now were; but, for his own part, he had seen the mixed breed, and he did not like it—he would rather have them a little farther off.” Weems could celebrate the thought of Indians’ territorial rights. Indeed, he even loved the idea of Native people in the South. However, the specter of light-skinned Indian children made it impossible for him to support Indian sovereignty in the region. Undoubtedly tapping into the moral panics that attended Cherokee students John Ridge’s and Elias Boudinot’s marriages to white women they had met while attending Cornwall Academy in Connecticut, Weems attested that racial purity was essential to maintaining a homogeneous— and Christian—white supremacist nation. Even as Weems expressed his Christian squeamishness over what “mixedrace” offspring might mean for white hegemony, most removers followed Andrew Jackson’s lead and declared children of mixed European and Indian ancestry to be disastrous for both whites’ and Indians’ reproductive futures. By refusing to relinquish Native territories to the United States, those leaders who were born of white and Indian unions ignored “real” Indians’ concerns as well as those of U.S. whites. Once crowded out of their hunting grounds by migrating settlers, Southeast Indian “hunters” would face starvation, and their communities would go extinct if they remained in the East. But if relocated to “empty” lands in the West (which were, in fact, not so empty at all), they could continue to survive on wild game, while white farmers made better use of their ancestral homelands. As John Bell of Tennessee told the House, the “present system” of governance among the Cherokee left “the great majority . . . in the most squalid and miserable condition.” “It was not the red men who were benefited” from current policies, he insisted, “but some twenty or thirty whites who had insinuated themselves into the confidence of the Indians, and who, together with the

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half-breeds, controlled the whole tribe, and acquired wealth at the expense of those for whose welfare so many philanthropic wishes were expressed.”  Meanwhile, Jackson and his cohort had long argued that a united white population in the lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf Coast was essential to deterring attacks against the expanding United States and, in turn, preserving settler populations. By insisting upon their indigenous rights to their homelands, “mixed-race” Indian leaders blocked these impor tant national security concerns. As John Coffee’s treaty commission would rail at James McDonald’s delegation in 1826, future warfare mandated “that the whole of the country east of the Mississippi shall be thickly settled” by whites. In sum, removers drew upon moral and political arguments about population and governance to legitimate Southern expansion. For those who wanted Southeast Indian land, it ultimately did not matter that both Native women and enslaved blacks living within Indian territories were astute agriculturalists, that western lands were already home to Native people, or that Southern settlers’ passion for cotton would leave them starving if it were not for the importation of food. These were technicalities subsumed within imperial claims to property. Southerners’ imperial interests, however, did not go unnoticed by their national contemporaries. Congressional opponents of Indian relocation were quick to point out the flimsy and transparent nature of removers’ assertions of philanthropy. Congressman John Woods of Ohio, one of the most outspoken of the anti-removal voices in Congress, told the House that Southeast Indians’ relocation west was “not for the benefit of the Indians—not for their civilization and preservation—but for our interest, and only our interest.”  Latching on to the language of reproduction, Woods and his cohort of anti-removal legislators characterized their own position as in true ser vice of human populations in the United States and Indian country and more generally representative of actual federal benevolence. First and foremost, anti-removal legislators vehemently challenged the idea that the current “civilization” programs operating east of the Mississippi were leading to Indians’ “extinction.” As Woods insisted, there was no evidence to make such claims. According to federal documents, the politics of adoption and assimilation had inspired population resurgences within the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Cherokee Nations over the course of the nineteenth century. Citing government surveys, Woods informed fellow

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lawmakers that the “whole number of the four largest [Indian] nations within the limits of the States” stood at “fifty-four thousand,” hardly an insignificant number. “The Creeks” were at “20,000; the Cherokees, 9,000; Choctaws, 21,000; and the Chickasaws, 3,625.” More recent information suggested even “greater” numbers and, most significantly, that “civilization” policies were helping to generate this population growth. Woods reiterated the fictional argument that U.S. missionaries and federal Indian agents brought capitalism and agriculture to Native societies, insisting that U.S. efforts had inspired animal husbandry, the production of “cotton, tobacco, wheat, oats, indigo, sweet and Irish potatoes,” and the construction of roads and taverns within Southeast Indian nations such as the Cherokee Nation. Having thus turned to yeoman agrarianism and market capitalism, Woods continued, Southeast Indian communities were “increasing, in a ratio as rapid as the most flourishing portion of the United States.” Their adoption of U.S. cultural, familial, and economic practices was so extensive that, soon enough, the United States could even extend them the privileges of U.S. kinship or, in Woods’s words, “Make them a portion of the great American family.” Citing former Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, he claimed that if the U.S. continued the “philanthropic” educational programs that had thus guided federal policy, Indians would see the benefit of dividing up “their landed property” into individually owned parcels and, in turn, “compress” themselves on smaller territories that would eventually become part of the United States. “[T]hey will ultimately attain such a state of intelligence, industry, and civilization,” Woods concluded, “as to prepare the way for a complete extension of our laws and authority over them.”  Counter to removers’ descriptions of a technocratic utopia in which whites and Indians thrived on opposite sides of the Mississippi River, Woods saw forced migration west of the Mississippi as the biggest threat to Indians’ reproductive futures. In an 1828 speech he cited the federal superintendent of Indians west of the Mississippi to assert that those Southeast Indians who had already made the trip west were starving and dying, especially women and children. There was no better evidence indicating that those supporting removal were motivated by self-interest, not philanthropy. They wanted to push Indians out of state limits and then leave them to die in a place where whites would not be forced to bear witness. Given the few resources Congress eventually delegated to the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole, and

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Cherokee people who were forced to move in the 1830s, Woods’s accusations were not unfounded. The national safety and security of U.S. whites was a central concern not only for those supporting Indian removal, but also for those opposing it. Ohio representative Samuel Vinton, for example, warned that Southeast Indians’ forced migration to lands west of the Mississippi would present security risks for settler populations in southeastern territories. Imagining future wars with “England or Mexico”—“or both together”—Vinton believed that by consolidating Native people together beyond the Mississippi, the United States would spark new pan-Indian resistance movements prepared to ally themselves with foreign invaders. In fact, the Ohio congressman argued, the federal government would have executed “by a single movement, the great plan of Tecumseh.” In racialized language, Vinton declared that by removing Indians from their current homelands—where they were isolated among greater populations of white settlers—the United States would create for enemy nations “a cordon of savages, extending from the Canadian to the Mexican line,” prepared to fight against the republic that had dislocated them. “The extent of the shocking atrocities that would follow this state of things,” Vinton jingoistically concluded, “no man can estimate.” For the Ohio congressman, keeping Southeast Indian nations circumscribed within white settlements was the only way to avoid this tragic future. Indeed, if the safety of U.S. populations was something that concerned removers, then they would leave off on their foolhardy relocation schemes. Like Woods’s accusations concerning Southerners’ intentions to let Indians die out of sight, Vinton’s fears that removal policies would ultimately support pan-Indianism proved prescient. However, the pan-Indian unity movements that were in the process of unfolding hardly took on the forms he anticipated. As the white men who sat in Congress debated how the Indian removal policies forwarded by Andrew Jackson and adopted by Southern states such as Georgia and Mississippi would affect human populations in eastern North America, Southeast Indian leaders were organizing across national lines, cultivating their own resistance strategies to forced relocation. Ideas about reproduction and belonging would shape these strategies, with Indian leaders asserting their own status as indigenous people, as well as the effectual practices their communities engaged in to reproduce their populations on their homelands in the face of U.S. imperial aggression.

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Paper Wars While prominent white men countered removal discourse within the halls of Congress, Southeast Indian leaders and adoptees persisted in opposing it from without. The Native leadership that pro-removal legislators and governing officials relegated to the status of “mixed blood” or “half breed” hailed from nations that had historically considered matrilineal ties to kin and clan lines—rather than reified notions of racial difference—as foundational to full inclusion. As the descendants of Native women, political figures such as James McDonald, David Folsom, John Ross, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot would traditionally have been considered within their own societies as unassailably Indian. Even though early nineteenth-century Southeast Indian chiefs had employed the terms “mixed blood” or “half breed” in treaties to request goods and resources for specific populations within their nations, their use of these appellations referred to the economic practices and bicultural makeup of many Euro-Indian families rather than serving to designate bicultural children as something other than Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, or Creek. From the time of the Creek War, however, some Native people did challenge the rights of bicultural individuals to rule. Red Sticks resisted the acquisitive practices and centralized governance strategies of the rising plantocracy within their nation, and Choctaw leaders such as Mushulatubbee framed their bicultural nationalist opponents (such as McDonald and Folsom) as “half breed” political usurpers. Such racial conceptualizations on the part of those against certain bicultural leaders gained ground alongside Native planter elites’ own ideas about heritable human difference. Indeed, the forms of plantation slavery especially embraced by a number of elite bicultural families created fissures within Southeast Indian societies, placing some leaders on the defensive within their own nations while generating enduring ideas about “blackness,” “whiteness,” and “Indianness” that would shape citizenship and national identity both before and after the era of Indian removal. As a result of these pressures from both outside and within their nations, the rising cadre of Native leaders contested narratives in nation-to-nation treaty negotiations and in other face-to-face interactions with U.S. whites that European-descended, U.S.-educated Native leaders had somehow lost their status as indigenous people and consequently failed to advance the interests of the Indian people they represented. James McDonald himself delivered a

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rebuttal to John Coffee’s accusation that illegitimate leaders of European descent had taken over the Choctaw Nation. Choctaw people “have determined not to part with their country,” McDonald insisted. “This determination is made with great unanimity on the part of those here present, and we are satisfied that we speak the sentiments of nine-tenths of the nation.” Moreover, he included himself and the rest of the Choctaw leadership when he spoke of Choctaws’ territorial birthrights. “It would be needless to enter into the various reasons which have determined us to decline the acceptance of your proposals,” he relayed. “It is sufficient that this is the land of our birth, and that when once sold it could never be recovered. Here our forefathers have lived; here we wish to live; and when we die, let our bones be laid by the side of those of our kindred.” Southeast Indian leaders, however, also realized the limitations of directly countering the discourses of federal treaty commissioners and governing officials whose sole mission was to achieve territorial cessions. As a result, they worked closely with international allies to broadcast their opposition to removal and counter the arguments supporting it. In 1828 Cherokee elites forged and solidified their relationships with other tribal nations and nonNative allies as they established the Cherokee Phoenix. Using funds from the Cherokee National Treasury as well as donations from evangelical missionaries to support this bilingual national newspaper, they printed articles in both English and Cherokee to reflect, inform, and further shape political conversations within and across Cherokee country as well as on an international stage. Elias Boudinot— one of the Cherokee men whose marriages to white women had caused such a scandal in the United States— served as the inaugural editor of the paper. He believed that through the Phoenix he could build solidarity networks with antislavery organizers and other progressive news editors and activists in the United States and Europe who were likely to oppose the United States’ high-handed treatment of sovereign Indian nations, not to mention the expansion of U.S. racial slavery farther west. Boudinot published the opinions of pro- and anti-removal U.S. officials in both the English and Cherokee languages, as well as Cherokee challenges to the “facts” and logics used to justify demands for Indian relocation, to galvanize broad-based public support for Cherokee sovereignty—as well as that of Native people more broadly—through print. In the inaugural issue of the Phoenix, Boudinot was confident that the paper would bring about a

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new kind of transatlantic and pan-Indian resistance movement against the expansion of the United States. Referencing the paper’s symbolic title, he expressed his “hop[e] for that happy period, when all the Indian tribes of America shall arise, Phoenix like, from their ashes.”  By 1829 he made this commitment to pan-Indianism even more explicit, renaming the paper the Cherokee Phoenix and Indian Advocate. Unlike the Indian unity movements organized prior to the War of 1812, this one would not revolve around arms and trade but adopt a strategy that James McDonald and at least one of McDonald’s Choctaw peers understood as “paper warfare.” It would use U.S.-educated Southeast Indians’ language and literacy skills and extensive knowledge of liberal governance systems to counter the pernicious rhetoric that fomented and legitimated U.S. imperialism. As did James McDonald during the 1826 treaty negotiations, contributors to the Phoenix challenged the racialized language and reproductive logics of removers’ assaults on Southeast Indian sovereignty. In one of the paper’s early runs, a speech by Woods was printed in which the congressman exposed the hypocrisy of the corrupted “half breed” narrative. “The power is claimed to depose these interfering and impertinent agents—half breeds, as they are called,” the Ohio representative declared, but the United States continued to “treat them as Indians,” individuals without “the rights of citizens.” Discrediting the leadership of these men, he concluded, was nothing more than an attempt on the part of U.S. legislators “to effect our wishes” to acquire land. A few months later Elijah Hicks, a member of the Cherokee National Council, himself addressed removers’ assertions that Cherokee people with mixed ancestries were not truly Indian in a speech delivered to the Cherokee Coosewatee district and later published by the Phoenix. Proximity to whites had made the Cherokee population “a complete variety,” Hicks argued, “one part Indian, another half Breeds, and a third whitemen.” According to Cherokee customs, matrilineal descent and adoption into matrilineal clans—not “full” Indian “blood”—were the arbiters of social and political belonging. Further, in response to marriages such as Boudinot’s and Ridge’s to Euro-American women, the Cherokee General Council had granted the children of white women and Cherokee men citizenship within the nation in 1825, before the drafting of the Cherokee Constitution. By emphasizing the Cherokees’ own changing customs concerning adoption and assimilation, Hicks insisted on the Cherokee Nation’s rights to recognize its membership and increase its populations as Cherokee people saw fit. Boudinot

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concurred. In response to Thomas McKenney’s condemnation of the Cherokee Constitution, he published an anonymous editorial declaring that the Cherokee “always have had the right of passing laws for ourselves, and regulating our own affairs.”  Even as U.S.-educated Cherokee leaders such as Hicks countered removers’ arguments concerning indigeneity and ancestry, their rebuttals revealed the ways in which imperial paradigms concerning reproduction, property, and race had simultaneously come to shape their own articulations of sovereignty. By recognizing the citizenship rights of the children of white women and Cherokee men, Cherokee elites such as Boudinot and Ridge bypassed the matrilineal clan systems that had been central to women’s political authority within Cherokee society. And even as the centralized governance systems codified in the Cherokee Constitution asserted Cherokee selfdetermination, their protection of elite Cherokee men’s rights to practice racial slavery and private property ownership further challenged matrilineal belonging, while embedding U.S. conceptualizations of race and labor into Cherokee law. Educated by abolitionist missionaries in Cornwall, Boudinot himself opposed the practice of holding black people in bondage and even publically criticized the state of Georgia in the Phoenix for slaveholding. Yet under his editorship the newspaper also printed sections of the Cherokee Constitution, including those that excluded people of African descent from full—or even partial— civic participation. These passages specified that the Cherokee National Council recognized the descendants of Cherokee women and black men as citizens of the nation, in accordance with Cherokee beliefs that the children of Cherokee women were also Cherokees. But they also prohibited such children from assuming any government or leadership position within the nation, a move that contravened established beliefs that matrilineal descent guaranteed full rights and privileges within Cherokee society. Members of the National Council further emphasized the ways that blackness curtailed Cherokee belonging by denying all other people of African descent—enslaved or free— access to even second-class citizenship. Indeed, children born from sexual unions between black women and Cherokee men would have none of the privileges enjoyed by those between white women and their Cherokee partners. When Elijah Hicks insisted that the Cherokee Constitution “plac[ed] the political rights of every Cherokee on an equality marking out the road leading to happiness, and to our national eminence,” he made

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invisible the gendered and racialized exclusions anchoring liberal citizenship for those within the Cherokee Nation. Hicks’s own description of Cherokee populations further highlighted these emergent forms of racial thinking. He celebrated a “complete variety” of communities with “white” and “Cherokee” ancestry while erasing the presence of African-descended people who had been enslaved within, or adopted or born into, Cherokee families. As had the Choctaw men who drafted their nation’s 1826 constitution, contributors to the Phoenix largely insisted upon their nation’s proximity to “whiteness,” while passing laws concerning black people that supported elite investments in plantation agriculture. Indeed, if print culture organized and conveyed the “languages of power” that shaped imagined national communities—as theorist Benedict Anderson has argued—for Boudinot, Hicks, and their cohort of Cherokee elites, the Cherokee Nation they envisioned self-consciously defined its multiracial citizenry as “not black.”  Social and legal discourses supporting racism and African American servitude in the Phoenix contributed to a broader project in which Cherokee elites insisted on their fitness for sovereignty in their homelands by demonstrating the reproductive practices associated with U.S. “civilization.” Throughout the Phoenix, Boudinot and his successors printed texts describing the transition of Indians from a so-called state of “savagery” to one of “civilization” in support of their claims to Native homelands in the East and their persistence as a Native population living alongside U.S. settlements. The inaugural edition of the Phoenix declared, “Sufficient and repeated evidence has been given, that Indians can be reclaimed from a savage state, and that with proper advantages, they are as capable of improvement in mind as any other people.” “[L]et it be remembered,” the passage continued, “that this improvement can be made, not only by the Cherokees, but by all the Indians, in their present locations.” To confirm his point, Boudinot printed a letter from David Folsom about similar “improvements” among Choctaw people. “Civilization is rapidly taken place among them,” Folsom wrote, “and they are visibly improving in their habits. Much industry is displayed . . . and considerable exertions are used to educate their sons and daughters.” Central to these assertions was the presumption that Native men had moved away from hunting wild game on collectively held homelands and, like their white neighbors, now occupied the individual, male-headed agricultural homesteads that would allow them to maintain their populations upon their remaining land base.

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Also part and parcel of this national project was the reenvisioning of women’s roles. Although Cherokee women had long been considered the heads of their households, exerting rights over land, their children, and the agricultural goods produced by their own labors, the Phoenix printed passages both celebrating and naturalizing women’s subordinate role to men through Christian dictates. “[S]o it is beautifully ordered by Providence,” the Phoenix printed, “that a woman, who is the mere dependent ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace, winding herself into the ragged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding the broken heart.” If women’s agriculturalism had provided them power in the past, women now were to support and embellish masculine authority. Of course, printing passages concerning black subordination and patriarchy in the Phoenix may have been merely strategic—a way to mirror U.S. discourses without actually taking them all that seriously. There would have been considerable incentive to advertise Cherokees’ affiliation with “civilization” discourses, for in addition to countering Southerners’ claims to Cherokee and other Indian lands, Cherokee elites sought to appeal to the sentiments of Christian allies throughout the Atlantic world. But evidence also indicates that the rising generation of slaveholding Indian leaders in the Cherokee Nation and throughout the Southeast did have investments in patriarchal governance, as well as in racial inequality. As scholar Tiya Miles argues, “In a period when the Cherokee Nation was trying to remake itself in the image of the United States to prove its level of civilization, entertaining the complex set of ideas and social practices known today as the ideology of ‘true womanhood’ or ‘domesticity’ represented a pathway to civilized society.” Meanwhile, Miles’s scholarship on James and Peggy Vann further shows that some Cherokee elites did, in fact, assert masculine prerogatives over their wives. That prominent Cherokee leaders supported chattel slavery is clear. When speaking publicly, men like John Ridge and Elias Boudinot deliberately shied away from the topic of racial servitude whenever possible, aware that the majority of the U.S. whites who would side with them against removal also supported abolition. The ubiquity of runaway-slave ads within the Phoenix, however, betrayed proslavery sentiments within the Cherokee Nation, generating conflicts between Cherokee elites and antislavery reformers over the course of the early 1830s. These commitments on the part of Cherokee leaders to the racialized reproductive practices embraced in the United States—or, more predominantly, in the U.S. South— kindled internal confl icts within Cherokee

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society that, from outsiders’ perspectives, fueled removers’ arguments that Cherokee elites in fact operated counter to the wishes of the vast majority of their nation. Over the course of the mid-1820s, political upheavals within the Cherokee Nation evinced that there were major conflicts over acculturation. Many Cherokee people opposed the ways Cherokee elites’ “civilization” initiatives interfered with long-standing cultural values and kin relations, and they also had reason to doubt whether the politics of adoption would lead to the acknowledgment of the social, political, and territorial rights of Native people. Given that the Cherokee men who had chosen to live on private land reserves were not recognized as citizens within the Southern states in which they resided; that the U.S. government refused to relinquish to the Cherokee Nation the funds for lands purchased by treaty; and that Boudinot’s and Ridge’s marriages to white women had caused an uproar in the United States, it seemed unlikely that the U.S. government would ever follow through on the promises of inclusion. Tensions came to a head in 1827, when a number of Cherokee people voiced their opposition to acculturation just before the Cherokee Constitutional Convention. Led by Cherokee chief White Path, a group interrupted the Cherokee National Council to refute the current leadership and demand respect for older Cherokee values. Among the new practices White Path and his cohort rejected was racial slavery. Yet as Georgia ramped up its assaults on Cherokee sovereignty over the ensuing year, many also saw U.S.educated leaders as useful in the fight against removal. In the nationwide elections of 1828, the Cherokee Nation voted in most of the men who had served in leadership positions over the previous ten years, including the bicultural men of European ancestry and Christian persuasion supportive of “civilization.” Despite the fact that Cherokee leadership was an intra-national concern within Cherokee society, the ongoing activism of men such as Ross, Boudinot, and Hicks served to incite Southerners’ calls for Indian removal. John Forsythe— Georgia’s elected representative in the House and its former governor—pounced on Cherokee elites’ efforts against relocation. Deploying Jacksonian rhetoric, the congressman insisted that the Cherokee Nation was “in the hands of a few half-breeds and white men” who used their positions of power for their own self-serving purposes. He claimed that these Cherokee leaders had published a constitution that was “hateful to many of the Indians, who desired to counteract it” and, instead of using annuity

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funds “to feed and clothe the common Indians, who are represented as half starved and naked wretches,” these leaders published a paper within “a community of thirteen thousand souls, not five hundred of whom can read or write.” Forsythe likewise fi xed on Hicks’s characterization of Cherokee populations. Implying that “real” Indians were destined to disappear, the congressman argued that the tribe disingenuously swelled its ranks by converting “citizens of the United States into Cherokees” through “the short and simple process of marriage and adoption.” Such opportunistic recalibrations of U.S. ideas about race and kinship, of course, put Indians in a double bind. Those acculturated—or adopted—into the U.S. domestic economy, or even U.S. families, were no longer legitimately “Indians” in the eyes of the United States. Meanwhile, the more Indians adopted the tenets—and even the people—associated with legitimate political governance, the more they lost their “authentic” claims to sovereignty. Finally, those Indians who refused to engage with U.S. cultural values and political frameworks were deemed unfit for life on a modernizing North American continent, a fiction that, once again, confirmed their unpreparedness for territorial rights and self-governance. While rigorously contested, these narratives had staying power. On May 28, 1830—two days before Georgia’s state extension laws went into effect—Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act passed by a narrow margin. Even though the bill did not legalize Indians’ forced removal to the transMississippi West, it provided the funds for relocation treaties and, to Southern states, a mandate for their unilateral dissolution of Native governments. In that year’s State of the Union Address, Jackson celebrated the ratification of his legislation through the rhetoric of Southern territorial power and U.S. philanthropy. White settlement on Southeast Indian land “place[d] a dense and civilized population in large tracts of country,” which would “incalculably strengthen the southwestern frontier, and render the adjacent States strong enough to repel future invasions,” while enabling states such as Mississippi and Alabama to “advance rapidly in population, wealth, and power.” Removal, Jackson insisted, “will separate the Indians” from white settlements, “ free them from the power of the States,” and “enable them to pursue happiness in their own way and under their own rude institutions.” Maybe in the future, Jackson concluded, “under the protection of the Government and through the influence of good counsels,” Indians would become “an interesting, civilized, and Christian community.”

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The Indian Removal Act was hardly the final word on the subject of adoption and removal. The Cherokee Nation and its missionary allies continued a legal fight against relocation, eventually bringing two lawsuits to the Supreme Court in 1831 and 1832 that challenged Georgia’s authority to extend its laws over a sovereign Indian nation. Between Jackson’s legislation and the Cherokee lawsuit, Indian self-determination in North America dominated national discussions in the United States in the 1830s. White women’s reform movements and evangelical organizations joined Southeast Indian elites’ “paper wars” against the federal government and Southern states, engaging in what was at that point the largest petition drive against a federal policy position. This quickly created the network of white antebellum activists who would soon join free blacks to demand the abolition of slavery. With an executive branch dead set on claiming Southeast Indian lands for U.S. slavery, however, theirs was an uphill battle. James McDonald publically acknowledged the difficulties ahead. In August 1830 McDonald delivered a speech in Jackson, Mississippi, challenging Southern calls for Southeast Indian removal and insisting upon the possibility that the United States could co-exist with Indian nations. Identifying himself as a Choctaw man and a U.S. citizen, he highlighted the hypocrisy of white Southerners’ claims to Native territories, even as he firmly situated himself as a man among them. “Fellow Citizens,” he addressed the crowd, “allow me to advert for a few moments, to some topics of the present day.” The South claimed to be “oppressed by the North” when it came to concerns over tariff laws and Indian sovereignty, the thirty-year-old McDonald declared, but white Southerners were themselves oppressors. By that time, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama had extended state laws over Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Creek territories, effectively erasing the power of tribal governments native to the South. “I say to Georgia, in behalf of the oppressed Cherokees,” McDonald continued, “I say to Mississippi, in behalf of my kindred Choctaws, while you suffer from the legislation of a majority in Congress, do not by your own legislation inflict unnecessary suffering upon a weak and helpless people.” Remaining silent on another glaring form of Southern tyranny— that of racial slavery—McDonald used his dual vantage point as a member of the Choctaw Nation and a proslavery citizen of the U.S. South to situate Indian removal as the glaring flaw underpinning Southern sectionalism. If McDonald meant his speech to serve as a provocation to the Southern guard regarding their insistence on relocating Southeast Indian nations west

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of the Mississippi, the white reporter of the event missed the mark. Providing an editorial above a transcription of McDonald’s “Oration,” a writer for the Raleigh Register ignored the political and territorial challenges McDonald presented to his white listeners, fi xating instead on his “racial” and national affiliations—on his seemingly novel and contradictory status as a “half breed Choctaw, but a citizen of the State of Mississippi.” Of particular interest to readers of McDonald’s speech, the reporter remarked, were “passages in which he refers to his mixed blood, and the doom of the Southern Indians”— neither of which were topics raised by the Choctaw leader. While McDonald had emphasized “without a blush . . . the Indian blood coursing through [his] veins,” he used the politics of “blood” to mark his ties to his “native land,” not to announce mixed ancestry. Most centrally, McDonald’s aim was to confront the faulty logic of removal policy. He did not believe Southeast Indian people faced an inevitable and unchangeable fate. By challenging removal, he instead opposed Southeast Indians’ “unnecessary suffering” at the hands of their white neighbors. Radically intervening in pro-removal discourse, McDonald argued that the futures of Choctaw people and other Native women and men in the Southeast were yet unwritten. Thus went transnational debates concerning Native sovereignty by the late 1820s. On the one hand, Native activists and their non-Native allies emphasized Native people’s rights to their homelands, as well as to full civic participation in their own nations and in the United States. On the other, pro-removal whites reduced the conversation to imperial questions of Indian racial purity and Indians’ putative best interests. Removers insisted that specific Native leaders—or even entire Native communities—who had adopted certain aspects of U.S. liberal society or had ancestral ties to nonNatives no longer legitimately fit the identity of “Indian.” They argued that Indians who had been incorporated into the U.S. national family—or had proved incorporable, however precariously—had relinquished their tribal belonging. When Native adoptees themselves refused this formulation, removers pointed to their European ancestry and their engagement with the liberal property regimes structuring U.S. “civilization,” conjuring up the figure of the so-called half breed in order to undermine claims to Native sovereignty. According to this rationale, only those whom U.S. whites designated as “full blood” could assume the status of “real Indians,” and these Indians, removers concluded, could not survive in the East.

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When the Cherokee Nation and American Board missionary Samuel Worcester brought the issue of Cherokee sovereignty to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall rejected removers’ assertions that Indians lacked jurisdiction over their homelands. He did so through the imperial politics of adoption. In 1831, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, he held that the U.S. government was Indian people’s “great father” and Indians were its adopted “wards.” Marshall argued that this made Indian nations neither completely “foreign states,” nor completely un-sovereign collectives. In what became one of the most important rulings in U.S.-Indian legal history, Marshall determined that Indian nations were “domestic dependent” nations, experiencing partial sovereignty under the U.S. federal government. In 1832 in Worcester v. Georgia, he reinforced this ruling when he held that Georgia’s unilateral extension of its laws over the Cherokee Nation was illegal because it infringed upon both the Cherokees’ inherent rights to self governance and the federal government’s authority over its assumed “dependent.” While codifying Indian people as the adopted children of the United States, Marshall’s decision represented a victory to the Cherokee Nation, acknowledging their rights to govern over their homelands. By the time of Marshall’s decisions, Andrew Jackson had come to reject the politics of adoption, infamously refusing to enforce Justice Marshall’s rulings and allowing Southern states to unilaterally dissolve Indian sovereignty. In so doing, Jackson exposed Indian people and their territories to white Southern invasion. Early U.S. policies and federal law had designated Indian people as adoptable subjects, either as potential citizens of the United States or as “dependent” Indian nations. Yet in the era of removal, it did not matter whether imperial audiences characterized Indians as “civilized” or “savage,” adoptable citizens or members of dependent polities; regardless, they had no rights over their homelands. Indeed, from the editor of the Raleigh Register, it would seem as if Indian people belonged nowhere. By expressing his astonishment in his description of James McDonald as a “half breed Choctaw, but a citizen of the State of Mississippi,” it appeared as if McDonald’s citizenship in the United States was no more a given than was his status in Indian country. McDonald’s final years in Mississippi would be dogged by this paradox, even as he continued to search for ways to resist and refuse it.

Epilogue The Limits of Sympathy

In her end- of- life autobiography Peggy Eaton wrote about a time when she “won an Indian boy.” According to Eaton’s account, she was living in Washington, DC, where her husband, John Henry Eaton, served as Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war. John had just returned to the nation’s capital after he and General John Coffee had made a treaty with the Cherokee Nation. After her husband had finished negotiations in Cherokee territories, she wrote, “The Indians were so satisfied with the treaty, and felt themselves so much indebted to Mr. Eaton, that they determined to make some exhibition of their gratitude.” As Peggy remembered it, the Cherokees first offered her husband a tract of land said to be worth $10,000. The secretary of war “steadfastly refused to accept it” because he had made the treaty “looking to the interests of his red brethren and never considering his own.” The Cherokees decided to “pay their respects” to the Eatons later at their Washington domicile. Betraying her racialized sense of white female delicacy and a crude understanding of Indian identity and culture, Peggy was disturbed at the news of these guests. “I told my husband,” she wrote, “that ‘no dirty old tobacco-smoking’ Indians should come into my parlors.” But she soon relented—and was glad she did. For “lo and behold” they brought her a gift of “an elegant silver set.” “The fact is,” Peggy added, “I won more.” The visitors gifted her a seven-year-old boy. The Cherokees’ white interpreter explained that the leaders “had brought him along to live with us 

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and make him a present.” At first reluctant to incorporate the child into her family (“I had enough white children of my own,” Peggy declared), she acquiesced. The interpreter “informed us that the Indians expected us to accept this boy; that he was a relative of John Ross; that we must take him and provide for him somehow.” John Eaton subsequently claimed the child, crossing “his hands over the head of the boy” and naming him—rather modestly—John H. Eaton Ross. Peggy Eaton’s account is unlikely, if not apocryphal. The Cherokee Nation never negotiated a treaty with John Eaton during his tenure as secretary of war between 1829 and 1830. And if Cherokee delegates did come to Washington, they would hardly have expressed gratitude toward John Eaton, who as part of Andrew Jackson’s presidential cabinet promulgated devastating removal policies that the vast majority of Cherokee people staunchly resisted. John Ross himself was the most visible and vocal opponent of Cherokee relocation from their southeastern homelands, and his stance against migration squarely situated him among a cohort of Indian people that Jacksonians such as Eaton described as recalcitrant and corrupted “half breeds.” It is more than improbable that Ross would place his child with the Eatons. Nor is there any corroborating evidence that he did so. Did Peggy Eaton make up an account of adopting an Indian boy? Or was the child a descendent of the Choctaw or Chickasaw Nations, with whom both Eaton and Coffee signed removal treaties in 1830? Did Cherokee, Chickasaw, or Choctaw leaders offer Eaton a child, themselves describing the boy as the son of the man who served as an obstacle against the expansion of the U.S. cotton kingdom? If they did claim the child to be Ross’s son, perhaps they hoped the youth might humanize Indian people for land-hungry Jacksonians. More likely, John and Peggy fantasized about containing and permanently infantilizing Chief John Ross by keeping a child with his name within their home. To be sure, by calling the boy John Henry Eaton Ross, the Eatons signaled their wish to subsume the chief’s patrilineage within their own. Whether part fact or full-fledged fantasy, Peggy Eaton’s subsequent description of John Eaton Ross’s life with her family exposes the changing racial terrain that emerged in concert with Indian removal policies. Echoing Andrew Jackson’s early biographers’ descriptions of Lyncoya, Peggy claimed that despite her best attempts to raise the child in the likeness of white children—“I had him dressed as nicely as any child in Washington and sent

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to school,” John Eaton Ross refused to relinquish his Indian “habits.” Indeed, in concert with racial tropes that positioned Indian people as incapable of adapting to changing environments and technologies, Peggy insisted that “if there was a feather afloat in the air, or to be picked up from the ground, or plucked from a chicken, or if there was a scrap of red ribbon astray,— John would appropriate it; and sometimes came home befeathered and beribboned about his head in the most ridiculous manner: he always showed the savage.” Peggy described Ross as actively resisting her attempts at assimilation. To hide his “bundle of feathers,” he tied them “about his waist when he slept at night.” And when Peggy “remonstrated him for bringing those feathers into one of [her] beds,” he “flew into a violent passion and said, ‘Me go! Me go!’ ” After three years, the boy did go. In Peggy’s story, the Eaton family was traveling home to Nashville by boat when, after noticing “something curious in John’s appearance,” she and her husband “heard a splash.” John Eaton Ross had jumped ship and “struck for the shore.” The former secretary of war “refused to recover” the ten-year-old child. “Whether Indian or white man, ingratitude soon cut any person from my husband,” she wrote. “When he saw John in the water, he said, ‘Let him go. Let him go.’ ” Although Peggy wrote that she “never saw [Ross] afterwards,” she nonetheless attested that he “found his own people.” “He was a beautiful boy,” Peggy wrote in concluding her story. More than that, he was “a perfect Indian.” According to her account, Indians were unwilling— even incapable—of relinquishing what U.S. whites considered outdated traditions, making them unable to appreciate new opportunities in even the most advantageous of circumstances. Consequently, it was in their best interest for them to jump ship, to abandon the very places and spaces associated with social, economic, technological, and political progress. What made John Eaton Ross “perfect” in Peggy Eaton’s story was that he realized this for himself. He did not remain to claim his rights as a Native person to Native space within the ever-expanding territorial borders of the United States. Instead, he voluntarily disappeared from the Eatons’ home, choosing to haunt the margins of the Southern landscape. Peggy Eaton’s autobiography reads as wish fulfillment. “Real” Indians chose to “disappear.” Of course, Indian people throughout the Southeast refused to comply with this imperial fantasy. Cherokee chief John Ross’s own position on Indian removal reflected that of the vast majority of Southeast Indians, who

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saw their homelands as integrally tied to who they were as people. Land was not a commodity to be exchanged. It contained individual and collective histories and stories, the bodies and spirits of ancestors, and the very resources that promised to sustain future generations. When Southeast Indians refused to relocate west of the Mississippi, those supporting Indian removal scrambled to strip them of territorial sovereignty. Arguing, as did Peggy Eaton, that Indians were not adoptable into the U.S. national family—at least not in the immediate future—they positioned Native communities as relics of the past whose only chance of survival was to be moved far away from “white” settlements. Within this pro-removal discourse, those individuals who had been housed and educated in U.S. homes and institutions—who appeared to have adopted U.S. customs and knowledge all too well—were no longer indigenous. The U.S. construal of the changing identities of men like James McDonald, David Folsom, John Ross, and Elias Boudinot best reflected the shifting political winds concerning the politics of adoption. These men had been incorporated into U.S. plantation households and mission schools as “Indians” but emerged from them—in white adopters’ eyes—as slaveholding “half breeds” who usurped power from their “full blood” relations.

Choctaw Removal While adopted Indian men such as James McDonald resisted these selfserving imperial discourses, the pressures for removal came to a head with the ratification of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act and the president’s support of Georgia’s and Mississippi’s extension of state laws over Indian territories. Indeed, the pressure to relocate was so great that even before the 1830s a number of Southeast Indian leaders began to consider relinquishing their territories in the East for lands west of the Mississippi. By the end of the 1820s, Choctaw chief Mushulatubbee was among this cohort. As he understood it, the United States had failed to live up to the kinship relations Choctaw chiefs and U.S. leaders had agreed upon, leaving Choctaw people with little choice but to abandon their homelands. With a “sorrowful” heart, Mushulatubbee told Secretary of War Eaton in 1829, “If our nation could remain at home and live free and independent I would be glad, or if the people of Mississippi would adopt us as their children upon equal terms I would also propose remaining where we are. But I believe this cannot be

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expected. Our only chance is to accept your proposition in due time to remove to a country where you can protect us.” In the late winter of 1830, even Mushulatubbee’s long-term Choctaw rivals David Folsom and Greenwood Leflore entertained relocation west and proactively drafted a removal treaty in the Choctaw National Council that they believed would be more beneficial to their nation’s interests than the terms they anticipated from federal officials. James McDonald—who had at that point returned to Ohio— came home to attend the general council meeting and helped to produce the treaty. In it were provisions that would allow Choctaw people to remain in the United States as citizens or, as U.S. whites would put it, as members of the U.S. national family. If they chose to stay in the East, individual Choctaw heads of households—be they man or woman— could petition for 640 acres in the lower Mississippi Valley, while young men would be allotted 320 acres, becoming propertied members of the state of Mississippi. The treaty also provided some economic support to Choctaw people on both sides of the Mississippi for four years, including financial compensation for horses and cattle left behind by those who removed and a permanent $50,000 yearly annuity to the new Choctaw Nation in the West. Although McDonald was among those who yielded to the idea of moving west, he felt ambivalent about the removal treaty that he and his Choctaw peers had produced. He believed it had been drafted in too much haste. He wrote to future Choctaw chief Peter Pitchlynn that he “had more thoughts running thro. my head within the last few days, than I could reduce to writing in a month” and informed Thomas McKenney of intentions to visit the U.S. president to hash out the terms of the treaty. McDonald’s plans never came to fruition, however, for the treaty never got off the ground. Both the vast majority of Choctaw people and the U.S. government opposed the conditions laid out for precisely opposite reasons. Choctaws did not want to leave their homelands and the federal government did not want to pay even the modest concessions for which the Choctaw treaty makers had asked. As Folsom and others had expected, by September of that year John Eaton and John Coffee showed up with their own removal treaty, which, again, most Choctaw people rejected. The secretary of war, in the words of missionary Cyrus Kingsbury, “then gave his sharp talk” in which he “threatened much . . . would be done if they did not make a treaty.” An unsigned letter from Choctaw delegates stated that Eaton “explicitly told us that the laws of

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Mississippi will be rigidly enforced, that the United States . . . cannot and will not protect us, that the agents and interpreters of the United States will be removed, and that consequently official communication between the general government and the Choctaws must cease.” “[I]n short,” they concluded, Eaton warned them “that if we refuse to treat now, total and irretrievable ruin will overtake us in five short years.” Given President Jackson’s stance on Indian removal and states’ rights with respect to Indian nations, Eaton’s bullying was difficult for Choctaw leaders to ignore. According to Kingsbury, McDonald told him in private conversation that Eaton’s talk “had a great effect” on the nation, and, “It was soon whispered round that some wished to make a treaty.” McDonald and roughly six other men were called upon to draft the document, which they did in late September. Yet before he and his peers had a chance to deliver their version of the treaty to the Choctaw National Council, Eaton and Coffee took up and altered the text the seven Choctaw leaders had drafted and then gave this revised document to a small subgroup helmed by Leflore, who signed it at Dancing Rabbit Creek on September 27, 1830, without the consent of the rest of the nation. While the final treaty retained a number of key provisions McDonald and his cohort had pushed for, including land provisions and U.S. citizenship for those who hoped to stay, it significantly modified other crucial demands. Consistent with their resistance to Indians’ adoption of U.S. knowledge regimes and to the United States’ adoption of Indian people and nations into its body politic, Eaton and Coffee curtailed funds for Choctaw schools within the Choctaw Nation and for Choctaw schooling outside of it; eliminated the request that the Choctaw Nation maintain sovereignty in Mississippi for another three years; and refused to permit a permanent Choctaw “delegate upon the floor of Congress.” Kingsbury summed up the scandalous and underhanded series of events that produced the treaty: “It has been stated to me by those present, that a majority [of the Choctaws] had left the ground before the Treaty was signed & a majority of those present were opposed & most of those that signed it now regret it. An attempt it is said will be made to break or alter the treaty,” he reported, “but I fear it will be feeble.” Kingsbury was right. Even though James McDonald and Peter Pitchlynn planned to protest the fraudulent agreement in Washington, the treaty was proclaimed valid on February 24, 1831. The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek proved devastating to the vast majority of Choctaw people. The Choctaw national government in the East had

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been dissolved in the eyes of the United States and Mississippi, and those who did not want to become part of the United States were now forced to take the heartbreaking and treacherous journey to foreign lands west of the Mississippi. Even those who decided to remain in their ancestral territories and become subject to Mississippi state laws found themselves unable to claim their settlements. Betraying the inclination on the part of federal officials to deny Indians’ incorporation into the U.S. body politic, William Ward—the controversial federal Indian agent appointed to the Choctaw Nation—refused to recognize most of the applications for Mississippi land and U.S. citizenship submitted by Choctaw men and women. Drawing upon the Jacksonian rhetoric of the “half breed,” Ward argued that any petitions for individual land holdings did not represent the true will of the Choctaw people but rather reflected the machinations of “designing men.” “I will observe that there are many more who wished to stay . . . than had been expected,” Ward remarked. “There were upward of two hundred persons from on[e] Section of Country applied a few days since at a great council held near this place. I put them off, as I did believe these were advised to that cause by designing men who were always opposed to the treaty.” “[T]his, I trust,” Ward concluded, would be the last time these men would be able to “thwart the views of the Government.” Out of the hundreds—if not thousands—of applicants, Ward submitted a register that “contained only sixty-nine heads of family.” He evidently threatened the rest of the applicants “with punishment if they did not emigrate.” Thousands of Choctaw people still refused to leave their homelands and, in the words of historian Samuel J. Wells, “faded into the wilderness” outside of the purview of white settlement. Today their descendants comprise the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. Another fifteen thousand people, however, found themselves faced with the daunting, traumatic, and dangerous task of migrating thousands of miles to the west, where they would have to rebuild their homes, their lives, and their nation. James and his mother, Molly McDonald, fared better than most. James appears to have abstained from signing the treaty at Dancing Rabbit Creek on September 27, 1830. But a day after the negotiations were completed Choctaw chiefs and the U.S. commissioners drafted a series of supplementary articles parceling out individual reserves to a handful of recipients—and he received one of them. More accurately, it appears that the treaty again recognized the reserve he and his brother, Alexander Hamilton, had secured for their mother in 1820 and 1824. Although James had

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debated moving west with the majority of the Choctaws, he ultimately chose to remain with his mother in the East and, given his title to his mother’s farm, was able to do so in plain sight. Over the ensuing year he continued to try to carve out a space for Native people such as himself and his mother as citizens— and as landed and propertied elites—within the slaveholding state of Mississippi. Even before the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, he had proposed a bill to the Mississippi State Senate “entitling Indians to give their testimony in courts of justice” The Senate passed the bill and the governor signed it into law in January 1830. Niles’ Weekly Register promoted it as “A Glorious Act” “extending to the Indians residing within the limits of that state, all the privileges and immunities whatever of citizens of that state— thus incorporating them with the white population.” While the bill appeared to uphold the promise of adoption, it was a disingenuous move given Mississippi’s unilateral extension of its laws over Choctaw lands and the limited number of Choctaw people able to claim either land or U.S. citizenship. Historian Frederick Hoxie writes that the bill reflected hopes on the part of state legislators to redeem Mississippi’s image to Northern detractors and that the “citizenship clause” was a meager offering in an “other wise hostile statute.” Still, the legislation was a small victory for McDonald, one that afforded him and his mother some of the property rights exerted by white Southerners. In the aftermath of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, James McDonald had ambitions of continuing to influence Mississippi’s legislature, this time as an elected representative. By 1831, however, his struggles to protect Choctaw rights and interests appear to have taken their toll, taxing his opportunities for higher office and influencing his health. McDonald admitted to his friend Alexander McKee in March 1831 that over the course of the previous winter he had “taken rather too much wine,” which inspired him to shout “rather too lustily for Henry Clay, without paying many compliments to Genl. Jackson.” “The truth is,” he continued, “I did dissipate too much last winter, and my opinions of Genl. Jackson are no secret.” McDonald’s denunciations of Jackson would have made him politically unpopular in his Southern state. Nonetheless, McDonald maintained hopes of running for office over the coming months. He also appears to have held on to the idea that his U.S. citizenship and, indeed, an eventual position within the Mississippi legislature, could be rendered compatible with his ongoing membership within the Choctaw Nation. Perhaps to emphasize his expertise in balancing his

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experiences in Choctaw country and the United States, he undertook in his leisure time a comparative study of Choctaw stories and U.S. literature, making him, in the analysis of Choctaw literary scholar Phillip Carroll Morgan, the first literary nationalist of his tribal nation. Yet sometime between late September and early October 1831, McDonald’s political and literary visions were cut short. At the young age of thirty or thirty-one, he tragically drowned in the Pearl River near his mother’s home near Jackson. Most of the sources pertaining to McDonald’s death claim that the young man ended his own life. Yet the reasons these sources provide are rooted in the individual interests of U.S. whites in McDonald’s life, not necessarily McDonald’s own assessment of it. Cyrus Kingsbury, for example, situated McDonald’s death within the Christian moral frameworks that governed Kingsbury’s own belief system. In October 1831 the American Board missionary wrote that McDonald “had again been indulging in his dissipated habits, & was so chagrined & mortified about it, that it brought on a state of partial derangement, & he drowned himself, having previously expressed the conviction that ‘his damnation was sealed.’ ” In his 1848 memoirs Thomas McKenney argued that McDonald had always struggled with white prejudice against his “Indian caste” and, after a white woman in Jackson rejected his proposal for marriage, “with promptness, and, as he thought, with scorn,” McDonald “rushed to the river, sprang off a bluff, and drowned himself!” No other records substantiate McKenney’s claims. Indeed, there are no existing documents even hinting that McDonald had a love interest in Jackson. McKenney’s narrative likely had more to do with white panics over white-Indian intermarriage than with the realities of McDonald’s own life. McKenney’s memoirs, however, do hold potential clues as to McDonald’s experiences in his final days. Southern anxieties over McDonald’s political ambitions should be considered a potential factor in McDonald’s death. McDonald’s outspoken critiques of Jacksonian politics and his ongoing advocacy for Choctaw property rights would have made him enemies within the white supremacist citizenry of Mississippi. While there is no evidence indicating foul play, some Southern whites may have been inclined to harm the budding Choctaw-U.S. statesman. In 1827 McDonald also reported having “made enemies” within the Choctaw Nation. His concerns over fissures with other Choctaw people, however, appear to have quickly dissipated, for he never mentions them again. There is ultimately no way to know what happened in McDonald’s final days and hours or what he thought or felt. If it is true

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that he did choose to end his life, it seems more than likely that the enormous upheavals and the personal and collective struggles he experienced over the course of the previous three decades appeared in his final tally to be more than he could bear. By 1831 Molly McDonald found herself having outlived both of her sons and having formally inherited the estate that they had secured for her. Her position within Mississippi, however, remained vulnerable. One document from 1833 indicates that Molly sold her claim to her territory “for a paltry” to Mississippi judge Isaac Caldwell to pay off a series of debts accrued by her younger son. However, she still managed to remain on her farm with the people she enslaved. Neighbors described her in 1833 as “an intelligent woman” who owned “a plantation and several slaves” and was “very capable of transacting her business concerns.” Molly died in 1834, and— according to another source—her land was then taken and “sold for Taxes.” In the 1850s, however, “five heirs” from her sisters’ side would successfully claim her territory, including her nephew Robert Jones, who would add his legacy to a property portfolio that included the several plantations in the Arkansas Territory run by the labors of the hundreds of men and women he enslaved.

Adoption and Empire For U.S. whites, the politics of adoption in post-Revolutionary North America was a family story that sought to mask the violence of U.S. territorial expansion, Indian dispossession, and African American servitude. For Native people, the placement of children within white homes was a way to support indigenous families and maintain indigenous sovereignty. As illuminated by the choices of Molly McDonald, this strategy generated gains and losses in the economic and political contests that dramatically transformed the Southeast. By engaging the politics of adoption, Molly McDonald secured title to her farm as well as a foothold in the U.S. Southern slave economy that had come to engulf Choctaw territories. She was most likely already tied to an elite lineage that gave her considerable influence within her nation. However, by educating her son within the United States she gave him both the forms of knowledge as well as the international kinship connections crucial for advocating on her family’s behalf in a society that sought to erase them both.

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But Molly McDonald’s resistance strategy came at a price. It was rooted in racial slavery and the Southern plantation economy, both of which fueled U.S. slaveholders’ drive to push Choctaw people off their homelands. In addition to compounding violence against people of African descent, her choices exposed her child to U.S. whites with little regard for Choctaw people, culture, or sovereignty. Molly McDonald surely placed her son in white men’s care in the hope that she was working toward her child’s and her family’s best interests. But as James McDonald discovered, one of the consequences of being a U.S. adoptee was that his Native family lost control over the ways he lived and whether he even experienced love or security apart from his Native kin. James McDonald’s early death coincided with the temporary decline of the politics of Indian adoption within the United States. But the stories of family, empire, and resistance in which he had played a vital role became foundational for U.S. interpretations of Indian sovereignty, culminating in Justice John Marshall’s decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and Worcester v. Georgia that Indian people and their nations were “wards” or “domestic dependents” existing under the guardianship of the United States. Marshall’s rulings at the behest of the Cherokee Nation and American Board missionaries would have enduring consequences for Native people both in and beyond the North American South. Even though Andrew Jackson refused to uphold Georgia’s legal obligation to respect the Supreme Court’s decision in Cherokee v. Worcester that U.S. states could not override indigenous sovereignty, the Court’s recognition of Indian nations’ status as independent polities imbued with inherent rights to self-govern still made it illegal for states to extend laws over Native nations and Native lands, setting a precedent for Indian nations’ relationships with U.S. federal and state authorities to this day (one that many U.S. governing officials and legal authorities continue to resist or ignore). On the other hand, to many non-Natives, the term “domestic dependency” suggested that Indian people and their chosen representatives lacked the political maturity deemed necessary for selfdetermination and, by extension, the right to autonomously govern themselves—as individuals and as part of broader indigenous communities—as they saw fit. Indeed, the story of adoption in the post-Revolutionary era laid the groundwork for the political terrain that Indian people continue to navigate in their ongoing struggles to protect their lands, their resources, and their children within and against the United States.

Appendix

Figure 7–1 in Chapter 7 is from the Ohio Historical Society and is said to reproduce a likeness of James Lawrence McDonald. However, the history provided on the back of the painting by Dr. William C. Miller both resembles parts of McDonald’s story and dramatically departs from it. It also reveals a significantly racialized interpretation of Native history in which McDonald is represented as a “noble savage” prone to reverting to “uncivilized” behaviors. Miller’s text reads: James Lawrence McDonald After the treaty of peace with the Indians at Greenville, a young chief of the Miamis went east to see the “Great Father.” He was a young man, noble in bearing, brave, just, generous, and scrupulously honest. His intention was to adopt the ways of the white man. Alexander Hamilton took an interest in him, and gave him his seal, a mark of great honor in the early days. He had adopted the name of James Lawrence McDonald, had become a classical scholar, and about 1825 returned to the home of his childhood, the Miami Valley. Here he entered into the law office of Jesse Corwin, then prosecuting attorney of Butler County, and brother Tom Corwin, one of Ohio’s illustrious sons. McDonald lived with Mr. Corwin until 1833, when one day, filled with “fire-water,” his savage nature all came to the surface, and with one great war-whoop he jumped into the Miami River and was drowned. “History of Fort Hamilton” By Dr. William C. Miller in Ohio Historical and Archaeological Society Publications

I believe Miller’s text is largely inaccurate. I also think the story contains enough markers in it that do pertain to James McDonald’s life to suggest 

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that this is indeed a painting of him. McDonald was of course Choctaw and not Miami. But from 1818–1820 he did live in Georgetown with Thomas McKenney, who supported his education in classical scholarship in Greek and Latin. From 1821–1823 he lived in Ohio to study law, albeit with John McLean, not the Corwins. His brother (and not his adopter) was named Alexander Hamilton and in 1823 McDonald returned “to the home of his childhood,” which was Choctaw territory in the lower Mississippi Valley, not the Miami Valley. In 1831 (rather than 1833) he drowned in the Pearl River. Both McDonald himself and missionaries living in Choctaw country at the time acknowledged that McDonald did struggle with excessive alcohol consumption. McDonald’s struggles, however, must not be seen in light of any putatively “innate” behaviors on the part of Indian people, or of any predisposition to alcoholism, as Miller’s text suggests, but rather of the pressures that U.S. officials—including the very men who had housed and educated McDonald—put on Choctaw people to relinquish their homelands. Indeed, McDonald’s two major episodes with extensive alcohol consumption were on the heels of tense treaty sessions, including the Treaty of Washington in 1825 and the illegal ratification of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, which led to the forced expulsion of most Choctaw people from their ancestral territories.

Notes

Abbreviations ABCFM Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Houghton Library, Harvard University FHL

Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College

LROIA Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, National Archives LRSW

Letters Received by the Secretary of War, National Archives

LSOIA Letters Sent by the Office of Indian Affairs, National Archives Minutes Minutes of the Indian Committee, vol. 1, 1795–1815, film 824, reel 8, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania PPP

Peter Pitchlynn Papers, Gilcrease Museum, University of Tulsa

PYMIC The Indian Committee of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College QSC

Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College

SDP

Silas Dinsmoor Papers, 1794–1853, microfilm 7011, roll 1, Letters, 1794–1827, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka

THP

Thomas Henderson Papers, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky

Treaties Documents Relating to the Negotiation of Ratified and Unratified Treaties with Various Tribes of Indians, 1801–1869, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75, National Archives

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Introduction 1. I am indebted to the work of black feminist thinkers and scholars in Native American and Indigenous studies and Queer studies in my analysis of family, race, and citizenship. See, for example, Brackette F. Williams, “The Impact of the Precepts of Nationalism on the Concept of Culture: Making Grasshoppers of Naked Apes,” Cultural Critique 24 (1993): 143–91; Patricia Hill Collins, “It’s All in the Family: Intersections of Gender, Race, and Nation,” Hypatia 13, no. 3 (1998): 62–82; Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Tiya Miles, Ties Th at Bind: Th e Story of an Afro- Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 2. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, November 4 and December 19 and 29, 1813, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser, Sharon Macpherson, and Charles F. Bryan Jr., vol. 2, 1804–1813 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 444, 494–95, 516; Robert Vincent Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 192–94; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 189. 3. The field of adoption studies has grown quite large in recent years. For both histories of adoption as a legal practice in the United States and the social and cultural parameters determining who qualifies as an adoptive parent and an adoptable child, see, for example, Jamil S. Zainaldin, “The Emergence of a Modern American Family Law: Child Custody, Adoption, and the Courts, 1796–1851,” Northwestern University Law Review 73, no. 6 (1979): 1038–89; Rickie Solinger, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion, and Welfare in the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002); Laura Briggs, Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Brigitte Fielder, “ ‘Those People Must Have Loved Her Very Dearly’: Interracial Adoption and Radical Love in Antislavery Children’s Literature,” Early American Studies 14, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 749–80. 4. Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 268–69. 5. Zainaldin, “The Emergence of a Modern American Family Law,” 1042–43, emphases in original. See also Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 269–80. 6. On enslaved families’ lack of legal rights, see Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 31. On antebellum white society’s reluctance to adopt African American children—or to even recognize their status as young people in need of actual protection and care—see Fielder, “ ‘Those People Must Have Loved Her Very Dearly.’ ”

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7. For examinations of these changing histories, see, for example, Miles, Ties That Bind; Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 8. It is impossible to fully assess the numbers of Native children “adopted” by U.S. whites during this period of study due to uneven record keeping on the part of U.S. educational institutions and missionary organizations, the transient nature of many of these “adoptions,” and the fact that many records have simply not survived into the present. This book accounts for small numbers (fewer than thirty). However, all told, there were an additional forty-two Indian children living in Cornwall, Connecticut, over the course of the 1810s and 1820s, as well as fluctuating numbers of Native youth at a residential school called Choctaw Academy in Blue Springs, Kentucky, opened in 1825. In addition, in 1824 the U.S. House Committee on Indian Affairs estimated that over eight hundred Indian children had attended mission schools within Indian territories. See Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 152. For scholarly accounts regarding the numbers of children at Cornwall mission school and Choctaw Academy, see John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2014), 231; Carolyn Thomas Foreman, “The Choctaw Academy,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 6, no. 4 (1928): 453–80. 9. As scholar Alexandra Harmon argues, “the banishment of Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Creeks was a response to competition between peoples with comparable agendas and comparable enterprising classes.” Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 93. 10. Samuel Eliot Morison, Th e European Discovery of America: Th e Northern Voyages, A.D. 500–1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 105; Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), esp. 13–45. A number of recent monographs and edited volumes have documented British, French, Spanish, and U.S. participation in the enslavement of American Indians. See, for example, ibid.; Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 11. Camilla Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, American Portraits (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 7–9. 12. James Horn, A Kingdom Strange: The Brief and Tragic History of the Lost Colony of Roanoke (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 55, 60–61, 81–82, 92, 155, 157–60.

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13. Townsend, Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma, 13–14. 14. Ibid., esp. 85–158. 15. Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 54; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 30–39. For a useful overview of Indian schooling by Europeandescended settlers, see Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). 16. Gallay, Indian Slave Trade; Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, eds., Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Gallay, Indian Slavery in Colonial America; Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 115, 121–24, 127. 17. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997). For how Native parents and children navigated the trauma of this history, see Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). 18. See Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 71. For a compelling memoir of one man’s experiences of being put in a residential school and then placed in an abusive white family in the 1940s, see Peter Razor, While the Locust Slept: A Memoir (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2002). Leslie Marmon Silko provides a powerful novel that engages with the history of this practice. See Leslie Marmon Silko, Garden in the Dunes: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). 19. Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape, 85. See also Briggs, Somebody’s Children, 59–93; Laura Briggs, “Why Feminists Should Care about the Baby Veronica Case,” Indian Country Today Media Network, August 16, 2013, http://indiancountry today medianetwork.com/2013/08/16/why-feminists-should-care-about-baby-veronica-case -150894; Laura Sullivan and Amy Walters, “Native Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families,” NPR News, October 25, 2011, http://www.npr.org /2011 /10/25/141672992 /native-foster-care-lost-children-shattered-families 20. See, for example, Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409; J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism Then and Now: A Conversation,” in special issue, ed. Michele Spanò, Politica & Società (June 2012): 235–58.

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21. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” 22. For histories of slavery in Indian country, see, for example, James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 80; Miles, Ties That Bind, 75; Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 17; Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979); Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country. 23. Drawing on the work of sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, historian Tiya Miles argues that the “ family can . . . be read as a barometer for . . . society, tracing and reflecting the atmospherics of social life and social change.” Ties That Bind, 3. For compelling studies on the intersections of family relationships and EuroAmerican imperialism, see ibid.; Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (New York: Ecco, 2012); Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An EighteenthCentury History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

1.

Adopting Indians into the Early U.S. Republic

1. Indian Committee, December 16, 1797, and June 18– September 17, 1801, Minutes, frames 65, 156, 158, 160. 2. James McDonald to Silas Dinsmoor, November 6, 1820, SDP; James McDonald to Thomas L. McKenney, August 9, 1819, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 86, frames 3921–22, National Archives, also published in John C. Calhoun et al., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, vol. 2 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1959), 227–30. 3. Thomas L. McKenney to John C. Calhoun, April 15, 1818, Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott to Thomas Loraine McKenney, March 6, 1818, and Thomas L. McKenney to Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott, March 27, 1818, all in LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 78, frames 9072–77, National Archives; James McDonald to Silas Dinsmoor, November 6, 1820. 4. James Taylor Carson, “Greenwood Leflore: Southern Creole, Choctaw Chief,” in Pre-Removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 226; Peter P. Pitchlynn to John Terrill, June 21, 1830, LPR 27, box 2, folder 6, roll 2, John Coffee Papers, State of Alabama Department of Archives and History. 5. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, November 4 and December 19 and 29, 1813, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser, Sharon Macpherson, and

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Charles F. Bryan Jr., vol. 2, 1804–1813 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 444, 494–95, 516; Robert Vincent Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006). 6. Elias Cornelius, “ ‘The Mother of the Little Osage Captive,’ Extract from a Letter from Rev. E. Cornelius, dated Natchez, Dec. 24, 1817,” Th e Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 14 (February 1818): 95. See also Elias Cornelius, The Little Osage Captive: An Authentic Narrative (Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong and Crocker & Brewster, 1822). I am grateful to Tiya Miles for pointing me to these documents. 7. My thinking about the relationship between race and reproduction is indebted to critical race and feminist scholarship. See Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), esp. 12–49; Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no.2 (Summer 1987): 64–81; Alys Eve Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 8. Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, December 25, 1780, in The Papers of Thomas Jeff erson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, vol. 4, October 1780 to February 1781 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 233–38. 9. Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 58–81; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 3–6; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 21–34. 10. Colin G. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 56–65. 11. Holton, Forced Founders, 3–5; Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians, 21. 12. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen, esp. 48–50; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Strug gle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), esp. 26. 13. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen, 66–76; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 33–36; Holton, Forced Founders, 6. 14. Calloway, The Scratch of a Pen, 92–93. 15. Ibid., 92–100; Holton, Forced Founders, 6–9; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 34–36; Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Set forth 22, in Some Resolutions Intended for the Inspection of the Present Delegates of the People of Virginia Now in Convention, by a Native, and Member of the House of Burgesses (Williamsburg, VA: Printed by Clementinarind, 1774), 6, http://www.wdl.org/en/item/117/.

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16. Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 197–98; Kathleen DuVal, “Independence for Whom?: Expansion and Conflict in the South and Southwest,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed. Andrew Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 101; Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?: Expansion and Conflict in the Northeast and Northwest,” in ibid., 124. 17. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 25–56; Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 4th ed. (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1975), 192–222. 18. Reginald Horsman, “The Dimensions of an ‘Empire for Liberty’: Expansion and Republicanism, 1775–1825,” Journal of the Early Republic 9, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 3. 19. Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians, 161–63. 20. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 18–19. 21. Ibid., 3–8, 18–19; Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians, 161. 22. Horsman, “The Dimensions of an ‘Empire for Liberty,’ ” 3; Rothman, Slave Country, 9–15; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 25. 23. Rothman, Slave Country, 6; Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 65. 24. Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 5–12, 26–27; Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), esp. 23–29. 25. See, for example, Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 53–64, 107–36; Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 56–70; Morgan, Laboring Women, 12–49. 26. Morgan, Laboring Women, 13–18, 36–40, 47; Fischer, Suspect Relations, 62–66. 27. Morgan, Laboring Women, 12–49. For an impor tant analysis of how ideas about disability informed constructions of blackness and “monstrosity,” see Douglas C. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” in The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 33–57. 28. Ibid., 19–49. See also Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 5–6, 128–36, 369; Fischer, Suspect Relations, 61–70. 29. Shammas, A History of Household Government in America, 24–25. As historian Kirsten Fischer also illuminates, “The patriarchal household was crucial to the social order; it served as metaphor and microcosmic example of the divinely ordained

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social hierarchy. As the monarch expected obedient subjects, so did the patriarch demand submissive household dependents (namely his wife, children, and servants). Households also controlled property and regulated its transfer from one male owner to his heirs.” Fischer, Suspect Relations, 14. See also Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 13–32; Jean M. O’Brien, Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650–1790 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 47–48. 30. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 27–41; Morgan, Laboring Women, 16–17; Shammas, A History of Household Government in America, 39–43. 31. For settler representations of Indians, see Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 28–30, 147–48. In her study of Tennessee settlements, historian Cynthia Cumfer shows that, as colonial settlements grew, newcomers who had not fought Native people for territory tended to be less vitriolic in their attitudes toward them. Cynthia Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 93–94. 32. Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 115–17. 33. As scholar Philip Deloria argues, “Americans wanted to feel a natural affinity with the continent, and it was Indians who could teach them such aboriginal closeness.” Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 5. 34. Philip Deloria’s reading of these images has directly informed my own. See ibid., 29–31. 35. On popular symbols and myths about American Indian and other indigenous women, see Rayna Green, “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American Culture,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, ed. Ellen Carol Dubois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1990), 19–21; Pamela Scully, “Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic World,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 3 (2005). 36. As historian Stephanie Camp succinctly states, “In the decades after the Revolution, proslavery ideology shifted subtly from the patriarchalism of the colonial period to paternalism, a form of social control more consistent with the humanitarian ideals of the age.” Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 17. For other descriptions of paternalism, see Elizabeth FoxGenovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South, 7th ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 64; Eugene D. Genovese, “ ‘Our Family, White and Black’: Family and Household in the Southern Slaveholders’ World View,” in In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in

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the Victorian South, 1830–1900, ed. Carol Bleser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69–87. Scholar Douglas C. Baynton demonstrates the ways in which frameworks concerning race and disability likewise contributed to the idea that people of African descent needed white guidance and containment in white homes. Baynton, “Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History,” 37–40. 37. For more on U.S. ambitions to both sustain and expand the practice of racial slavery in the post-Revolutionary era, see Rothman, Slave Country, 1–9. On free blacks’ indenture during and after the Revolutionary period, see Shammas, A History of Household Government in America, 62; Joanne Pope Mellish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 77–79; Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 57–58; Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship before the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 16. For the circumscription of free black men’s access to skilled wage labor and the devaluation of both black men’s and black women’s work, see David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 75–76. 38. Margaret Ellen Newell, “Indian Slavery in Colonial New England,” in Indian Slavery in Colonial America, ed. Alan Gallay (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 60–61, 66n80; Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, “The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era,” in After King Philip’s War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 115, 124, 127. 39. Tiya Miles, “ ‘His Kingdom for a Kiss’: Indians and Intimacy in the Narrative of John Marrant,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 165. 40. For ideologies about Republican motherhood and the post-Revolutionary family and for accounts of white women’s changing roles and experiences after the Revolution, see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750– 1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Shammas, A History of Household Government in America, 53–107. 41. Quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993), 146–47. Also quoted in Shammas, A History of Household Government in America, 79. For a psychoanalytic analysis of Revolutionary and early national tensions with respect to family “order,” see also Rogin, Fathers and Children, 19–37. 42. For an extended analysis of the ways in which heteronormative and nuclearoriented family structures have historically undermined Native sovereignty and empowered the U.S. settler state, see Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?:

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Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 3–43. 43. Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeff ersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 19–26. See also Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 82–91. 44. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, annotated ed. (New York: Penguin Classics, 1998), 66, 150–51. 45. Literary scholar David Kazanjian comes to similar conclusions about the role of blackness in calibrating difference between whites and Indians. Kazanjian writes, “Indeed, theories of redness as a racial form that could ‘become white’ as opposed to unchangeable blackness . . . schematize[d the] ritual of assimilation.” Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick, 144. 46. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 61; Pearce, Savagism and Civilization, 92–93; Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 66–67. 47. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 63–64. With regard to Jefferson’s “armchair analysis,” as Jefferson scholar Anthony Wallace argues, “Jefferson was not personally familiar with the situation in Indian country, even though he sought to improve conditions by introducing ‘civilization.’ He never saw with his own eyes any Indian community . . . except for the town on Long Island that he and [James] Madison visited in June 1791 and (possibly) the . . . reservation at Brotherton, in central New Jersey, where he or a friend collected a vocabulary in 1792.” Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 180. 48. For more on collective Anglo-American preoccupations with human reproduction, see Eustace, 1812, 6–12; Usner, Indian Work, 24–25. 49. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 65. 50. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, esp. 21, 174. 51. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 65–66. 52. Ibid., 65, 307n101. 53. Ibid., 64. 54. As historian Darlene Clark Hine writes, “Virtually every known nineteenthcentury female slave narrative contains a reference to, at some juncture, the ever present threat and reality of rape.” Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer 1989): 912. For additional studies on sexual violence within the context of racial slavery, see Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 79–112; Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 37–38, 44–45; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 5, 19, 113–14; Sharon Block, Rape and

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Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), esp. 65–74, 100–101, 116. For one formerly enslaved woman’s account of her experiences with sexual assault and servitude, see Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), esp. 26–33, 46–49. For the nature of Jefferson’s own sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, see Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), esp. 312–20. 55. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 140–44. See also Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2007). Scholar Mark Rifkin has likewise emphasized the biopolitical nature of Jefferson’s intersecting ideas concerning Indian culture, kinship, and reproduction. See Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?, 46–47. 56. On the commercial aspects of Jefferson’s “civilization” program, see Usner, Indian Work, 20–29. 57. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 65. 58. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409; Eustace, 1812, 31–35. 59. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 66. 60. On the impact of Jeffersonian ideas on federal policy, see Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 121–23. 61. Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, 122–23; David Andrew Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 30–33, 40; Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 32–33, 34, 40; Daniel K. Richter, “Onas, the Long Knife: Pennsylvanians and Indians, 1783–1794,” in Native Americans and the Early Republic, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoff man, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 136–41. 62. As legal historian Stuart Banner writes, “In the first few years after the Revolution, the widely felt desire to exact retribution against the Indians coincided with [the] strong political pressures to acquire land quickly and cheaply. . . . The federal government began to dictate to tribes the extent of the land they would be allowed to occupy.” Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, 129. 63. Michael Leroy Oberg, Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 30–41. 64. Prucha, American Indian Policy, 40; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 161–77. 65. Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 106–62; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, esp. 91–93.

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66. Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, 131–32. 67. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 25. 68. Henry Knox, “Report from H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, Relative to the Northwestern Indians, War Office, June 15th, 1789,” in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, vol. 1, 1789–1814 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 12–14, quote from 13. See also Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, 130–34; Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians, 165–69. 69. Henry Knox, “Report of H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, in continuation,” July 7, 1789, in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, 1:52. On McGillivray’s and Mad Dog’s ties to the Spanish, see Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duff els: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 173; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 100; Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 2015), 246–55, 257–60; Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 75–79. 70. Knox, “Report from H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, Relative to the Northwestern Indians, War Office, June 15th, 1789,” 13. 71. For additional scholarship detailing the convergence of Jeffersonian ideologies and Knox’s assimilationist policies, see Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 110; Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 58–60; Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction, 6, 120–21; Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians, 165–70. 72. Knox, “Report from H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, Relative to the Northwestern Indians, War Office, June 15th, 1789,” 13. See also Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 44; Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians, 165–70. 73. Knox, “Report from H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, Relative to the Northwestern Indians, War Office, June 15th, 1789,” 13–14. See also Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 142–45. 74. Knox, “Report of H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, in continuation,” July 7, 1789, 53. 75. Knox, “Report from H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, Relative to the Northwestern Indians, War Office, June 15th, 1789,” 13. 76. Knox wrote with respect to the Creeks “[t]hat the national dignity and justice require that the arms of the Union should be called forth in order to chastise the Creek nation of Indians, for refusing to treat with the United States on reasonable terms and for their hostile invasion of the State of Georgia.” Knox, “Report of H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, in continuation,” July 7, 1789, 52.

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77. Knox, “Report from H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, Relative to the Northwestern Indians, War Office, June 15th, 1789,” 13. Regarding generational differences, Knox wrote in the same document that “it is greatly to be apprehended that hostilities may be so far extended as to involve the Indian tribes with whom the United States have recently made treaties. It is well known how strong the passion for war exists in the mind of a young savage [sic], and how easily it may be infl amed, so as to disregard every precept of the older and wiser part of the tribes who may have a more just opinion of the force of a treaty.” 78. Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, esp. 2–3, 46–50. For foundational studies addressing the U.S. “civilization” program, see Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 213–49; Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction; Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians, 161–205. See also John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2014), esp. 129–42; Usner, Indian Work, 18–41. 79. Knox, “Report of H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, in continuation,” July 7, 1789, 53–54. For other brief summaries of the interlocking “conciliatory” initiatives derived by Knox and his successors, see Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 134–45; William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 34–37; Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 46–47. 80. See, for example, Demos, The Heathen School, 57–62; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 30–41; Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), esp. 5. 81. On the explicitly Christian ideologies informing early colonial ideas about Native population losses, see Usner, Indian Work, 24. 82. Knox, “Report of H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, in continuation,” July 7, 1789, 53. 83. Copy of a letter to Jacob Taylor, Jonathan Thomas, and Vincent Wiley, dated January 30, 1802, in Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” March 18, 1802, Minutes, frame 166. For how ideas about Indian “extinction” informed Baltimore and Philadelphia Friends’ interests in missionizing, see the enclosure from the Baltimore Society of Friends in Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, August 21[26], 1818, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 78, frames 270–79, National Archives. See also Daniel K. Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 601–28.

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84. Thomas McKenney to Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott, March 27, 1818 (copy), enclosure in Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, April 15, 1818, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 78, frames 9072–77, National Archives. 85. See discussion in Chapter 6, esp. note 80. 86. Cornelius, The Little Osage Captive, 36–37, 40, 46–47. 87. See Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816–1830 (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1974), 40. See also Chapter 6. 88. For example, see Cornelius, The Little Osage Captive; Elias Cornelius, The Indian Convert: or, an Account of Catharine Brown, the First Fruits of the American Missions to the Cherokees (New York: N. Bangs and J. Emory, for the Tract Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1827). 89. For a brief overview of Quaker pacifism and the loss of political power, see Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food,’ ” 617. See also Chapter 2. 90. Usner, Indian Work, 18–41; Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food,’ ” 611; Diane Rothenberg, “The Mothers of the Nation: Seneca Resistance to Quaker Intervention,” in Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock (New York: Praeger, 1980), 70. In the context of Cherokee history, historian Theda Perdue contends, “Not only had Cherokee women been farming for centuries, but many of the crops and techniques used by Euro-Americans came from Native peoples.” Perdue, Cherokee Women, 111. 91. Rothenberg, “The Mothers of the Nation,” 70; Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food,’ ” 614. 92. Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food,’ ” 616. See also Braund, Deerskins and Duff els, 40–58; Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 61; Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 34–146. 93. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 47–50. 94. For one of the more critical declension narratives when it comes to Native women’s authority after European contact, see, for example, Michelene E. Pesantubbee, Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005). For emphases on continuity and negotiation, see Perdue, Cherokee Women; Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2000). 95. See, for example, James Taylor Carson, “Molly Brandt: From Clan Mother to Loyalist Chief,” in Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives, ed. Theda Perdue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 48–59; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 54; Daniel K.

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Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, no. 40 (1983): 533–35; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 54–55. 96. Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land, 18–20, 56–58. 97. On “white captives,” see June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 117–44. On U.S. governing officials’ fears of white settlers emulating Indians, see Aron, How the West Was Lost, 7–8, 13–14; Usner, Indian Work, 26–27. 98. Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food,’ ” 614, 616, 627. 99. Usner, Indian Work, 28. 100. Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food,’ ” 616; Usner, Indian Work, 29. 101. Daniel K. Richter and Troy L. Thompson, “Severed Connections: American Indigenous Peoples and the Atlantic World in an Era of Imperial Transformation,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: 1450–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 507–8. 102. Knox, “Report of H. Knox, Secretary of War, to the President of the United States, in continuation,” July 7, 1789, 54. 103. “Report on the Operation of the Acts Making Provision for the Establishment of Trading Houses with the Indian Tribes, and into the Expediency of Reviving and Continuing the Said Acts in Force,” April 22, 1800, in U.S. Congress, The New American State Papers, vol. 3 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1972), 131–38. See also Edgar Bruce Wesley, Guarding the Frontier; a Study of Frontier Defense from 1815 to 1825 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1935), 33. 104. For the mechanisms of the “play-off ” system, see Anthony F. C. Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Knopf, 1970), 111–14; White, The Roots of Dependency, 34–68. 105. See also Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’ ”; Usner, Indian Work, 18–41. 106. For a sampling of the range of debates surrounding federally sponsored trade with Indians, see “Indian Trading Houses,” January 8, 1796, House Journal, Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 1st Sess., 229–32. 107. Rogin, Fathers and Children, 145, 189. See also Chapter 5. 108. Thomas Loraine McKenney to John C. Calhoun, May 9, 1818, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 78, frames 9101–05, National Archives. 109. The term “kinship” has contested meanings within Native American and Indigenous studies, particularly since non-Native anthropologists have historically used it to racialize Indian people and, in turn, justify the colonial expropriation of Indian lands. Th roughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the term “kinship” was often wielded by social scientists to mark societies that did not practice

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nuclear-family orientation as non-normative and, as a result, undeserving of the resources delegated to whites. I use it here because, in the words of scholar Mark Rifkin, “it has come to serve as a way for native people to name their own social structures.” When Did Indians Become Straight?, 15. For an overview of the history of kinship and anthropology, see ibid., esp. 12–15; Brian Connolly and Dawn Peterson, “Introduction to Special Issue on Kinship and Race in Early America,” Early American Studies 14, no. 4 (Fall 2016): 617–25. 110. On Native conceptualizations of kinship, see Daniel Heath Justice, “ ‘Go Away, Water!’: Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative,” in Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, ed. Janice Acoose et al. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 147–68; Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?, 9, 127; Brooks, The Common Pot, xxxii, 283n98; Susan Sleeper Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), esp. 5–6, 42–43; Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Cynthia Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 26–27. 111. I borrow the term “network of relations” from Brooks, The Common Pot, xlviv.

2.

American Indians and the Post-Revolutionary Era

1. For accounts of Cornplanter’s official visit to Philadelphia and the series of land deals and murders with which he and other Haudenosaunee leaders had to contend, see Thomas S. Abler, Cornplanter: Chief Warrior of the Allegany Senecas (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 80–84; Christopher Densmore, Red Jacket: Iroquois Diplomat and Orator (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 33–34; Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?: Expansion and Conflict in the Northeast and Northwest,” in The World of the Revolutionary Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed. Andrew Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), 120–23; Michael Leroy Oberg, Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 57–62; Daniel K. Richter, “Onas, the Long Knife: Pennsylvanians and Indians, 1783–1794,” in Native Americans and the Early Republic, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 125–61; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Th e Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York: Knopf, 1970), 167. 2. Cornplanter, Half Town, and Great Tree, “The speech of Cornplanter, HalfTown, and the Great-Tree, Chiefs and Councillors of the Seneca nation, to the Great Councillor of the Thirteen Fires,” December 1, 1790, in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Indian Affairs, vol. 1, 1789–1814 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 141.

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3. Cornplanter, Half Town, and Big Tree, “The speech of the Cornplanter, Half-Town, and the Great-Tree, Chiefs of the Seneca nation, to the President of the United States of America,” January 10, 1791, “The speech of Cornplanter, Half-Town and the Big-Tree, Seneca Chiefs, to the Great Councillor of the Th irteen Fires,” February 7, 1791, both in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Indian Aff airs, 1:143–44. See also Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 289–90. 4. On the site of Cornplanter’s settlement, see David Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas: The Quaker Mission to Cornplanter’s People (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2000), 132. 5. Henry Knox, “The speech of the Secretary of War to the Cornplanter, HalfTown, and Big-Tree, chiefs of the Seneca nation of Indians,” February 8, 1791, in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Indian Aff airs, 1:145. 6. Sydney V. James, A People among Peoples: Quaker Benevolence in EighteenthCentury America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 299. 7. Cornplanter, “The Request of the Seneca Chief, Corn Plant, and the Answer of Friends,” in Some Transactions between the Indians and Friends in Pennsylvania in 1791 & 1792 (London: Printed by James Phillips, n.d.), 5–7. 8. Ibid., 8–9; James, A People among Peoples, 300. 9. Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” December 26, 1796–December 16, 1797, Minutes, frames 43–65; “Indians’ ‘Outing’ a Century Ago,” Friends’ Intelligencer, January 8, 15, and 22, 1898, all in Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal 1898 (Philadelphia: Friends’ Intelligencer Association, Limited, 1898), 17–19, 39–41, 54–55. 10. For the range of strategies pursued by American Indian communities in general, and the Senecas in particular, in the post-Revolutionary era, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Strug gle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?” 11. Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 106–27; Gail D. MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements: Iroquois Change and Persistence on the Frontiers of Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 28–29, 122–23; Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?,” 123; Oberg, Peacemakers, 4, 6–23; Kurt A. Jordan, The Seneca Restoration, 1715–1754 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008). 12. MacLeitch, Imperial Entanglements, 73–75, 99–107, 247. 13. Brooks, The Common Pot, 115–21; Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 55–56, 75–82. 14. Densmore, Red Jacket, 11; Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 4th ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1975), 104–28, 192; Oberg,

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Peacemakers, 25–26; Karim M. Tiro, The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from the Revolution through the Era of Removal (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), 39–64; Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 125–34. 15. Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 107, 121–23. 16. Ibid., 129–56. 17. Cornplanter, Half Town, and Great Tree, “The speech of the Cornplanter, Half-Town, and the Great-Tree, Chiefs of the Seneca nation, to the Great Councillor of the Thirteen Fires,” December 1, 1790, 140; Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 121–23, 192–222; Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?,” 124; Tiro, The People of the Standing Stone, 55; Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 141–45. 18. Cornplanter, Half Town, and Great Tree, “The speech of the Cornplanter, Half-Town, and the Great-Tree, Chiefs and councilors of the Seneca nation, to the Great Councillor of the Thirteen Fires,” December 1, 1790, 140. 19. Brooks, The Common Pot, 121; Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 259–91; Oberg, Peacemakers, 30–41; Richter, “Onas, the Long Knife”; Tiro, The People of the Standing Stone, 61–95. 20. Brooks, The Common Pot, 106–62; Oberg, Peacemakers, 32–34. 21. Oberg, Peacemakers, 35. 22. Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 27–33; Tiro, The People of the Standing Stone, 65–156. 23. Quoted in Densmore, Red Jacket, 10. For an extended account of Seneca articulations of this whirlwind and their post-Revolutionary negotiations of it, see Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?,” 125; Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, After the Whirlwind: Haudenosaunee People and the Emergence of US Settler Colonialism, manuscript in progress. 24. Abler, Cornplanter, 57; Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests, 107–9; Oberg, Peacemakers, 48, 58; Richter, “Onas, the Long Knife,” 132–33, 145–55; Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 168–69. Note that the spelling for the Seneca settlement at Allegany differs from that for the nearby Allegheny River. 25. Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, “Guiding Principles: Guswenta and the Debate over Formal Schooling at Buff alo Creek, 1800–1811,” in Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education, ed. Brenda J. Child and Brian Klopotek (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2014), esp. 115; Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?”; Oberg, Peacemakers, 6–23. 26. Brooks, The Common Pot, 106–62; Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?,” 124. 27. Cornplanter, Half Town, and Big Tree, “The speech of Cornplanter, HalfTown, and the Big-Tree, Seneca Chiefs, to the Great Councillor of the Th irteen Fires,” February 7, 1791, 144.

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28. David L. Preston, The Texture of Contact: European and Indian Settler Communities on the Frontiers of Iroquoia, 1667–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 7. 29. Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 20–21. For this practice in another context, see also Patricia Galloway, “ ‘The Chief Who Is Your Father’: Choctaw and French Views of the Diplomatic Relation,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and M. Thomas Hatley, rev. and exp. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 345–70. 30. Cornplanter, “The Request of the Seneca Chief, Corn Plant, and the Answer of Friends,” 5. 31. Preston, The Texture of Contact, 6–7. 32. Cornplanter, Half Town, and Great Tree, “The speech of the Cornplanter, Half-Town, and the Great-Tree, Chiefs of the Seneca nation, to the President of the United States of America,” January 10, 1791, 144. 33. Cornplanter, Half Town, and Great Tree, “The speech of Cornplanter, HalfTown, and the Big-Tree, Seneca Chiefs, to the Great Councillor of the Th irteen Fires,” February 7, 1791, 144. 34. Cornplanter, “The Request of the Seneca Chief, Corn Plant, and the Answer of Friends,” 6. 35. That Seneca men continued to find game for the fur trade throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is clear. See, for example, Diane Rothenberg, “The Mothers of the Nation: Seneca Resistance to Quaker Intervention,” in Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock (New York: Praeger, 1980), 71, 75. 36. Cornplanter, Half Town, and Great Tree, “The speech of the Cornplanter, Half-Town, and the Great-Tree, Chiefs and Councillors of the Seneca nation, to the Great Councillor of the Thirteen Fires,” December 1, 1790, 141–42. 37. Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 11–15. 38. Cornplanter, Half Town, and Great Tree, “The speech of the Cornplanter, Half-Town, and the Great-Tree, Chiefs and Councillors of the Seneca nation, to the Great Councillor of the Thirteen Fires,” December 1, 1790, 141–42. See also Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 34–35. 39. Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 47–48. 40. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 21–25. 41. Oberg, Peacemakers, 122–25. 42. Abler, Cornplanter, 57, 71–72. See also Oberg, Peacemakers, 35, 122–25; Wallace, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 170–71.

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43. Merle H. Deardorff, “The Cornplanter Grant in Warren County,” Western Pennsylvania History: 1918–2015 24, no. 1 (March 1, 1941): 10; Richter, “Onas, the Long Knife,” 157. 44. Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, no. 40 (1983): 528–59. 45. For analyses of Jemison’s captivity narrative, see Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 49–77; June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 145–203; Susan Walsh, “ ‘With Them Was My Home’: Native American Autobiography and a Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison,” American Literature 64, no. 1 (March 1992): 49–70. 46. Rachel Wheeler, To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the EighteenthCentury Northeast (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 34; Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse, 111. 47. “Treaty with the Six Nations, 1784,” in Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, Treaties, comp. and ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 5. 48. Abler, Cornplanter, 14. 49. Ibid., 15–16. 50. Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Franklin: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 969–70. 51. For one account of debates over formal schooling, see Mt. Pleasant, “Guiding Principles.” 52. Franklin, Benjamin Franklin: Writings, 969–70. 53. See, for example, Mt. Pleasant, “Guiding Principles.” 54. Cornplanter, “The Request of the Seneca Chief, Corn Plant, and the Answer of Friends,” 6. 55. Thomas Procter, “Narrative of Colonel Thomas Procter [To the Hon. Major General H. Knox, Secretary of War],” in U.S. Congress, American State Papers, 1:150. 56. As historian Barbara Alice Mann argues, Senecas were looking for “trade-andsafety” partners from their Christian allies. Barbara Alice Mann, Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 53. 57. Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 31. For one account of Pickering’s role in U.S.-Iroquois affairs in the 1790s, see Oberg, Peacemakers, 50–143. 58. Jane T. Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 3, 24–28. 59. Richter, “Onas, the Long Knife,” 129. 60. Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 17, 65–66; James H. Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton &

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Company, 2000), 266–67; Merritt, At the Crossroads, 203–4; Rayner Wickersham Kelsey, Friends and the Indians, 1655–1917 (Philadelphia: Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs, 1917), 69–70. 61. For a useful summary of the Friends’ loss of power during the Seven Years’ War, see Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 61–67. See also Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), esp. 74, 107–9; Merritt, At the Crossroads, 201, 236, 288–95; Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), chap. 6, esp. 204–5. Historian David Preston makes the important clarification that the ethnic cleansing that defined relationships between frontier settlers and Native people in Pennsylvania and other regions during the Seven Years’ War did not reach all areas of British colonial settlement until the Revolutionary era. See Preston, The Texture of Contact, 16, 150–51. 62. Richter, “Onas, the Long Knife,” esp. 128. 63. James, A People among Peoples, 142–43, 325–26; Merritt, At the Crossroads, 288–90; Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 191–226; Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 191–226. 64. James, A People among Peoples, 240–47; Jack D. Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 233, 260–71. On men’s social networks in post-Revolutionary politics, see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 73. 65. Bruce Dorsey, “Friends Becoming Enemies: Philadelphia Benevolence and the Neglected Era of American Quaker History,” Journal of the Early Republic 18, no. 3 (October 1, 1998): 395–428; Margaret Morris Haviland, “Beyond Women’s Sphere: Young Quaker Women and the Veil of Charity in Philadelphia, 1790–1810,” The William and Mary Quarterly 51, no. 3 (July 1994): 444; Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 64, 68. 66. Dorsey, “Friends Becoming Enemies”; Daniel K. Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (Winter 1999): esp. 616–18. 67. On Quaker conceptualizations of charity, see James, A People among Peoples, 23–42, 87. The growing differences between Friends over the nature and shape of community outreach are addressed in Dorsey, “Friends Becoming Enemies”; James, A People among Peoples, 286–87, 323–34. 68. Dorsey, “Friends Becoming Enemies”; Mary Maples Dunn, “Women of Light,” in Women of America: A History, ed. Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 131; James, A People among Peoples, 216–39, 286–315; Jayne Ptolemy, “Quaker Geographies of Race in the Early Republic” (McNeil Center

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for Early American Studies Seminar Series, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2012), cited with permission of the author. 69. Society of Friends, “Advertisement,” in Some Transactions between the Indians and Friends in Pennsylvania In 1791 & 1792, 3. 70. Ptolemy, “Quaker Geographies of Race in the Early Republic,” 14–25; Richter, “ ‘Believing Th at Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food,’ ” 616–17. 71. Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 7–8. 72. Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, “Debating Missionary Presence at Buffalo Creek: Haudenosaunee Perspectives on Land Cessions, Government Relations, and Christianity,” in Ethnographies and Exchanges: Native Americans, Moravians, and Catholics in Early America, ed. A. G. Roeber (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 175–92; Mt. Pleasant, “Guiding Principles, 1800–1811.” 73. John Dean to David Bacon and others, October 18, 1801, AA41, PYMIC, box 2, folder D, QSC. 74. Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 289; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 113; Oberg, Peacemakers, 100–101; Mt. Pleasant, “Independence for Whom?,” 128. 75. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 113. 76. Michael D. Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 36; Harmon, Rich Indians, 83–91; Kathleen Duval, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 2015), 342–43. 77. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 112. 78. See James, A People among Peoples, 302. For more on the organization of the Quaker Yearly Meeting, see Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 56–57. 79. “Report 1796,” Collection 1003, Associated Executive Committee on Indian Affairs, Plans, Maps, Printed Materials, etc., Letters 1758–1807 & [n.d.], box 1, QSC; Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” December 26, 1796, November 18, 1797, and August 14, 1800, Minutes, frames 43, 64, 138. 80. Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” July 21 and September 22, 1797, Minutes, frames 57, 59; Joseph Trimble to Henry Drinker, July 17, 1797, January 1, 1798, and June 2, 1799, all in AA41, PYMIC, box 5, folder T, QSC. 81. Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” October 7, 1797, Minutes, frame 62. 82. Society of Friends, “Substance of the Conversation of Friends, at Several Interviews with the Deputies from the Indian Southern Nations, Cherokees, Chickesaws, and Choctaws, At Philadelphia,” February 1792, in Some Transactions between

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the Indians and Friends in Pennsylvania In 1791 & 1792, 10. On Cherokee and Creek travels north, see January 29, 1792, PYMIC, AA43, Conferences with Indians, 1792– 1865, Doc 98, QSC. 83. Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” September 29, 1796, frame 38. 84. “Report 1796”; “Invoice of sundry articles purchased by direction of the yearly Meeting,” October 15, 1796, Collection 1003, Associated Executive Committee on Indian Affairs, Plans, Maps, Printed Materials, etc., Letters 1758–1807 & [n.d.], box 1, QSC. 85. Oberg, Peacemakers, esp. 113–31; Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 18. 86. William N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 660–63, 670; Densmore, Red Jacket, 41–45. 87. Address by Farmer’s Brother, October 21, 1800, in “Letters of the Reverend Elkanah Holmes From Fort Niagara in 1800,” in Buffalo Historical Society, Publications of the Buff alo Historical Society, vol. 6 (Buffalo, NY: Bigelow Brothers, 1903), 201. I thank Alyssa Mt. Pleasant for pointing me to this document. 88. Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” March 26, 1796, Minutes, frame 13. 89. Ibid., frames 21–22. 90. Tiro, The People of the Standing Stone, 80, 102–6. 91. Ibid., 102–3. 92. Brooks, The Common Pot, 106–62. 93. Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” October 7, 1797, Minutes, frame 62. 94. Enoch Walker to Thomas Wistar, July 16, 1796, Collection 1003, Associated Executive Committee on Indian Affairs, Plans, Maps, Printed Materials, etc., Letters 1758–1807 & [n.d.], box 1, QSC. 95. “Secret articles of US / Creek Treaty of 07/04/1790,” Miscellaneous File, Record Group 94, National Archives. The Treaty of New York is discussed in Green, The Politics of Indian Removal, 35–36. 96. Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 67. On the Indian Committee and Hawkins’s correspondence concerning Bailey and Durant, see Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” September 29, 1796, 38–43. 97. Tiro, The People of the Standing Stone, 21, 68–69; David J. Silverman, Red Brethren: The Brothertown and Stockbridge Indians and the Problem of Race in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 120–24. 98. “Indians ‘Outing’ a Century Ago,” Friends’ Intelligencer, January 15, 1898, 39. 99. Ibid., 40.

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100. “Indians ‘Outing’ a Century Ago,” Friends’ Intelligencer, January 22, 1898, 54; Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” December 16, 1797, Minutes, frame 65. 101. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests, 74. 102. Silverman, Red Brethren, 153; Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests, 82; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderlands of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006), 304. 103. Tiro, The People of the Standing Stone, 72–76; Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. 101–2. 104. See Brooks, The Common Pot, 106–62; Alan Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut: The Dilemmas of an Intercultural Broker,” Ethnohistory 43, no. 3 (1996): 431–57; Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?, 129–37. 105. Brooks, The Common Pot, 143–49; Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?, 134–35. 106. Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut”; Rachel Wheeler, “Hendrick Aupaumut: Christian-Mahican Prophet,” Journal of the Early Republic 25, no. 2 (2005): 187–220. 107. Wheeler, To Live upon Hope, 39. 108. Silverman, Red Brethren, 36–37, 73–74; Tiro, The People of the Standing Stone, 68–69. 109. Wheeler, To Live upon Hope, 241–42. 110. Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, The Life of Thomas Eddy (Fry, 1836), 79–80. 111. “Indians’ ‘Outing’ a Century Ago,” Friends’ Intelligencer, January 22, 1898, 54. 112. Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’ ”; Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 238–50. 113. Indian Committee, “Copy of a letter to the Chiefs of the Oneida nation,” February 19, 1801, Minutes, frames 147–48. 114. “Indians ‘Outing’ a Century Ago,” Friends’ Intelligencer, January 8, 1898, 19. 115. Mary Peters is a fascinating figure whose life has been documented by her descendant Richard Niemi as well as by graduate student Kallie Kosc in her forthcoming dissertation. See Richard Niemi, “The Interconnected Lives of Stockbridge Indians Mary (Peters) Doxtater and Peter Pohqounnoppeet,” in Mohican Seminar 3: The Journey, An Algonquian Peoples Seminar, ed. Shirley W. Dunn, New York State Museum Bulletin 511 (2009): 145–58; Kallie Kosc, tentatively titled “The Education of Mary Doxtater: Indian Women, Community, and Power in the Early Republic, 1780– 1840” (PhD diss., Texas Christian University, forthcoming). 116. Peters refers to an “Uncle Hendrick” in one correspondence, and, given her travels with Margery Aupaumut and Hendrick Aupaumut’s involvement in the girls’ placement among the Quakers, it appears a distinct possibility that she was related to the Stockbridge chief. Mary Peters to Hannah Jackson, September 19, 1803, Collection 950, Quaker Miscellany, Kelsey, Naomi, and Raynor, Sermons, Talks, n.d., QSC. For Peters’s age, see Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Com-

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mittee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” December 16, 1797, Minutes, frame 65. 117. Philadelphia Indian Committee, “Letter to the Stockbridge Tribe of Indians,” September 25, 1801, Collection 1003, Associated Executive Committee on Indian Affairs, Plans, Maps, Printed Materials, etc., Letters 1758–1807 & [n.d.], box 1, QSC. 118. Ibid. 119. Mary Peters to David Bacon, August 16, 1800, AA41, PYMIC, box 4, folder P, QSC. 120. Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” April 10–August 20, 1801, Minutes, frames 156–59; John Dean to David Bacon and others, October 18, 1801, AA41, PYMIC, box 2, folder D, QSC. 121. Mary Peters to Hannah Jackson, September 19, 1803, collection 950, Quaker Miscellany, Kelsey, Naomi, and Rayner, Sermons, Talks, n.d., QSC. 122. “Copy of a letter to Joseph [Frost?] from the Natives of New Stockbridge,” May 22, 1812, New York Yearly Meeting, Committee of Indian Concerns Scrapbook of Miscellaneous Papers, 1807–1869, FHL. 123. “Letter from Stockbridge Indians,” February 2, 1815, Mary Peters to [unaddressed], September 10, 1817, both in New York Yearly Meeting, Committee of Indian Concerns Scrapbook of Miscellaneous Papers, 1807–1869, FHL. 124. Niemi, “The Interconnected Lives,” 147; Silverman, Red Brethren, 149. 125. Mary Peters to [unaddressed], September 10, 1817. 126. Niemi, “The Interconnected Lives,” 148; Silverman, Red Brethren, 150. 127. “Copy of a letter to the Chiefs of the Oneida nation,” in Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” February 19, 1801, Minutes, frame 147. 128. Brooks, The Common Pot, 159–60; Mann, Iroquoian Women; Wheeler, To Live upon Hope, 147–50. 129. Wheeler, To Live upon Hope, 148; Mt. Pleasant, “Guiding Principles,” 115. 130. Dunn, “Women of Light,” 151–52; Haviland, “Beyond Women’s Sphere.” 131. Haviland, “Beyond Women’s Sphere,” 436. 132. Ibid., 421–22. There is evidence that Quaker women were allowed to occasionally visit the all-men’s Indian Committee. See, for example, Indian Committee, “Report to the Yearly Meeting,” September 29, 1796, Minutes, frame 38. 133. Undated document, Collection 1003, Associated Executive Committee on Indian Affairs, Plans, Maps, Printed Materials, etc., Letters 1758–1807 & [n.d.], box 1, QSC. 134. Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” May 13, 1805, Benjamin Cooper, Jacob Taylor, Joel Swain, Stephen Twining, and Hannah Jackson to the Committee of Indian Affairs, October 16, 1807, both in Minutes, frames 223, 256–58. 135. Indian Committee, [report] “To the approaching yearly meeting,” [n.d.] 1804, Minutes, frame 208.

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136. Niemi, “The Interconnected Lives,” 148–50; Silverman, Red Brethren, 149–50. 137. Address by Farmer’s Brother, October 21, 1800, 201–2. 138. Ibid.; James, A People among Peoples, 300–1. 139. Swatzler, A Friend among the Senecas, 34. 140. Ibid., 23. 141. Timothy Pickering to George Washington, January 20, 1791, Henry O’Reilly Collected Documents, 1784–1862, 6:36, New-York Historical Society. 142. Pickering wrote his letter in late January, and Washington’s reply to the three chiefs via Henry Knox was written in early February. See note 141 above and note 5. 143. Jeremy Belknap and Jedidiah Morse, “The Report of a Committee of the Board of Correspondents of the Scots Society for Propagating the Christian Knowledge, Who Visited the Oneida and Mohekunuh Indians in 1796,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, for the year M, DCC, XCVIII (Boston: Samuel Hall, 1798; repr. John H. Eastburn, 1835), 29–30. 144. Joseph Trimble to Henry Drinker, January 1, 1798. 145. Joseph Trimble to Henry Drinker, June 2, 1799. 146. Silas Dinsmoor to Henry Drinker, April 21, 1798, AA41, PYMIC, box 2, folder D, QSC. 147. Joseph Trimble to Henry Drinker, June 3, 1796, AA41, PYMIC, box 5, folder T, QSC; Henry Dearborn to Henry Drinker, May 22, 1801, AA41, PYMIC, box 2, folder D, QSC. 148. Copy of a letter to Jacob Taylor, Jonathan Thomas, and Vincent Wiley, dated January 30, 1802, in Indian Committee, “At a Meeting of the Committee appointed for the gradual Civilization of the Indians,” March 18, 1802, Minutes, frame 166. 149. Historian Daniel K. Richter comes to similar conclusions concerning Baltimore Friends’ early nineteenth-century mission efforts in the Great Lakes region. See Richter, “ ‘Believing Th at Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food,’ ” 625–28. 150. Henry Dearborn to Henry Drinker, May 22, 1801. 151. See, for example, “Letter from Stockbridge Indians,” February 1, 1815, which documents the New York Quakers’ oversight of the educations of Stockbridge boys John Quinney and Solomon Hendrick, in New York Yearly Meeting, Committee of Indian Concern Scrapbook of Miscellaneous Papers, 1807–1869, FHL; “Minutes & Proceedings of the Committee on Indian Concerns appointed by the Yearly Meeting of Baltimore from the 10th mo. 1795 to the 10th mo. 1815,” book A, M-562, film MR-B, FHL; “Died” [death announcements], Republican Farmer (Bridgeport, CT), May 15, 1816.

3.

Domestic Fronts on the Eve of 1812

1. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, March 29, 1807, SDP. 2. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, January 6 and May 18, 1808, SDP.

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3. On McDonald’s residence with Dinsmoor in Washington, Mississippi, see James McDonald to Silas Dinsmoor, November 6, 1820, SDP. For his schooling in Washington, Mississippi, as well as with the Baltimore Friends, see James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, August 9, 1819, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 86, frames 3921–22, National Archives, also published in W. Edwin Hemphill, ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, vol. 3, 1818–1819 (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 1967), 226–30. 4. Historian Gregory Evans Dowd refers to this time period as the “republican interlude.” See Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Strug gle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 116–22. 5. Ibid; Rayner Wickersham Kelsey, Friends and the Indians, 1655–1917 (Philadelphia: Associated Executive Committee of Friends on Indian Affairs, 1917), 89–98, 104; Daniel K. Richter, “ ‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 601–28; John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2014), 64; Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (New York: Oxford, 2012) 199–201; Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 51–65, 215–22. 6. Dowd, Spirited Resistance, 118–20, 144–48, 167–73. For examples of Choctaw raiding against U.S. settlements, see James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 64–65. 7. The Secretary of War [Henry Dearborn] to Silas Dinsmoor, May 8, 1802, in The Territorial Papers of the United States, ed. Clarence Edwin Carter, vol. 5, The Territory of Mississippi, 1798–1817 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1937), 146. A copy is also transcribed in SDP. 8. The Secretary of War [Henry Dearborn] to Silas Dinsmoor, May 8, 1802, 148. 9. On late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Choctaw territories, see Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 2–7, 12–15; Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 16; Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 170. 10. On the quality of Choctaw lands for agriculture, see White, Roots of Dependency, 12–14. On imperial schemes with respect to the region, see Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge,

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MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 9, 45–54. As Reginald Horsman writes with regard to navigation rights, “The farmers of the Southwest could not prosper unless they could market their products by water. . . . For southerners in general this made free navigation of the Mississippi, and ultimate control of the Gulf, an essential aim.” Reginald Horsman, “The Dimensions of an ‘Empire for Liberty’: Expansion and Republicanism, 1775–1825,” Journal of the Early Republic 9, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 3. 11. Daniel H. Usner Jr., “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier: Changing Economic Relations with Citizens and Slaves in the Mississippi Territory,” Journal of American History 72, no. 2 (1985): 298; Rothman, Slave Country, 16. 12. Usner, “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier,” esp. 299. 13. On Choctaw relationships with the British and Spanish, see James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: Th e Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 38–48; Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 92–96. These scholars point out that Spanish and British trade presences among the Choctaw Nation had largely disintegrated by the close of the eighteenth century. However, Dinsmoor’s assessment of his agency location clearly had Spanish influences in mind. See discussion below. 14. For a very brief and useful account of these expected transformations, see Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 109. 15. Secretary of War Henry Dearborn to Silas Dinsmoor (copy), May 8, 1802, SDP. 16. For overviews of the roles of Indian agents, see Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 52–57; William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 35; Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 189–91; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 66–67. 17. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 42–45. On Dinsmoor’s age, see Ancestry.com, New Hampshire, Births and Christenings Index, 1714–1904, 2011, accessed November 17, 2012. 18. Perdue, Cherokee Women, 117. 19. As historian Theda Perdue succinctly puts it, “The response of Native people to ‘civilization’ varied by tribes and individuals, but the pattern is remarkably similar. People adopted aspects of ‘civilization’ that seemed useful to them and avoided practices that challenged deeply held values and beliefs.” Theda Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 78. 20. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 12–13, 21, 44. 21. Perdue, Cherokee Women, 117.

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22. Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 215–17; Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, esp. 220–26, 277–94. 23. Dinsmoor was preceded as Indian agent by Samuel Mitchell, who served as Indian agent to the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations between 1797 and 1799, and by John McKee, who ran the Choctaw Agency from 1799 until Dinsmoor’s 1802 arrival. John D. W. Guice, “Face to Face in Mississippi Territory, 1798–1817,” in The Choctaw Before Removal (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 161–62. For Dinsmoor’s stopover in Chickasaw territories, see R. S. Cotterill, The Southern Indians: The Story of the Civilized Tribes before Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 142n7. 24. For descriptions of Choctaw topography, see Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, 170; H. S. Halbert, “Bernard Romans’ Map of 1772,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society 6 (1902): 414–39; Edward Mease, “Narrative of a Journey through Several Parts of the Province of West Florida in the Years 1770 and 1771,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Centennial Series, no. 5 (1925): 82. 25. Quotes from “Treaty with the Chickasaw, 1801” and “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1801,” both in United States, Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, Treaties, comp. and ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 57, 55. The history and purpose of the Natchez Trace are detailed in ibid., 55–58; John R. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 4; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 48–49; Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 100–101. Also, see William C. C. Claiborne to James Madison, Secretary of State, December 20, 1801, in Dunbar Rowland et al., The Mississippi Territorial Archives, 1798–1803 (Nashville, TN: Brandon Printing Company, 1905), 363. 26. For references to the “Wilderness Road,” see William Lattimore to the Secretary of War, March 9, 1814, in The Territorial Papers of the United States, ed. Clarence Edwin Carter, vol. 6, The Territory of Mississippi, 1809–1817 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1938), 425; George Strother Gaines, The Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines: Pioneer and Statesman of Early Alabama and Mississippi, 1805– 1843, ed. James P. Pate, annotated ed. (University Station: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 159; Gideon Fitz to the President, February 17, 1804, in The Territorial Papers of the United States, ed. Clarence Edwin Carter, vol. 5, The Territory of Mississippi, 1798–1817 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1937), 308; Ann Toplovich, “Marriage, Mayhem, and Presidential Politics: The RobardsJackson Backcountry Scandal,” Ohio Valley History 5 (Winter 2005): 4. 27. On Choctaw spatial orientations and town structures, see Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, 170. The estimate of the size of the Choctaw Nation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century is from Usner, “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier,” 298n2.

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28. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 72–73; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830, 89. 29. On the McDonald family’s place of settlement, see William Haley, “History of Copiah: Recollections of an Old Citizen by W.H. (Attributed to William Haley) c. 1876, from the ‘Mississippi Democrat’ Newspaper, Edited & Reprinted by Paul Cartwright,” Special Collections, University of Mississippi Archives; Affidavit of James M. Pucket, January 16, 1833, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Records Concerning Indian Land Reserves, Reserve File A, ca. 1825–1907, box 15, folder 456, National Archives; Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816–1830 (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1974), 44. 30. Gaines, The Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines, 47. 31. William C. C. Claiborne to Silas Dinsmoor, January 28, 1803, series 0483, Journal of the Superintendent, 1803–1808, frames 2–3, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson. 32. The Mississippi territorial governor ordered “thirty pair of [cotton] Cards” for Dinsmoor to distribute to Choctaw women in February 1803. See William C. C. Claiborne to Silas Dinsmoor, February 28, 1803, Series 0483, Journal of the Superintendent, 1803–1808, frames 8–9, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson. 33. Gaines, The Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines, 47. 34. “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1802” in United States, Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, 2:63–64; Robert B. Ferguson, “Appendix: Treaties between the United States and the Choctaw Nation,” in The Choctaw Before Removal, ed. Carolyn Keller Reeves (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 215. 35. Ferguson, “Appendix: Treaties between the United States and the Choctaw Nation,” 218; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 49; Usner, “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier,” 301–4. 36. Choctaw Nation et al., Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting a Treaty of Limits between the United States of America and the Choctaw Nation of Indians. January 30, 1808. Referred to the Committee of Ways and Means (Washington, DC: A. & G. Way, 1808). 37. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 51–69, 74. 38. Ibid., 25, 28–29; Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 200; White, The Roots of Dependency, 41–42. 39. Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, 1–32; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 80–82, 88–90; W. David Baird, Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 6–8. 40. Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, 58–59; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 32; Samuel J. Wells, “The

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Role of Mixed-Bloods in Mississippi Choctaw History,” in After Removal: Th e Choctaw in Mississippi, ed. Roseanna Tubby and Samuel J. Wells (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), esp. 46–47. For similar events in the Cherokee Nation, see Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 59; Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 60. For debates about race thinking within Southeast Indian nations, see Theda Perdue, “Race and Culture: Writing the Ethnohistory of the Early South,” Ethnohistory 51, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 701–23; Saunt et al., “Rethinking Race and Culture in the Early South”; Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 102–16. 41. Wells, “The Role of Mixed-Bloods in Mississippi Choctaw History,” 47. 42. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 80–81; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 89; Baird, Peter Pitchlynn, 6–7. 43. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 80; Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 185. 44. Wells, “The Role of Mixed-Bloods in Mississippi Choctaw History,” 46; Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 30–32. 45. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 68; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830, 103–4. O’Brien argues that the use of the term “half-breed” within the treaty requests “probably reflects the American predilection to identify persons of mixed ancestry as something less than a ‘whole’ person, rather than Choctaw insistence on such categorization” and that U.S. whites assumed those who adopted “American economic and religious values” were of mixed ancestry. Ibid., 104. Similarly, historian Theda Perdue argues that the use of the term “mixed blood” or “half-breed” in treaties on the part of Southeast Indian leaders “described or personified departures from traditional ways of doing things rather than identifying particular individuals by race.” Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, 90. While it is important to take these arguments into consideration, it is also likely that, since descendants of Euro-Choctaw unions frequently stood at the forefront of colonial economic practices within Choctaw territories at this time, chiefs did intend the goods that Dinsmoor was to supply specifically for bicultural families within the nation, even if they did not classify these individuals as a “racially” distinct group of people. 46. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, May 24, 1807, SDP. 47. Quote from James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, vol. 2 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), 579. See also Cato West to Silas Dinsmoor, February 15, 1805, Series 0483, Journal of the Superintendent, 1803–1808, frames 79–80, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson; “Treaty Limits between the United States of America and the Choctaw nation of Indians,” November 16, 1805, in U.S. Congress, American

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State Papers: Indian Affairs, vol. 1, 1789–1814 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 749. For analyses of Choctaw plantation raids, see James Taylor Carson, “Horses and the Economy and Culture of the Choctaw Indians, 1690–1840,” Ethnohistory 42, no. 3 (1995): 498–502; James Taylor Carson, “Native Americans, the Market Revolution, and Culture Change: The Choctaw Cattle Economy, 1690–1830,” Agricultural History 71, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 7; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830, 84. Carson argues that plantation raiding effectively ceased after 1803. Carson, “Horses,” 502. However, Dinsmoor’s correspondence suggests that it persisted as an anti-imperial practice at least through 1807. Another set of sources also indicates raids against at least one trader in the Arkansas Territory during this time. See Joseph Bogy to Samuel S. Hamilton, July 27, 1831, Joseph Bogy to Secretary of War Lewis Cass, October 18, 1831, both in LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 856–63, National Archives. Bogy claimed that, under Chief Pushmataha’s leadership, he suffered over $6,000 in damage to his property in the winter of 1806–1807 while trading with Osage people. 48. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, May 24, 1807. 49. For the settlement patterns of the Pearl River region, see Sarah Tuttle and Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, Conversations on the Choctaw Mission, vol. 1 (Boston: Printed by T. R. Marvin, for the Massachusetts Sabbath School Union, 1830), 84–86; White, The Roots of Dependency, 104. On Dinsmoor’s new agency’s location along the Natchez Trace, see William Lattimore to the Secretary of War, March 9, 1814, 425. 50. For an overview of the ideological frameworks that underpin settler colonial practices, see Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409. 51. U.S. settlements were, of course, still Indian territories. For a critique of the erasure of an indigenous presence from New England in particular, see Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 52. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon, August 16, 1794, SDP. 53. For discussions of the process through which settlers have made indigenous people foreign to their own territories, see J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism Then and Now: A Conversation,” in special issue, ed. Michele Spanò, Politica & Società (June 2012): 235–58; Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”; O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting. 54. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, January 26, 1807, SDP. 55. Quotes from Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon, June 10, 1806, and Silas Dinsmoor to [unaddressed], July 10, 1806, both in SDP. See also Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon, June 19, 1806, SDP. 56. Silas begins to refer to Gordon as Mary Gordon Dinsmoor in a letter to her dated August 14, 1806, in SDP. The marriage was announced in the major Mississippi newspaper, Mississippi Herald & Natchez Gazette, on September 30, 1806.

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57. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, January 18, 1807, SDP. 58. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, January 26, 1807, emphasis in original. 59. See Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. 78–116. 60. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, October 12, 1806, SDP. 61. On late eighteenth-century slave ownership among Cherokee people, see Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro- Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), esp. 28–41; Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society: 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987), 36–39, 50–60. 62. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 81–94. 63. A census from 1790 indicates that John Dinsmoor held three slaves at that time. First Census of the United States, 1790, Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives. Accessed via Ancestry.com on November 12, 2013. 64. On the processes of emancipation in the North, see Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000); Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 72–133. On gradual emancipation in New Hampshire in particular, see Melish, Disowning Slavery, 64, 66, 76–77. 65. On white women’s stakes in enslaving people of African descent, see Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. 1–136. Mary Gordon Dinsmoor’s letters are not present among her husband’s and it is therefore impossible to know if Silas Dinsmoor responded to her own requests for enslaved women to serve her. 66. I am drawing here on the work of Stephanie E. Smallwood, in which she focuses on, in her words, “the processes by which things become commodities.” See Stephanie E. Smallwood, “Commodified Freedom: Interrogating the Limits of AntiSlavery Ideology in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 24, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 291. See also Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 67. Examples abound throughout Hunter’s narrative, so much so that economic potential determines the way he interprets almost every thing he sees around him. See, for example, John Francis McDermott and George Hunter, “The Western Journals of Dr. George Hunter, 1796–1805,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series 53, no. 4 (1963): 26, 85, 98–100, 108. 68. On William Dunbar, see Rothman, Slave Country, 47–48; McDermott and Hunter, “The Western Journals of Dr. George Hunter, 1796–1805,” 10. 69. Rothman, Slave Country, 45–46; Usner, “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier,” 297.

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70. Rothman, Slave Country, 49–54; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), esp. 31. 71. On the transformation of enslavers’ desires with regard to owning people of African descent into “necessities,” see Johnson, Soul by Soul, 84–88. 72. McDermott and Hunter, “The Western Journals of Dr. George Hunter, 1796–1805,” 81. 73. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, October 26, 1806, SDP. As historian Walter Johnson argues, slave buyers worked to “maintain an artificial and ideological separation of ‘slavery’ from ‘the market.’ ” Johnson, Soul by Soul, 25. 74. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, October 26, 1806. 75. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, January 18, 1807. 76. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, March 29, 1807; Charles S. Sydnor, A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, Benjamin L. C. Wailes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1938), 55. 77. Gaines, The Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines, 65. 78. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, March 21 and 29, 1807, SDP. 79. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, March 21, 1807. 80. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, February 14, 1807, SDP, emphasis in original. 81. The peach trees “seem to invite home the mistress of my little rustic domain,” he wrote to Mary. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Dinsmoor, March 21, 1807. 82. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 90–91. 83. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, March 29, 1807. 84. Quote from Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, March 21, 1807. See also Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, March 29, 1807. 85. On Mary’s migration with Silas Jr. and Nancy, Silas’s ward, to live with Dinsmoor at the agency, see Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, May 16 and May 18, 1808, SDP. 86. See, for example, Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 32; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 141. 87. For an account of antebellum white women’s maternal feelings toward Native people, see Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 23–50. 88. Silas Dinsmoor to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor, March 21, 1807. 89. My thinking here is directly informed by literature documenting ongoing strug gles around graves protection and repatriation. See, for example, Margaret Bruchac, Siobhan Hart, and H. Martin Wobst, eds., Indigenous Archaelogies: A Reader on Decolonization (New York: Routledge, 2010); Kathleen S. Fine-Dare, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Lincoln: University of

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Nebraska Press, 2002), 13–46; Ruth B. Phillips, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2011); Susan Sleeper-Smith, ed., Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 90. Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians, 104–7. 91. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 246–48. 92. Gaines, The Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines, 65. 93. The “Indenture” for his Concordia estate was signed on February 9, 1809. See SDP. Silas Dinsmoor began to address letters to Mary Gordon Dinsmoor in Washington, Mississippi, on January 24, 1809, in SDP. 94. The Secretary of War [William Eustis] to Silas Dinsmoor, February 22, 1811, in Carter, ed., The Territorial Papers of the United States, 6:178. On Tecumseh’s travels south, see Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 145–47. 95. James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, vol. 1 (Mason Brothers, 1860), 350–51. 96. Philip E. Thomas to John C. Calhoun, February 16, 1818, in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. W. Edwin Hemphill, vol. 2, 1817–1818 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1963); Baltimore Indian Committee, October 20, 1813, in “Minutes & Proceedings of the Committee on Indian Concerns appointed by the Yearly Meeting of Baltimore from the 10th mo. 1795 to the 10th mo. 1815,” book A, M-562, film MR-B, frame 259, FHL. For evidence concerning Thomas Jefferson’s travels, see “Minutes & Proceedings” above as well as “Died” [death announcements], Republican Farmer (Bridgeport, CT), May 15, 1816. 97. Historian Robert Remini argues that Dinsmoor was “very tolerant toward runaways. Worse, he required each master to show documentary proof of ownership before he would let him pass with his slaves. If proof were lacking, he took the slaves into custody. Obviously there were many complaints to the secretary of war about the highhandedness of this official.” Remini does not cite his sources for Dinsmoor’s supposed “tolerance” for the presence of self-emancipated people on Choctaw lands. Given Dinsmoor’s own commitments to the practice of racial slavery, it seems more likely that Dinsmoor was more invested in protecting slaveholders’ property. Robert Vincent Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 163. On pressures for Dinsmoor’s dismissal, see also ibid., 162–64, 170; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children, Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 41–42; William Lattimore to the Secretary of War, March 9, 1814. 98. On Dinsmoor’s removal, see Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 163; Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 1:358–59. 99. Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 2:577–78. 100. Dinsmoor’s predecessor and successor, John McKee, wrote in 1815, “Mr. Dinsmoor when our Agent lost much property of his by our bad young men; but has been too honest to complain of it, as others do. You know that Red people have very

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little property. It is therefore our wish, that our Father the President may grant his permission to convey to Mr. Dinsmoor a tract of land two miles square at (Tuketchepoonta) the Little Turkey Town on Tombigbee.” “Extract of the Journal of the Conference between Colo. John McKee United States Agent to the Chaktaws, and the Mingoes, Leaders and Warriors of the Chaktaws, Chaktaw Agency, December 15, 1815,” in folder 7, 4026.176, Peter Pitchlynn Papers, Gilcrease Museum, University of Tulsa. See also Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 392. 101. William S. Bodley to General Thomas Bodley, July 19, 1830, Bodley Family Papers, MSS A B668e, folder 13, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.

4.

A Choctaw Mother in Slave Country

1. William Haley, “History of Copiah: Recollections of an Old Citizen by W.H. (Attributed to William Haley) c. 1876, from the ‘Mississippi Democrat’ Newspaper, Edited & Reprinted by Paul Cartwright,” Special Collections, University of Mississippi Archives. 2. Ibid.; Robert Jones to James L. McDonald, September 15, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 773, frames 356–57, National Archives. 3. Robert Jones to James L. McDonald, September 15, 1826, frame 357. 4. James McDonald to Thomas L. McKenney, August 9, 1819, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 86, frames 3921–22, National Archives, letter also published in W. Edwin Hemphill, ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, vol. 3, 1818–1819 (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 1967), 226–29. 5. Hereafter Molly’s surname will be referred to as McDonald rather than Rhodes, since the former appears most frequently on documents referencing her. 6. James McDonald was born around 1800 or 1801 and had an elder brother, Alexander Hamilton, whose birth date is unknown. Assuming Molly McDonald was somewhere between eighteen and forty years of age when she gave birth to her second child, she herself would have been born between 1760 and 1783. For James McDonald’s age, see Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, April 15, 1818, in W. Edwin Hemphill, ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, vol. 2, 1817–1818 (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 1963), 247. McKenney writes that McDonald was seventeen years old at that date. 7. For an overview of these transfers, see Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 9–10. 8. For the emergence of a Choctaw “play-off ” system, see Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), esp. 34–68. On Choctaw conceptualizations of politics and power, see O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 27–49. On Choctaw districts and community governance between

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the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 312–15, 353–58; Patricia Galloway, “ ‘The Chief Who Is Your Father’: Choctaw and French Views of the Diplomatic Relation,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter H. Wood, and M. Thomas Hatley, rev. ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 352–53; James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 26–27; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 13–14. See also James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frame 320, National Archives. 9. Stephen P. van Hoak, “Untangling the Roots of Dependency: Choctaw Economics, 1700–1860,” American Indian Quarterly 23, no. 3 (Summer–Autumn 1999): 116–18, quote on 116; White, The Roots of Dependency, 74–87; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 62–65. 10. Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 278–80. 11. Ibid., 284–85. 12. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 51–69; van Hoak, “Untangling the Roots of Dependency,” 118–19. 13. Daniel H. Usner Jr., “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier: Changing Economic Relations with Citizens and Slaves in the Mississippi Territory,” Journal of American History 72, no. 2 (1985): 304–5. 14. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 81–82; Sarah Tuttle and Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, Conversations on the Choctaw Mission, vol. 1 (Boston: Printed by T. R. Marvin, for the Massachusetts Sabbath School Union, 1830), 47. 15. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 64–65; Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), esp. 185; Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, 285. See also James Taylor Carson, “Horses and the Economy and Culture of the Choctaw Indians, 1690–1840,” Ethnohistory 42, no. 3 (1995): 495–513; James Taylor Carson, “Native Americans, the Market Revolution, and Culture Change: The Choctaw Cattle Economy, 1690–1830,” Agricultural History 71, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 7–9. 16. Michelene E. Pesantubbee, Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 31–32, 54; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830, 43–44; Celia E. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory: From Chattel to Citizens (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 7; Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 98–102, 191. 17. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 37, 146. For similar occurrences within the Cherokee Nation, see Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: Th e Story of an Afro- Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 51.

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18. For accounts and debates on the emergence of race thinking in Southeast Indian societies, see Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to Be Red,” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (June 1997): 625–44; Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 193–97; Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory, 10. 19. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 182–87.; Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory, 13–14. For even earlier efforts on the part of the British to encourage Choctaws to capture self-emancipated slaves who had fled to Choctaw territories (and hence preclude Choctaw-black alliances), see Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 290. As Gallay demonstrates, from the early eighteenth century the British would offer to exchange Choctaw people captured within the Indian slave trade for people of African descent. 20. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 70–82; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 23. 21. Records on Molly McDonald’s ancestral history are inconsistent. William Haley described her as a “full-blooded Choctaw woman,” whereas later documents refer to her as “part Choctaw Indian.” Haley, “History of Copiah”; Affidavit of James M. Pucket, January 16, 1833, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Records Concerning Indian Land Reserves, Reserve File A, ca. 1825–1907, box 15, folder 456, National Archives. 22. Theda Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 58–59; Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 32; Samuel J. Wells, “The Role of Mixed-Bloods in Mississippi Choctaw History,” in After Removal: The Choctaw in Mississippi, ed. Roseanna Tubby and Samuel J. Wells (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), esp. 46–47. My thinking here is also informed by scholar Tiya Miles’s analysis of the economic practices of bicultural Cherokee slaveholder James Vann. See Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 59. See also Chapter 3, notes 39 and 40. 23. Claudio Saunt et al., “Rethinking Race and Culture in the Early South,” Ethnohistory 53, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 402–3; Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 33–35. 24. For an extensive study of the labors of enslaved people of African descent within the Choctaw Nation, see Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, esp. 33. 25. Ibid., 30–31; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 44–45; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830, 80–81; Wells, “The Role of Mixed-Bloods in Mississippi Choctaw History,” 45–51; Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 56. Little has been written about Choctaw women’s roles in the redistribution of goods, but scholars have noted the practice in other Native nations, and it is not a stretch to presume that intermarried Choctaw women exerted their own influence when it came to how their families main-

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tained power and authority. See James Taylor Carson, “Molly Brant: From Clan Mother to Loyalist Chief,” in Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives, ed. Theda Perdue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 48–59; Michael D. Green, “Mary Musgrove: Creating a New World,” in ibid., esp. 39–40; Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 67, 78. 26. On familial migrations into Choctaw borderlands, see White, The Roots of Dependency, 104; Harmon, Rich Indians, 97–98. 27. Wells, “The Role of Mixed-Bloods in Mississippi Choctaw History,” 47; Tuttle, Conversations on the Choctaw Mission, 1:85. 28. Haley, “History of Copiah.” 29. E-mail correspondence with Jennifer Mieirs, August 4, 2014. On Apuckshunubbee’s move to western borderlands, see White, The Roots of Dependency, 104. 30. From later claims to Molly McDonald’s land, it is clear that she had only two surviving children. See Joseph E. Penton’s Affidavit, September 3, 1833, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Records Concerning Indian Land Reserves, Reserve File A, ca. 1825–1907, box 15, folder 456, National Archives. 31. Miles, The House on Diamond Hill, 54–55. See also ibid., 23–24, 109–10, 112. 32. Ibid., 155. 33. Ibid., 109–12. 34. Benjamin Hawkins, December 20, 1796, in Benjamin Hawkins, “Letters of Benjamin Hawkins,” in The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810, ed. H. Thomas Foster (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 43. 35. According to the early twentieth-century ethnographer David Bushnell Jr., husbands and wives could separate. “By mutual agreement the two parties could separate and, in the event in so doing, were at liberty to marry again. The man usually returned to his own village, taking all his property with him.” David L. Bushnell Jr., The Choctaw of Bayou Lacomb St. Tammany Parish Louisiana (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 27. 36. See James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, November 9, 1824, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 89–91, National Archives. 37. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 80; Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory, 17. 38. Quoted in Miles, Ties That Bind, 42. 39. Benjamin Hawkins, December 20, 1796, 43. 40. Miles, Ties That Bind, 41; Miles, The House on Diamond Hill, 115–16. 41. Historian Celia Naylor makes this point with respect to enslaved people within the Cherokee Nation. Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory, 49–50. 42. For examples of U.S. educators giving Southeast Indian students English names, see Thomas Henderson to Secretary of War James Barbour, “Quarterly Report [of the Choctaw Academy] ending on the 31st of Oct. 1826,” October 1, 1826, and P. B.

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Porter, October 14, 1828, both in LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 773, frames 110–15, 1027– 28, National Archives. 43. William P. Anderson to John McKee, April 14, 1814, John McKee Papers, c. 1792–1825, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. I thank Brandon Layton for sharing this source with me. 44. O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830, 77. 45. “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1786,” in United States, Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, Treaties, comp. and ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 11–14; Robert B. Ferguson, “Appendix: Treaties between the United States and the Choctaw Nation,” in The Choctaw Before Removal, ed. Carolyn Keller Reeves (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 214–15; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 50–51. 46. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 48; White, The Roots of Dependency, 90; Usner, “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier,” 298. 47. William Gordon Forman and John Ellis, “Memorial of the Legislative Council and House of Representatives of the Mississippi Territory, to the President and Congress, January 5th, 1803,” in J. F. H. Claiborne and C. M. Lagrone, Mississippi, as a Province, Territory, and State; with Biographical Notices of Eminent Citizens, vol. 1 (1880; repr., Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 241. 48. See Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 48. 49. On settler expansion into these regions, see Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 58–81. For Cumberland and Ohioan settlers’ reliance upon markets in Natchez and New Orleans, see ibid., 54; John R. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, Three Regions in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 197–98. 50. Lieutenant McClary to Winthrop Sargent, October 8, 1799, Winthrop Sargent Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 51. Governor Winthrop Sargent, “Circular Letter to Slave-holders,” November 16, 1800, in Dunbar Rowland et al., The Mississippi Territorial Archives, 1798–1803, vol. 1 (Nashville: Brandon Printing Company, 1905), 311–12, emphases in original. 52. Winthrop Sargent, “Address to the Militia Officers,” January 12, 1801, in ibid., 324–26. See also Davidson Burns McKibben, “Negro Slave Insurrection in Mississippi, 1800–1865,” Journal of Negro History 34, no. 1 (January 1949): 74–75. 53. Henry Dearborn to William C. C. Claiborne, May 10, 1802, in Rowland et al., The Mississippi Territorial Archives, 435–37; McKibben, “Negro Slave Insurrection in Mississippi,” 75. 54. Governor William C. C. Claiborne to James Madison, January 23, 1802, in Rowland et al., The Mississippi Territorial Archives, 373–74, emphases in original. 55. The work of historian Thavolia Glymph powerfully exposes the fallacy of this myth. See Th avolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: Th e Transformation of

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the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Thavolia Glymph, “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3, no. 4 (December 2013): 501–32. 56. “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1801,” in United States, Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, 2:56; Ferguson, “Appendix: Treaties between the United States and the Choctaw Nation,” 215. 57. Ferguson, “Appendix: Treaties between the United States and the Choctaw Nation,” 215. 58. Ibid., 215–18. 59. Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 49. 60. William C. C. Claiborne to James Madison, April 3, 1802, William C. C. Claiborne to Henry Dearborn, April 8, 1802, both in Rowland et al., Th e Mississippi Territorial Archives, 402–6. See also Usner, Indian Work, 42–68; O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830, 99; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 55–56, 72. 61. William C. C. Claiborne to James Madison, April 3, 1802. 62. See also Usner, Indian Work, 49–50. 63. “Character of a Chactaw,” in Mississippi Herald (Natchez, MS), September 21, 1804. 64. John McKee to Benjamin Hawkins, December 9, 1801, Governor Claiborne to Benjamin Hawkins, December 14, 1801, both in Rowland et al., The Mississippi Territorial Archives, 358–60. There seem to have been fewer Choctaw “Encampments” by 1802, but those present were still framed as a “great inconvenience” to be “remedied” by colonial officials. See Governor William C. C. Claiborne to John McKee, June 4, 1802, in ibid., 450. 65. Governor William C. C. Claiborne to Benjamin Hawkins, encl. “A Proclamation,” December 14, 1801, in ibid., 361. 66. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, December 13, 1830, box 1, folder 19, Peter Perkins Pitchlynn Collection, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Norman. 67. For an important analysis of the “Shooka noompa” stories McDonald wrote about, see Phillip Carroll Morgan, “ ‘Who Shall Gainsay Our Decision?’: Choctaw Literary Criticism in 1830,” in Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, ed. Janice Acoose et al. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 126–46. 68. As historian Gregory Evans Dowd indicates, the numbers of Choctaw “militants” contributing to Tecumseh’s and the Red Sticks’ efforts were small—thirty or forty. Their defiance of the will of Choctaw leaders caused rifts and tensions within the nation. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Strug gle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 172–73. 69. William P. Anderson to John McKee, April 14, 1814.

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70. McKenney refers to James McDonald’s brother as Thomas Jefferson. McDonald, of course, did know a Choctaw youth named Thomas Jefferson, but he was Choctaw chief Apuckshunubbee’s son, not McDonald’s brother. McKenney quite frequently misremembered details within his memoirs and likely did so with McDonald’s brother’s name. See Thomas Loraine McKenney, “Preservation of the Indians,” in Memoirs, Official and Personal: With Sketches of Travels among the Northern and Southern Indians; Embracing a War Excursion, and Descriptions of Scenes along the Western Borders, vol. 2 (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846), 113. 71. William P. Anderson to John McKee, April 14, 1814. 72. Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 322. 73. Ibid., 322–23; Pesantubbee, Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World, 105. 74. Joshua Piker, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 22. 75. Ibid.; Patricia Kay Galloway, Practicing Ethnohistory: Mining Archives, Hearing Testimony, Constructing Narrative (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 215, 230; Galloway, “ ‘The Chief Who Is Your Father,’ ” 359–64; Pesantubbee, Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World, 105. 76. Galloway, “ ‘The Chief Who Is Your Father,’ ” esp. 345; Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 306, 322; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 28–29. 77. James Taylor Carson, “Greenwood Leflore: Southern Creole, Choctaw Chief,” in Pre-Removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths, ed. Greg O’Brien (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 226. 78. Ibid. See also Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, 226–28. 79. Susanna Smith, “Washington, Mississippi: Antebellum Elysium,” Journal of Mississippi History (May 1978): 143–46; Charles S. Sydnor, A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, Benjamin L. C. Wailes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1938), 24–28. 80. The Natchez Trace veered east through Washington, Mississippi, before heading northeast to Tennessee. Sydnor, A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, Benjamin L. C. Wailes, 24. 81. Claiborne and Lagrone, Mississippi, as a Province, Territory, and State, 1:258. 82. Quote from Sydnor, A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, 29. For an additional discussion of Washington’s businesses, see Smith, “Washington, Mississippi: Antebellum Elysium,” 158. 83. Sydnor, A Gentleman of the Old Natchez Region, 30. 84. Ibid., 41; Smith, “Washington, Mississippi: Antebellum Elysium,” 157. 85. Guy B. Braden, “A Jeffersonian Village: Washington, Miss.,” Journal of Mississippi History 30 (May 1968): 135–42; Claiborne and Lagrone, Mississippi, as a Province, Territory, and State, 1:258–60. 86. As historian Brenda Child reveals within a different temporal and geographical context, children placed in residential institutions in the first half of the twentieth century “were burdened by their separation from family and loved ones before

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they were developmentally mature.” They “felt lonely and isolated when they first arrived at school, and many continued to be afflicted with homesickness during their lengthy terms of study,” so much so that some succumbed to illness. Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 43, 49. 87. H. B. Cushman, History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez Indians, ed. Angie Debo (Stillwater, OK: Redlands Press, 1962), 396; Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 31. 88. William P. Anderson to John McKee, April 14, 1814. 89. James L. McDonald to Thomas L. McKenney, August 9, 1819, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 86, frames 3921–22, National Archives, letter also published in Hemphill, ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 3:227. 90. For the “public” culture of Washington, see Smith, “Washington, Mississippi: Antebellum Elysium,” 147–51. 91. Carson, “Greenwood Leflore: Southern Creole, Choctaw Chief,” 226. 92. “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1830,” in United States, Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, 2:318. 93. Pitchlynn, who was born in 1806, never indicates the years he lived with this family. On his residency with Terrill, see Peter P. Pitchlynn to John Terrill, June 21, 1830, LPR 27, box 2, folder 6, roll 2, John Coffee Papers, State of Alabama Department of Archives and History. 94. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, September 30, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 774, frames 361–362, National Archives. See also Czarina C. Conlan, “David Folsom,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 4, no. 4 (December 1926): 341. 95. My thinking here is influenced by Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. 117–61. 96. For an example of factory tallies of trade debt, see Ora Brooks Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 1795–1822 (Denver, CO: Sage Books, 1954), 98–99. 97. Deposition of Teedoe Brashears, September 1, 1819, folder 11, 1819-2, 4026.181, William Tyrill to Mr. Cooper, October 29, 1803, folder 4, 1803-1, 4026.173, Deposition of L. James Allen, April 27, 1818, folder 10, 1819-1, 4026.179, Deposition re: Medlong Case, September 16, 1819, folder 12, 1819-3, 4026.182, all in PPP. 98. James Taylor Carson argues that Choctaw people in the early nineteenth century “never completed the transition” from a “marketplace” society to a market society: “Although they increasingly sought profit instead of reciprocity from trade with outsiders, they retained the gendered division of labor and production that had

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characterized their post-Mississippian economy, and they never became dependent on buying and selling to make a living.” Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 71. 99. Letter from John Pitchlynn to Capt. P. P. Pitchlynn, July 19, 1824, folder 25, 1824-4, 4026.221, PPP. 100. “Last Will and Testament of David Choate, a citizen of U.S. and an inhab. of Choctaw Nation,” October 23, 1823, folder 20, 1824-4, 4026.215, PPP. 101. Carson, “Greenwood Leflore: Southern Creole, Choctaw Chief.” 102. James Lawrence McDonald to J. C. Calhoun, July 10, 1824, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 94–96, National Archives. 103. On these men’s literacy skills, see for example, “Unidentified manuscript re ways of living 60 years ago in Choctaw Nation (attributed to Nathaniel Folsom, maternal grandfather of Peter [Pitchlynn],” 1798, folder 3, 1798-2, 4026.172, J. Pitchlynn to Capt. P. O. Pitchlynn, June 15, 1824, folder 24, 1824-3, 4026.220, both in PPP; Letter from John Pitchlynn to Capt. P. P. Pitchlynn, July 19, 1824. On Pitchlynn’s lending practices and status as a slaveholder, see O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830, 110; W. David Baird, Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 6–7. 104. Tuttle, Conversations on the Choctaw Mission, 1:85. 105. Thomas McKenney to Lee Compere, March 29, 1828, LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 4, frame 377, National Archives; Benjamin Hawkins, “A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799,” in Foster, Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 66s–67s. 106. Gilbert C. Fite, “Development of the Cotton Industry by the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory,” Journal of Southern History 15, no. 3 (August 1949): 346–47. 107. Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy: 1816–1830 (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1974), esp. 21; Thomas Loraine McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal: With Sketches of Travels among the Northern and Southern Indians; Embracing a War Excursion, and Descriptions of Scenes along the Western Borders, vol. 1 (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846), 187–88. See also Chapter 6. 108. Scholar Tiya Miles argues with respect to Cherokee slaveholders that, by adopting the exploitative racial regimes that engendered planter imperialism, they “ultimately [made] an investment in a system that subordinated and excluded them.” Miles, Ties That Bind, 83.

5.

Adoption in Andrew Jackson’s Empire

1. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, October 1, October 18, and December 29, 1813, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser, Sharon Macpherson, and Charles F. Bryan Jr., vol. 2, 1804–1813 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 436, 437, 515–16. On Jackson’s general health conditions during his occupation of Creek country, see Robert Vincent Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 223–24. On the source of

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Jackson’s injuries and his invasion of Creek territory, see ibid., 185, 192–93. Racehorses were prized possessions among Tennessee and Kentucky elites. Stud fees from winning stallions could bring up to $150 a session. See Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 127; John R. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 187. 2. On postbattle events, see Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 193–205. 3. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, November 4, 1813, in Moser, Macpherson, and Bryan, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 2:444. 4. Ibid.; Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 19, 1813, in ibid., 2:494–95. 5. For more on the Battle of Tohopeka, see Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 270. For Jackson’s account of the battle, see Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, April 1, 1814, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser, David R. Hoth, Sharon MacPherson, and John H. Reinbold, vol. 3, 1814–1815 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 54–55. 6. Andrew Jackson to the Officers of the 2nd Division, April 20, 1808, in Moser, Macpherson, and Bryan, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 2:191. See also “The Massacre at the Mouth of the Duck River [July 7, 1812],” in ibid., 2:310–11. 7. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, January 8, 1813, in Moser, Macpherson, and Bryan, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 2:354; “Proclamation by Jackson,” April 2, 1814, in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, vol. 1, to April 30, 1814, ed. John Spencer Bassett (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1926), 494–95, also printed in Mary French Caldwell, General Jackson’s Lady: A Story of the Life and Times of Rachel Donelson Jackson, Beloved Wife of General Andrew Jackson, Seventh President of the United States (Kingsport, TN: Kingsport Press, 1936), 291. 8. I draw here from Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 9. The War of 1812 had several theaters and its causes were not isolated to Native re sistance to U.S. expansion, but U.S. expansion was the central grievance of those Native nations who entered into the confl ict. See Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Strug gle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), esp. 129, 139, 143, 183–90. On the Creek War in par ticu lar, see ibid., 185–90; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 249– 72; Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: Th e Muskogees’ Strug gle for a New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Kathryn E. Holland Braund, ed., Tohopeka: Rethinking the Creek War and the War of 1812 (Auburn, AL: Pebble Hill Books, 2012). 10. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 189; Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, 233.

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11. On the economic downturn that accompanied the War of 1812, see Aron, How the West Was Lost, 141. On Jackson’s military conditions, see Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821, 192–200. 12. Saunt, A New Order of Things, 249–72; Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821, 189–90. 13. On Jackson’s troops’ behaviors and settlers’ locations vis-à-vis Native people at this point, see Finger, Tennessee Frontiers, 233–34, 239. See also Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 190–91, 196–205. 14. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 29, 1813, 515. 15. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821, 187–205, esp. 190. On social advancement in the Southeast, see also Aron, How the West Was Lost, esp. 161; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 53–63. 16. Saunt, A New Order of Things, 3, 12–13. Note that some of the members of the Muscogee Nation spoke a dialect that was related to the broader Muskogee language group shared by Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw people. 17. Ibid., 249–72. On Red Stick alliances with African American slaves, see ibid., 269–70. 18. For accounts of Jackson’s vision of an expanded proslavery South, see Rogin, Fathers and Children, esp. 165–205; Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), esp. 138–39. 19. This emerging group of ruling elites hoped to centralize political governance among the Creeks, creating a set of national institutions that would grant them decision-making powers over all Creek people, a move that would not only support their visions of an autonomous Creek republic but also their ambitions to privatize commonly held Creek lands and resources as personal property. Saunt, A New Order of Things, esp. 164–85. 20. Ibid., 249–72. 21. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821, 86–112; Rogin, Fathers and Children, 76–85. 22. Quote from Rogin, Fathers and Children, 176. See also ibid., 83. 23. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 29, 1813, 444. For a theoretical analysis of the conversion of bodily harm into political meaning, see Elaine Scarry, Th e Body in Pain: Th e Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. 66 and 117. 24. Davy Crockett, Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (Cincinnati: U.P. James, 1839), 83–84. 25. Quoted in Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767– 1821, 193.

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26. Major Reid to His Wife, November 14, 1813, in Samuel Gordon Heiskell, Andrew Jackson and Early Tennessee History (Nashville, TN: Ambrose Printing Co., 1918), 404. 27. In the words of historian Cynthia Cumfer, Tennessee volunteer militias “reinforced the authority of each soldier on the battle field.” Cynthia Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land: The Minds of Cherokees, Blacks, and Whites on the Tennessee Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 186–87. 28. Crockett, Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, 89–90. 29. Rogin, Fathers and Children, 151; Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, April 1, 1814. 30. In Heiskell, Andrew Jackson and Early Tennessee History, 600. 31. John Reid and John Henry Eaton, The Life of Andrew Jackson, ed. Frank L. Owsley Jr. (1817; repr., University: University of Alabama Press, 1974), 395. Eaton completed this biography after John Reid—who started the book— died after writing the first four chapters. Even if Eaton’s reference to Tohopeka (Horseshoe Bend) was correct, it does not change the meaning here. John Reid, who was one of Jackson’s troops, wrote that “the route” of the Red Sticks’ retreat from Tohopeka “was traced in their blood.” John Reid to his wife, November 11, 1814, in Heiskell, Andrew Jackson and Early Tennessee History, 404–5. 32. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 19, 1813, 494–95. 33. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 29, 1813, 516. 34. On the importance of the “last” surviving Indian in the context of U.S. settler expansion, see, for example, Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 35. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 19 and 29, 1813, 495, 516. 36. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 29, 1813, 516. 37. Reid and Eaton, The Life of Andrew Jackson, 395–96. 38. On Jackson’s reputation suffering as a result of his violent behavior with white men, see Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 143, 186, 211–12. 39. George Washington Campbell to Andrew Jackson, December 27, 1816, in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, vol. 2, May 1, 1814 to December 31, 1819, ed. John Spencer Bassett (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1926), 271, letter also reprinted in Caldwell, General Jackson’s Lady, 347–48. 40. On Jackson’s early life, see Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1–25. 41. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 29, 1813, 516. 42. The literature on Native captivity practices is vast. For recent histories of Southeast Indian captivity practices, see Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro- Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society: 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

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University Press, 2010). See also Michelene E. Pesantubbee, Choctaw Women in a Chaotic World: The Clash of Cultures in the Colonial Southeast (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 31–32, 39–42, 45–58. 43. Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 201–5; Miles, Ties That Bind, 124–28. 44. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821, 161; Moser, Macpherson, and Bryan, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 2:218. 45. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 107–36; Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 69–106; Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 46–47. 46. Jackson himself referred to his “white and Black family.” See Andrew Jackson to Graves Steele, November 7, 1839, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Daniel Feller, Harold D. Moser, Laura-Eve Moss, and Thomas Coens, vol. 7, 1829 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), 539–41. On Southern paternalism, see Eugene D. Genovese, “ ‘Our Family, White and Black’: Family and Household in the Southern Slaveholders’ World View,” in In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830–1900, ed. Carol Bleser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69–87; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), esp. 22–23, 28–9, 86–88; Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 17. 47. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 107–36; Miles, Ties That Bind, especially 59; Morgan, Laboring Women, 69–106. 48. On how purchasing slaves constructed whiteness, patriarchy, and elite status, see Johnson, Soul by Soul, 81–90; Mark R. Cheathem, Old Hickory’s Nephew: The Political and Private Strug gles of Andrew Jackson Donelson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 44–45. 49. Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passion of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 118–67. For a broader study of white captives, see June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). 50. Albert V. Goodpasture, “Indian Wars and Warriors of the Old Southwest, 1730–1807,” Tennessee Historical Magazine 4, no. 3 (September 1918): 179–80. See also Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country, 140–41. 51. On the importance of kinship networks in the South, see Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 55, 68; Rogin, Fathers and Children, 40– 41, 55–56; Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the

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Law in the Nineteenth- Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 14, 43–44; Ann Toplovich, “Marriage, Mayhem, and Presidential Politics: The Robards-Jackson Backcountry Scandal,” Ohio Valley History 5 (Winter 2005): 3–22; Cheathem, Old Hickory’s Nephew, 36. 52. On the slave trades that would unfold between Jackson and his extended relations, see, for example, James Houston to Andrew Jackson, September 24, 1819, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser, David R. Hoth, and George H. Hoemann, vol. 4, 1816–1820 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994), 325. See also James Jackson Hanna to Andrew Jackson, January 30, 1829, in ibid., 353. For an example of family connections and their ties to land speculation schemes, see Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 86. 53. On Jackson’s legal career, see Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 39–45; Cheathem, Old Hickory’s Nephew, 9. 54. On slavery and the production of class distinction, see Johnson, Soul by Soul, 80–83, 90–99. 55. Record of Slave Sale, Washington County Court, November 17, 1788, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Sam B. Smith, Harriet Chappell Owsley, vol. 1, 1770–1803 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 15. On white men’s speculations concerning enslaved women’s reproduction, see Johnson, Soul by Soul, 82–83. 56. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 66–68; Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello, 38, 81–82. 57. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 51–52. 58. Ibid., 87. 59. Ibid., 86–90, 109, 129–33, 159; Rogin, Fathers and Children, 84–85, 95–96. 60. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 55, 133; Moser, Macpherson, and Bryan, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 2:261–62. 61. On Rachel’s previous marriage, her family connections, and the scandal that eventually dogged the couple, see Toplovich, “Marriage, Mayhem, and Presidential Politics”; Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 41–44, 58–69; Cheathem, Old Hickory’s Nephew, 9–10, 13, 51, 53. 62. Rogin, Fathers and Children, 55; Toplovich, “Marriage, Mayhem, and Presidential Politics: The Robards-Jackson Backcountry Scandal.” 63. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 160–61. See also Cheathem, Old Hickory’s Nephew, 10–13. 64. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, January 8, 1813. 65. For changing ideas about appropriate relationships between white men and their wives and children in the South in general, and Tennessee in particular, see Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household, 24–34; Cumfer, Separate Peoples, One Land, 157–78. 66. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 68.

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67. On white women’s stakes in the practice of racial slavery, see Th avolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1–136. 68. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, March 1, 1813, in Moser, Macpherson, and Bryan, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 2:372–73. 69. Ibid. 70. Robert Butler to Andrew Jackson, November 2, 1815, in Moser et al., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 3:390, emphasis in original. On black women’s ongoing resistance to slavery, see Camp, Closer to Freedom; Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 1–136; Thavolia Glymph, “Rose’s War and the Gendered Politics of a Slave Insurgency in the Civil War,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3, no. 4 (December 2013): 501–32. 71. Andrew Jackson to James Craine Bronaugh, July 3, 1821, in The Papers of Andrew Jackson, ed. Harold D. Moser, David R. Hoth, George H. Hoemann, vol. 5, 1821–1824 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 66; Cheatham, Old Hickory’s Nephew, 44–45. 72. See Feller et al., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 7:333–34, 336, 384–85. 73. Andrew Jackson to William Donelson, October 8, 1829, in ibid., 7:480–82. 74. Andrew Jackson to Graves Steele, November 7, 1829, emphases in original. 75. Andrew Jackson to Andrew Jackson Hutchings, June 13, 1829, in Feller et al., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 7:279–80. 76. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, February 21, 1814, in Moser et al., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 3:34–35. 77. See, for example, Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, April 1, 1814; Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, January 28, 1814, in Moser et al., Papers of Andrew Jackson, 3:17–21, letter also printed in Bassett, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, 1:444–47. 78. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, January 8, 1813, 354. 79. Rachel Jackson to Andrew Jackson, February 8, 1813, in Moser, Macpherson, and Bryan, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 2:361–62. 80. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, November 4, 1813, 444. 81. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 19, 1813, 495. 82. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, February 21, 1814; Rachel Jackson to Andrew Jackson, April 7, 1814, in Moser et al., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 3:59; Andrew Jackson Jr. to Andrew Jackson, April 8, 1814, in ibid., 3:60. 83. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, April 1, 1814, 3:55. 84. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, November 4, 1813. There are disagreements among scholars as to whether Theodore was African American or American Indian. The editors of The Papers of Andrew Jackson, for example, believe that Theodore was “probably another Indian child at the Hermitage.” Jackson scholar Michael Paul Rogin asserts that Theodore was an enslaved person of African descent. I have not come across evidence to validate either claim. Moser, Macpherson, and Bryan, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 2:444n5, 2:35n2; Rogin, Fathers and Children, 189.

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85. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, February 21, 1814, 35. I owe this insight to Tiya Miles. 86. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 29, 1813, 2:516. 87. Ibid. Observations about the Hermitage mansion and the slave cabins are from the author’s own visit to Jackson’s plantation site. 88. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, November 17, 1814, in Moser et al., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 3:190–91. 89. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, September 18, 1816, in Moser, Hoth, and Hoemann, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 4:62. 90. David Smith to Andrew Jackson, April 4, 1814, in Bassett, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, 1:495. 91. Andrew Jackson to James Gadsden, May 2, 1822, in Moser, Hoth, and Hoemann, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 5:180. See also ibid., 5:472 (February 5, 1821), 5:519 (January 24, 1822), 5:568 (July 5, 1824); Amos Kendall, Life of Andrew Jackson: Private, Military, and Civil (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1843), 200–201. 92. On Lyncoya’s apprenticeship, see Kendall, Life of Andrew Jackson, 200–201. 93. Ibid. 94. It is unclear who these visitors were precisely. Remini writes that “dozens” of Indians visited the Hermitage but fails to offer sources. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 337. Evidently the Cherokee chief John Ridge stayed in Jackson’s home in 1837 en route to resettling in the “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi after illegally signing the Treaty of New Echota, which Congress would read as providing the United States with the mandate to forcibly remove Cherokee people from their homelands. See John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2014), 246–47, 252–53. 95. “Proclamation by Jackson,” April 2, 1814, also printed in Caldwell, General Jackson’s Lady, 291–92. For further details on the loss of life at Tohopeka, see Martin, Sacred Revolt, 162–63; Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 215–16. 96. Benjamin Hawkins, “Extract of a letter from Colonel Hawkins to George Graham, chief clerk of the War Department,” August 1, 1815, in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Indian Aff airs, vol. 2, 1815–1827 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1834), 493. See also Benjamin Hawkins, Letters, Journals, and Writings, ed. C. L. Grant (Savannah: Beehive, 1980), 2:744; Martin, Sacred Revolt, 165. 97. Quote from Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 226. For more on the Treaty of Fort Jackson, see Martin, Sacred Revolt, 166; Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 226–27. 98. On Red Sticks’ flight to Florida, see Martin, Sacred Revolt, 163. 99. Hawkins, “Extract of a letter from Colonel Hawkins to George Graham, chief clerk of the War Department,” August 1, 1815. See also Hawkins, Letters, Journals and Writings, 2:744; Martin, Sacred Revolt, 165.

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100. Rogin, Fathers and Children, 195; Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 353. 101. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 306–7; Rogin, Fathers and Children, 195. 102. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 344. 103. Ibid., 341–77; Rogin, Fathers and Children, 195. 104. Rogin, Fathers and Children, 195. 105. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 399–424. 106. Rogin, Fathers and Children, 199. 107. Ibid. 108. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 64–65; Jill Lepore, Th e Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 191–226. See, for example, James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (New York: Signet Classics, 2005). 109. On how militarism such as Jackson’s affected civilization programs, see Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816–1830 (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1974), 47–70; Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missionaries: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 164–67. See also this book, Chapter 3. 110. Theda Perdue, “Race and Culture: Writing the Ethnohistory of the Early South,” Ethnohistory 51, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 701–23; James Taylor Carson, “Greenwood LeFlore: Southern Creole, Choctaw Chief,” in Pre-Removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths, ed. Greg O’Brien (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 221–36. 111. Tiya Miles lays out this history in relation to the Cherokee Nation in Miles, Ties That Bind, esp. 100–28. See also Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 114–16. 112. Kendall, Life of Andrew Jackson, 200. 113. Cheathem, Old Hickory’s Nephew, 32. 114. For Lyncoya’s education, see, for example, Andrew Jackson to James Gadsden, May 2, 1822; Receipt of William Chandler (tutor), July 5, 1824, in Moser, Hoth, and Hoemann, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 5:568. 115. Andrew Jackson to Rachel Jackson, December 7, 1823, in Moser, Hoth, and Hoemann, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 5:322–23. 116. Kendall, Life of Andrew Jackson, 200. 117. I thank Claudio Saunt for this insight. For more on Red Stick masculinity, see Saunt, A New Order of Things, esp. 266–67. 118. Kendall, Life of Andrew Jackson, 201.

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1. This vignette was compiled from Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, March 26, 1818, in LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 78, frame 117, National Archives; Philip E. Thomas to John C. Calhoun, February 16 and March 23, 1818, in W. Edwin Hemphill, ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, vol. 2, 1817–1818 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1963), 142, 206–7; Thomas L. McKenney to John C. Calhoun, April 15, 1818, Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott to Thomas McKenney, March 6, 1818, and Thomas McKenney to Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott, March 27, 1818 (copy), all in LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 78, frames 9072–77, National Archives; James L. McDonald to Thomas McKenney, August 9, 1819, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 86, frames 3921–22, National Archives, letter also printed in W. Edwin Hemphill, ed., The Papers of John C. Calhoun, vol. 3, 1818–1819 (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 1967), 226–30. Quote from Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott to Thomas McKenney, March 6, 1818. McKenney provided a somewhat different account of this exchange in his memoirs. Surviving documents, however, indicate that his narrative proves largely inaccurate. See Thomas Loraine McKenney, “Preservation of the Indians,” in Memoirs, Official and Personal: With Sketches of Travels Among the Northern and Southern Indians; Embracing a War Excursion, and Descriptions of Scenes along the Western Borders, vol. 2 (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846), 109–10. 2. Thomas McKenney to Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott, March 27, 1818. For details on Weston, see Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney: Architect of America’s Early Indian Policy, 1816–1830 (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1974), 21–22, 36. On McKenney’s status as a slaveholder, see ibid., 21. 3. McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 2:109. 4. Thomas McKenney to Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott, March 27, 1818. 5. See Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 40–41. 6. Ibid., 3–5. 7. Ibid., 4–5, 10; Edgar Bruce Wesley, Guarding the Frontier; a Study of Frontier Defense from 1815 to 1825 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1935), 36. 8. “James Madison’s appointment of Thomas Loraine McKenney to the Superintendent of Indian Trade,” April 12, 1816, no. 1926, Manuscripts Collection, Huntington Library. 9. For overviews of the factory system, see Ora Brooks Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 1795–1822 (Denver, CO: Sage Books, 1954); Larry A. McFarlane, “Economic Theories Significant in the Rise of the United States Indian Factory System, 1795–1817” (master’s thesis, University of Missouri, 1959); Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years: The Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 84–93; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 6–20; Wesley, Guarding the Frontier, 31–54. 10. Wesley, Guarding the Frontier, 33–34; McFarlane, “Economic Theories Significant in the Rise of the United States Indian Factory System, 1795–1817,” 86–101.

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11. William Vans Murray, House Journal, January 8, 1796, Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 1st Sess., 231–32. 12. John Swanwick, January 8, 1796, ibid., 230. 13. “Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1785,” “Treaty with the Chickasaw, 1786,” “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1786,” Treaty with the Wyandot, etc., 1795,” all in United States, Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, Treaties, comp. and ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 7–8, 13, 42–43. 14. The precise reasons for opening the first factories in Cherokee and Creek borderlands are unclear. See McFarlane, “Economic Theories Significant in the Rise of the United States Indian Factory System, 1795–1817,” 68. See also Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 86–87; Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 11. 15. On Southeast Indians’ growing geographic isolation, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Strug gle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 112–13. 16. See Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 9, map following page 14; Wesley, Guarding the Frontier, 36–40; Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 10–14. 17. Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, February 27, 1803, in Documents of United States Indian Policy, 3rd ed., ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 22–23. See also McFarlane, “Economic Theories Significant in the Rise of the United States Indian Factory System,” 102–23. 18. Daniel H. Usner Jr., “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier: Changing Economic Relations with Citizens and Slaves in the Mississippi Territory,” Journal of American History 72, no. 2 (1985): 300–301. 19. On factory products, see Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 12–14; Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 45–81. 20. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 10. On the goods Native people traded into factory posts, see ibid., 20; Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 132–35. 21. On the smell of curing skins, see Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 17–18. 22. Ibid., 9–10; Wesley, Guarding the Frontier, 40–41. On the fortification of trading posts, see Wesley, Guarding the Frontier, 46. 23. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 14; Wesley, Guarding the Frontier, 37–40. 24. Quote in Gary Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 196. For more on the reach and breadth of the federal factory system and U.S.-Indian trade relations more broadly during McKenney’s early years in office, see ibid., 190–203; Andrew C. Isenberg, “The Market Revolution in the Borderlands: George Champlin Sibley in Missouri and New Mexico, 1808–1826,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, no. 3 (2001): 445–65. 25. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 11–16; Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 26–152.

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26. Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 57; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 21. 27. Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 45–81; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 12; Wesley, Guarding the Frontier, 42. For one important example of the continued importance of wampum in the early nineteenth century among Haudenosaunee people, see Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, “Guiding Principles: Guswenta and the Debate over Formal Schooling at Buffalo Creek, 1800–1811,” in Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2014), 114–32. 28. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 12; John Johnson to [the Superintendent of Indian Trade], May 16, 1809, quoted in Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 68. 29. Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 45–55; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 13–14. 30. Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 82–94; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 14–16. 31. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 16–19; Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 135. 32. Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 138–43; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 19. 33. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 19. 34. Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 3; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 48. 35. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 20. See also Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 153–67. 36. Peake, A History of the United States Indian Factory System, 153–67; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 9. 37. McFarlane, “Economic Theories Significant in the Rise of the United States Indian Factory System,” 93. 38. Zephaniah Swift, January 8, 1796, House Journal, Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 1st Sess., 230. See also Robert Goodloe Harper’s response, February 1, 1796, ibid., 283. 39. Wesley, Guarding the Frontier, 37; Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 87; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 8. 40. McFarlane, “Economic Theories Significant in the Rise of the United States Indian Factory System, 1795–1817,” 120. Early factory advocate William Vans Murray likewise saw the factory system as a temporary solution to a problem that would remedy itself as U.S. private commerce grew: “This great company can afford to pay this price for the perpetuity of this trade and influence. . . . [I]n a few years after the competition has ceased, the Government may then withdraw its agency, and leave it to private capitals, to which the field will then have been rendered easy.” William Vans Murray, January 8, 1796, 232.

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41. Thomas Jefferson to William Henry Harrison, February 27, 1803. 42. McFarlane, “Economic Theories Significant in the Rise of the United States Indian Factory System, 1795–1817,” 123. 43. James Madison, President’s Annual Message, December 3, 1816, House Journal, Annals of Congress, 14th Cong., 2nd Sess., 13. 44. “Report of the Secretary for the Department of War,” March 13, 1816, Senate Journal, Annals of Congress, 14th Cong., 1st Sess., 195–96, emphasis mine. 45. Quoted in Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, vol. 1 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 148, also quoted in Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 24. 46. Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, May 9, 1818, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 78, frame 206, National Archives, emphasis in original. 47. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2007), 326. See also, Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 138. 48. As Francis Paul Prucha writes, “It is impossible to detail the full operation of the annual $15,000 authorized by the intercourse acts [for Indian education], for the Treasury Department kept no special account under that heading, and when the Senate in 1822 asked for information of the annual disposition of the fund, little was forthcoming from either the War Department or the Treasury. Secretary of War Calhoun, however, reported that he thought the principal expenditure had been made through the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw agents for spinning wheels, looms, agricultural implements, and domestic animals.” Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, 217. 49. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 32–35. 50. Ibid., 35. 51. Quoted in ibid., 33–34. 52. Ibid., 33–35 53. “Perhaps,” historian Francis Paul Prucha speculates, the bill “departed too much from the basic principle of the factory system, which specified that no profits were to be made out of the government trade with the Indians.” Prucha, The Great Father, 1:150. See also Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 32–39. 54. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 35–41. 55. Ibid., 34. 56. Thomas McKenney to Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott, March 27, 1818. 57. James L. McDonald to Thomas Loraine McKenney, August 9, 1819. 58. Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott to Thomas Loraine McKenney, March 6, 1818. 59. Thomas McKenney to Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott, March 27, 1818, emphasis in original. 60. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 41.

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61. Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, March 26, 1818; Philip E. Thomas to John C. Calhoun, February 16, 1818; Philip E. Thomas to John C. Calhoun, March 23, 1818. 62. On McKenney’s hope that his missionary acquaintances would petition support for his bill, see Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 39. 63. For overviews of Christian evangelism following the Second Great Awakening, see Linford D. Fisher, The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. 200, 210; John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2014), 62, 216–17. For missionary activity after the War of 1812, see Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., Salvation and the Savage: An Analysis of Protestant Missions and American Indian Response, 1787–1862 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1965), 1–2; Prucha, The Great Father, 1:145; Henry Warner Bowden, American Indians and Christian Missions: Studies in Cultural Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. 164–67; Matthew Dennis, Seneca Possessed: Indians, Witchcraft, and Power in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 142–47. 64. D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 339. 65. Ibid.; Berkhofer Jr., Salvation and the Savage, 2. 66. Berkhofer Jr., Salvation and the Savage, 1–2. 67. Prucha, The Great Father, 1:145; Emily Conroy-Krutz, “Dissenters from the Mainstream: The National and International Dimensions of Evangelical Reform,” in The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent, ed. Andrew Shankman (New York: Routledge, 2014), esp. 375. 68. “Copy of a letter from C. Kingsbury to the Secretary of War,” May 2, 1816, William H. Crawford to Rev. Cyrus Kingsbury, May 14, 1816, both in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Indian Aff airs, vol. 2, 1815–1827 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 477–78. 69. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 32; Ronald Rayman, “Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System of Instruction and American Indian Education, 1815–1838,” History of Education Quarterly 21, no. 4 (December 1981): 398. 70. Elias Cornelius, The Little Osage Captive: An Authentic Narrative (Boston: Samuel T. Armstrong and Crocker & Brewster, 1822), 54. See also Rayman, “Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System of Instruction and American Indian Education,” 398–401. 71. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 32–34, 38; Patricia Crain, “Children of Media, Children as Media: Optical Telegraphs, Indian Pupils, and Joseph Lancaster’s System for Cultural Replication,” in New Media, 1740–1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 61–90; Prucha, The Great

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Father, 1:147–49; Rayman, “Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System of Instruction and American Indian Education,” 395–409. 72. Crain, “Children of Media, Children as Media,” 62. 73. Ibid., 63, 65. 74. Ibid., 63, 66, 70. 75. Ibid., 61–89; Rayman, “Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System of Instruction and American Indian Education,” esp. 396–97. 76. Rayman, “Joseph Lancaster’s Monitorial System of Instruction and American Indian Education,” 398–401. 77. Cornelius, The Little Osage Captive, 19; Elias Cornelius, “ ‘The Mother of the Little Osage Captive,’ Extract of a Letter from Rev. E. Cornelius, dated Natchez, Dec. 24, 1817,” The Panoplist, and Missionary Herald 14 (February 1818): 95. See also “Journal of the Mission” at Brainerd, July 28, 1818, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.1, Cherokee Mission, microfilm A467, reel 737, frame 33, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 78. Cornelius, The Little Osage Captive, 36–37. 79. Ibid., 47. See also “Journal of the Mission” at Brainerd, December 1, 1819, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.1, Cherokee Mission, microfilm A467, reel 737, frame 51, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 80. At times, when speaking of this “ family,” these missionaries referred solely to those U.S. whites on missions in Indian territories. More often, however, they drew upon the concept of the “mission family” as a means to signify their incorporation of Indian children into the mission community. For example, they happily wrote in the Brainerd mission journal in 1818, a year after Brainerd was founded, “Within three days we have had 5 scholars added to our family.” “Journal of the Mission” at Brainerd, July 21, 1817, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.1, Cherokee Mission, microfi lm A467, reel 737, frame 7, Houghton Library, Harvard University. When, in 1820, the U.S. agent to the Cherokees brought a Creek child to Brainerd, adding to the Cherokee and Osage students already residing there, Brainerd missionaries recorded, “Thus, in the good providence of God, are collected in this one family the children of three different tribes.” “Journal of the Mission” at Brainerd, January 30, 1820, ibid., frames 103–4. 81. Thomas Loraine McKenney to John C. Calhoun, July 13, 1818, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 78, frame 60, National Archives. 82. Cornelius, The Little Osage Captive, 26–32. 83. Cornelius, “ ‘The Mother of the Little Osage Captive,’ ” 95. 84. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 36. 85. Ibid., 41. 86. Ibid., 42. 87. Prucha, The Great Father, 1:148–51; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 42–43.

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88. McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 2:111. 89. Ibid., 2:114–15. 90. For McKenney’s later account of McDonald’s departure, see ibid. 91. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 122, 128, emphases in original. 92. Referring to his work transcribing documents in the Office of Indian Trade, McDonald reported to McKenney that he found that “[w]riting is a most irksome employment to me.” James L. McDonald to Thomas McKenney, August 9, 1819, 228. See also Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, August 10, 1819, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 86, frames 3918–20; McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 2:111. 93. James L. McDonald to Thomas McKenney, August 9, 1819, 228. 94. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 25, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 326–330, National Archives. 95. James L. McDonald to Thomas McKenney, August 9, 1819, 229. 96. Ibid. 97. Thomas McKenney to Isaac Tyson and Andrew Ellicott, March 27, 1818. 98. Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, April 15, 1818. 99. McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 2:110. 100. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 200–201. 101. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 81–90; Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008), 38, 81, 126–27; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 5, 19, 113–14. 102. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 45. 103. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 81. 104. Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early Amer ica (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 53, 80–87, quote from 80; Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 68–70; Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 78. 105. Sarah Deer, The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 48, 69–71. 106. Thomas Loraine McKenney, Sketches of a Tour to the Lakes, of the Character and Customs of the Chippeway Indians, and of Incidents Connected with the Treaty of Fond Du Lac (Baltimore, MD: F. Lucas Jr., 1827), 97–98, emphases in original.

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107. Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, November 20, 1820, LRSW, microfilm 221, roll 90, frame 111, National Archives; James McDonald to Silas Dinsmoor, November 6, 1820, SDP. 108. Prucha, The Great Father, 1:152. 109. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 58–70. 110. Prucha, The Great Father, 1:164; Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 92–95. 111. Viola, Th omas L. McKenney, 202. For McKenney’s extensive articulation of his support of Indian removal, see “Preservation of the Indians,” in McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 2:106–36. 112. Thomas McKenney to Major James Corcoran, December 22, 1824, LSOIA, microfilm 221, roll 1, frame 272, National Archives. 113. Thomas McKenney to Dougherty Colbert, April 3, 1827, LSOIA, microfilm 221, roll 4, frame 3, National Archives. 114. Thomas McKenney to Lee Compere, March 29, 1828, LRSW, microfilm 21, roll 4, frame 377, National Archives; Thomas Loraine McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal: With Sketches of Travels Among the Northern and Southern Indians; Embracing a War Excursion, and Descriptions of Scenes Along the Western Borders, vol. 1 (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846), 188. 115. Thomas McKenney to the Acting Secretary of War, October 4 and 7, 1830, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 774, frames 547–56, National Archives. 116. McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 1:188. 117. Ibid. 118. Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro- Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), esp. 100–14; Tiya Miles, The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 175–76. 119. Thomas McKenney to Lee Compere, January 2, 1828, LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 4, frame 221–22, National Archives, emphasis in original. 120. Ibid. 121. “From The President U. States on the subject of schooling two Creek boys . . . encloses . . . a request of William Barnard and Lee Compere,” October 9, 1830, James McVain to D. P. G. Randolph, October 11, 1830, Thomas McKenney to the Acting Secretary of War, October 7, 1830, and John Crowell to John Henry Eaton, October 30, 1830, all in LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 774, frames 599–601, 561–64, 550–56, 317–18, National Archives. See also Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, 233–35.

7.

Adoption and Diplomacy

1. James McDonald to Silas Dinsmoor, November 6, 1820, SDP. 2. See, for example, the works in Margaret Connell Szasz, ed., Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994).

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3. John McLean’s father purchased lands from John Cleve Symmes just outside the bounds of what would become known as the Symmes—or the Miami—Purchase. Francis P. Weisenburger, The Life of John McLean: A Politician on the United States Supreme Court (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 4. 4. Hazel Spencer Phillips, John McLean (Lebanon, OH: Warren County Historical Society, n.d.); Weisenburger, The Life of John McLean, 1–6. 5. Livingston, Biographical Sketches of Distinguished American Lawyers, 35–36; Phillips, John McLean; Weisenburger, The Life of John McLean, 9–23. 6. Fred Compton, Lebanon (Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2011). 7. James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, October 13, 1823, in The Papers of John C. Calhoun, ed. W. Edwin Hemphill, vol. 8, 1823–1824 (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 1979), 309–10. 8. Ibid. 9. James L. McDonald to Thomas McKenney, January 31, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 314–17, National Archives. 10. See Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), esp. 83–8. For a powerful reading of the gendered nature of settler panics over Indian violence during the War of 1812, see Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 118–67. 11. See Eustace, 1812, 120. 12. See Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), esp. 3; Theda Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 83–90. 13. For an analysis of the ways in which financial competition fueled anti-Indian rhetoric during this time, see Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 20010), esp. 92–132. For an empirical accounting of Southeast Indian successes in the cotton economy, see Gilbert C. Fite, “Development of the Cotton Industry by the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory,” Journal of Southern History 15, no. 3 (August 1949): 342–53. 14. For extended coverage of these marriages and the controversies that surrounded them, see John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2014), 143–95. See also Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, 85–86. 15. Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro- Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 86, 111. 16. Cited in Demos, The Heathen School, 154, emphasis in original. 17. James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, October 13, 1823. 18. My writing here draws upon the widely used saying in Chicanx movements that Mexican Americans did not cross the border, but the border crossed them. See, for

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example, Josue David Cisneros, The Border Crossed Us: Rhetorics of Border, Citizenship, and Latina/o Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013). For a broader theoretical framing of settler colonialism and its aims to make Indian people minorities within their homelands, see Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409. 19. Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 50; Eron O. Rowland, History of Hinds County Mississippi, 1821–1922 (Jackson: Mississippi Historical Society, 1922), 5, 10–11. 20. Rowland, History of Hinds County Mississippi, 10–11; William Haley, “History of Copiah: Recollections of an Old Citizen By W. H. (Attributed to William Haley) C. 1876, Edited & Reprinted by Paul Cartwright,” Mississippi Democrat, 2000, Special Collections, University of Mississippi Archives. 21. Rowland, History of Hinds County Mississippi, 11, 14. 22. On the density of the Pearl River settlement, see Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 29–30. 23. Rowland, History of Hinds County Mississippi, 7; Robert B. Ferguson, “Treaties between the United States and the Choctaw Nation,” in The Choctaw Before Removal, ed. Caroline Keller Reeves (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), 218–19. On the emergence of official removal policies, see Ronald R. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 10–11. 24. “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1820,” in United States, Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, Treaties, comp. and ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), esp. 192; James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal, Indians of the Southeast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 90. 25. “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1820,” 193. 26. Thomas McKenney to John Calhoun, January 22, 1825, LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 1, frame 317, National Archives; Thomas McKenney to William Ward, September 17, 1825, LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 2, frame 157, National Archives. 27. Thomas McKenney to William Ward, September 17, 1825. For more on the petitions not being initially granted, see Choctaw Delegation, November 22, 1824, Treaties, microfilm T494, roll 1, frame 612, National Archives. 28. On Hamilton’s marriage status, see Molly Rhodes’s claim, Joseph E. Penton’s Affidavit, September 3, 1833, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Records Concerning Indian Land Reserves, Reserve File A, ca. 1825–1908, box 15, folder 456, National Archives; for Jones’s age, see James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, September 30, 1826, LROIA, microfi lm 234, roll 773, frames 359–66, National Archives. 29. See Choctaw Delegation, November 22, 1824, frame 612; Thomas McKenney to John Calhoun, January 22, 1825.

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30. James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, November 9, 1824, James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, July 10, 1824, both in LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 89–90, 95–96, National Archives. 31. James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, July 10, 1824, frames 95–97. 32. Choctaw Delegation, November 22, 1824, frame 612; Thomas McKenney to John Calhoun, January 22, 1825, frame 317. For the long term battles that would later ensue over Molly McDonald’s reserve, see Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Records Concerning Indian Land Reserves, Reserve File A, ca. 1825–1908, box 15, folder 456, National Archives. 33. James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, July 10, 1824. For Thomas McKenney’s response, see Thomas McKenney to James McDonald, August 5, 1824, LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 1, frame 165, National Archives. 34. “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1820,” Treaty with the Choctaw, 1825,” in United States, Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, 2:193, 212; David Folsom and James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, December 1, 1824, Treaties, microfilm T494, roll 1, frame 616, National Archives. See also Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 91; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 47–48. 35. James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, October 13, 1823. 36. James McDonald to Silas Dinsmoor, July 12, 1824, SDP. 37. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, September 30, 1826, frames 362– 63; Czarina C. Conlan, “David Folsom,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 4, no. 4 (December 1926): 340–41; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 19; Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 31. 38. Sarah Tuttle and Massachusetts Sabbath School Society, Conversations on the Choctaw Mission, vol. 1 (Boston: Printed by T. R. Marvin, for the Massachusetts Sabbath School Union, 1830), 29; Conlan, “David Folsom,” 344. In his report to John C. Calhoun in October 1823, Cyrus Kingsbury wrote, “One youth the school at Elliot & two from Mayhew—have been selected, & sent to the Foreign Mission School at Cornwall, Connecticut,” to be educated “at the expense of the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions.” Report of Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun, October 1823, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.4, Choctaw Mission, microfilm A467, reel 755, frames 334–35, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 39. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 30–38; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 83. 40. Cyrus Kingsbury to the War Department, July 6, 1825, in Joe R. Goss, The Choctaw Academy: Official Correspondence 1825–1841 (Conway, AR: Oldbuck Press, 1992), 5–6. On Folsom and McDonald’s collaborations before leaving for Washington, see Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun, September 30, 1824, in The Papers

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of John C. Calhoun, ed. W. Edwin Hemphill, vol. 9, 1824–1825 (Charleston: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 332–33. As Kingsbury wrote about the impending arrival of the Choctaw dele gation in which both McDonald and Folsom took part, “I rejoice that a dele gation . . . are on their way to Washington. You will have an opportunity of conferring with them, particularly with Capt. [David] Folsom & your old Pupil, Mr. [James L.] McDonald, relative to the Schools.” On McDonald’s shared vision with Kingsbury and Folsom for a national academy on Choctaw lands, see James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1826, LROIA, microfi lm 234, roll 169, frames 318–19, National Archives. 41. William Ward to the Office of Indian Affairs, September 23, 1824, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 136–37, National Archives. 42. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 86–90. 43. Ibid., 88; Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 90; W. David Baird, Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 5–7. 44. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 87–97; Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 209–12. On the relationship between centralized national governance and the protection of slaveholding property, see Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733– 1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially 164–185; Miles, Ties that Bind, 64–76. 45. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 89–91. 46. Ibid. 88, 91–2. 47. J. L. McDonald to John Calhoun, November 16, 1824, Treaties, microfi lm T494, roll 1, frames 621–23, National Archives. 48. David Folsom and J. L. McDonald on behalf of the delegation to John Calhoun, November 20, 1824, Choctaw Delegation, November 22, 1824, both in Treaties, microfilm T494, roll 1, frames 600–601, 607–9, National Archives; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 94. 49. Choctaw Delegation, November 22, 1824, frames 607–13. 50. Ibid., frame 613; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 94. 51. On Mushulatubbee and Cole’s interests in schooling outside of the nation, see Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 99. 52. Choctaw Delegation, November 22, 1824, frames 607–13. 53. John C. Calhoun to the Choctaw Delegation, November 19, 1824, John Calhoun to the Choctaw Delegation, November 27, 1824, both in LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 1, frame 236, 241–42, National Archives. 54. Thomas McKenney to James McDonald, November 27, 1824, LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 1, frame 242, National Archives.

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55. Thomas Loraine McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal: With Sketches of Travels Among the Northern and Southern Indians; Embracing a War Excursion, and Descriptions of Scenes Along the Western Borders, volume 2 (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846), 116. 56. Choctaw Delegation, November 30, 1824, Treaties, microfilm T494, roll 1, frames 618–20, National Archives. 57. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 25, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 326–27, National Archives. 58. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, December 17, 1830, box 1, folder 19, Peter Perkins Pitchlynn Collection, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Norman. 59. For more on the role of witchcraft within the Choctaw Nation, see O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 106–9. 60. James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, November 9, 1824. 61. David Folsom and James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, December 1, 1824, frame 617. 62. See, for example, Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 63. On slavery in Baltimore, see Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 64. Miles, Ties That Bind, 24. 65. David Folsom and James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, December 1, 1824, Treaties, microfilm T494, roll 1, frames 614–17, National Archives. 66. McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 116. 67. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, January 31, 1826, frame 316; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 95. 68. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 92. 69. John C. Calhoun to the Choctaw Delegation, December 28, 1824, in Hemphill, The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 9:465–66. For the controversy over the bar bill, see Thomas McKenney to James L. McDonald, June 16, 1825, Thomas McKenney to the Choctaw Chiefs, June 17, 1825, Thomas McKenney to Mr. Joshua Tennison, June 17, 1825, all in LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 2, frames 48–50, National Archives. 70. James McDonald to John C. Calhoun, January 20, 1825, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 178–82, National Archives, also published in Hemphill, The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 9:510–511; Choctaw Delegation to John C. Calhoun, January 14, 1825, Treaties, microfilm T494, roll 1, frames 586–88, National Archives; “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1825,” in United States, Indian Aff airs: Law and Treaties, 2:211–14. For additional information on reserves, see Thomas McKenney to James McDonald [and Richard Mentor Johnson, encl.], March 15, 1826, LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 2, frame 469, National Archives.

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71. Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, January 29, 1825, Thomas McKenney to John C. Calhoun, February 23, 1825, Thomas McKenney to William Ward, February 23, 1825, all in LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 1, frames 330, 371–72, National Archives. 72. Robert Cole and Daniel McCurtain, n.d., Treaties, microfilm T494, roll 1, frame 581, National Archives; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 92.

8.

Choctaw Schooling

1. For McDonald’s departure, see James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, June 17, 1825, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 183–85, National Archives. Also Thomas McKenney to James McDonald, June 16, 1825, Thomas McKenney to the Choctaw Chiefs, June 17, 1825, both in LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 2, frame 48, National Archives. 2. Colonel Ward to James Barbour, June 26, 1825, in Joe R. Goss, The Choctaw Academy: Official Correspondence 1825–1841 (Conway, AR: Oldbuck Press, 1992), 4. See also Clara Sue Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 1818–1918 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 100–101; James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 94. 3. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 320–25, National Archives. 4. Barbara Krauthamer argues, “In Choctaw and Chickasaw communities and across the southern states, the ideologies of racial hierarchy that buttressed chattel slavery were intertwined with and inseparable from understandings of gender. As the definition of property and racial identity evolved in the early nineteenth century, so, too, did understandings of gender.” Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 32–33. See also Claudio Saunt et al., “Rethinking Race and Culture in the Early South,” Ethnohistory 53, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 402–3. 5. Angie Debo, The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1934), 45. 6. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 86; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 28, 33, 38. 7. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 89. 8. On the location of the mission, see Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun, “Copy of the First Annual Report of the Mission School at Elliot,” November 18, 1819, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.4, Choctaw Mission, microfilm A467, reel 755, frame 294, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 9. For Choctaw settlement patterns, see Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 6; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 29–30.

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10. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 29–30; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 83. 11. “Journal of the Mission at Elliot, Choctaw Nation,” April 15, 1829, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.4, Choctaw Mission, microfilm A467, reel 755, frame 7, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 33. 12. “Extracts from the Journal of the Brethren at Elliot, 1819,” October 25, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.4, Choctaw Mission, microfi lm A467, reel 755, frame 24, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun, “Copy of the First Annual Report of the Mission School at Elliot,” November 18, 1819, esp. frame 296. 13. Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun, December 21, 1820, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.4, Choctaw Mission, microfilm A467, reel 755, frames 302–4, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun, “Copy of the First Annual Report of the Mission School at Elliot,” November 18, 1819. In 1820 Kingsbury told John C. Calhoun of the “liberality of the Choctaws in providing for the education of their children.” Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun, December 21, 1820, frame 304. 14. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 83; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 42. 15. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 39–42, 86. 16. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 84; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 43, 48–49. 17. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 56–58, 80. 18. Ibid., 64. 19. “Journal of the Mission at Mayhew,” June 30, 1822, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.4, Choctaw Mission, microfilm A467, reel 755, frame 234, Houghton Library, Harvard University. According to the American Board’s newsletter, the chief visited the school the ensuing fall, telling all its scholars, “I hope I shall yet live to see my council filled with the boys who are now in school and that you will know more than we know, and do much better than we do.” Quoted in Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 86. 20. Report of Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun, October 1823, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.4, Choctaw Mission, microfilm A467, reel 755, frame 333, Houghton Library, Harvard University; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 65. 21. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 29–30; Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 49. 22. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 29–32. 23. Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 64, 66–68; Cyrus Kingsbury (and others) to Samuel Worcester, September 21, 1819, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.4, Choctaw Mission, microfilm A 467, roll 755, frame 168, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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24. Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 55, 59. 25. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, September 30, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 773, frames 362–63, National Archives. 26. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 59–60. 27. Quote from “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1830,” United States, Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, Treaties, comp. and ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 317. 28. For more on Mushulatubbee’s property and his investments in chattel slavery, see Secretary of War Lewis Cass to Wm. S. Colquhoun, September 20, 1833, in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Public Lands, vol. 7, 1834–1835 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1860), 14. See also Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 80; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 73–74, 80–81, 88; Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 42. 29. On the presence of racial slavery in Mushulatubbee’s district, see Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 40. Historian Clara Sue Kidwell argues, “The first American Board venture into an authentic Choctaw community was at Mushulatubbee’s home in the summer of 1824.” While Kidwell’s framing of “authenticity” raises thorny questions concerning identity and belonging, she highlights the fact that the school was located among communities who held some U.S. cultural values—not to mention U.S. settlers—at a greater distance. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries, 65. 30. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 31; H. B. Cushman, History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians (New York: Russell & Russell, 1972), 396. 31. Report of Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun (Copy), January 1823, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.4, Choctaw Mission, microfilm A 467, reel 755, frame 320, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 32. Kingsbury wrote to Calhoun in 1820 of measles, whooping cough, and fever at Elliot mission in the Western District. Report of Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun, October 1823, 329. 33. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 55. 34. Ibid. 35. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 52; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 37, 44. 36. Report of Cyrus Kingsbury to John C. Calhoun (Copy), January 1823; Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 54. 37. Quoted in Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 65. 38. Ibid., 54–55. 39. See ibid., 55, 66 (quote on 66); Thomas McKenney to Choctaw Chiefs, October 21, 1825, in Goss, The Choctaw Academy, 15–16.

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40. Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 30. 41. See Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 34. 42. Quoted in Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 95; Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 34. 43. Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 52. 44. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 89. On the economic opportunities that came with mission stations more generally, see Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 107. 45. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 89–95. 46. O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 90; Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 30–31. 47. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 65–66. 48. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 94. Indian Agent William Ward would later declare that Mushulatubbee wanted his boy “to learn to talk English and quit Choctaw.” William Ward to Thomas Henderson, December 16, 1825, Folder 1, THP. 49. Mushulatubbee to John Eaton, September 28, 1829, Choctaw Emigration 1826–1830, microfilm 234, roll 185, frame 56, National Archives. 50. Mushulatubbee and others to Andrew Jackson, December 23, 1830, in Daniel Feller, Thomas Coens, and Laura-Eve Moss, eds., The Papers of Andrew Jackson, vol. 8, 1830 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2010), 704. 51. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 67. 52. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 93. 53. According to Kingsbury, “the chief [gave] permission to his warriors to buy whiskey, get drunk, fight and kill, for one month” after his return from the federal capital. Cyrus Kingsbury to Thomas McKenney, September 28, 1825, in Goss, Th e Choctaw Academy, 13. On Mushulatubbee’s distribution of annuities, see James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1826; Thomas McKenney to William Ward, November 3, 1825, LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 2, frame 221, National Archives; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 93. On Folsom’s assertion of Mushulatubbee’s drinking, see Duane Champagne, Social Order and Political Change: Constitutional Governments among the Cherokee, the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, and the Creek (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 150. William Ward argued, however, that men such as Kingsbury and Folsom got it wrong. “There has been very little drinking in the nation this year, and nothing like a charge against Mingo [Mushulatubbee] for his Order of last year was attempted to be made.” Ward blamed the influx of whiskey on “half breeds,” some of whom who had “an education at Mission Schools in and out of the nation.” William Ward to Secretary of War James Barbour, April 15, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 343–45, National Archives.

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54. Cyrus Kingsbury to Thomas McKenney, September 28, 1825, 12–13. 55. Ibid., 13. 56. Jno. Colmen, Sampson Muncrief, John Jones, Joseph Riddle, Isaac Gaunee, Samuel Jones, Jeremiah Gardner, and John Walker to Cyrus Kingsbury, June 27, 1825, in Goss, The Choctaw Academy, 7. 57. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Wilson, December 20, 1820, Richard Mentor Johnson, Correspondence, 1808–1829, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky; Ella Wells Drake, “Choctaw Academy: Richard M. Johnson and the Business of Indian Education,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 91 (Summer 1993): 262–66. 58. Cyrus Kingsbury to Thomas McKenney, September 28, 1825, 13, emphasis in original. 59. Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 151. 60. Drake, “Choctaw Academy,” 267–68. 61. Thomas McKenney to Secretary of War, December 9, 1825, William Staughton to Secretary of War, December 8, 1825, both in Goss, The Choctaw Academy, 20–21, 21–23. 62. William Staughton to Secretary of War, December 8, 1825, 21–23; R. M. Johnson to Thomas McKenney, October 28, 1825, William Ward to Thomas McKenney, October 22, 1825, both in Goss, The Choctaw Academy, 18–19; James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1826. On Johnson’s reputation for killing Tecumseh, see Meyer, The Life and Times of Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 129–35. 63. On McDonald’s continued work to secure reserves for his mother as well as for Greenwood Leflore, George Turnbull, and Alexander McRae, see Thomas McKenney to James McDonald, January 12, 1826, Thomas McKenney to James McDonald, March 15, 1826, both in LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 2, frames 363, 469, National Archives. Not all the women associated with these plots benefited from the reservation system. Sylva Harris, Greenwood Leflore’s sister, was denied a reserve because it was given to her brother. 64. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, January 31, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 314–17, National Archives. 65. Ibid. On the terse nature of McKenney’s correspondence with McDonald, see James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 25, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 326–330, National Archives. 66. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1826, frames 318–19. For more on district chiefs, see Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 88, 95. 67. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1826, frames 320–25. 68. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, January 31, 1826, frame 315. 69. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1826, frames 318–19. 70. Ibid., frames 320–25, emphasis in original.

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71. Ibid., frame 324. 72. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 25, 1826, frames 326–28. 73. Ibid., frames 326–30. 74. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, April 27, 1826, frames 318–19. See also Richard Mentor Johnson to John T. Johnson, December 31, 1825, folder 1, THP. 75. Thomas McKenney to Secretary of War, October 17, 1827, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 420–27, National Archives; William Ward to Secretary of War James Barbour, April 15, 1826. See also Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 95; Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 150–51; Mary Elizabeth Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi 1830–1860 (1961; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 26. For Mushulatubbee’s version of these events, see Mushul[a]tubbee to John Henry Eaton, December 30, 1830, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 472–74, National Archives. Mushulatubbee frames his overthrow in light of his “arrangement” with the Secretary of War to pay trade debts with licensed traders. 76. Peter Perkins Pitchlynn, Marcia Haag, and Henry J. Willis, A Gathering of Statesmen: Records of the Choctaw Council Meetings, 1826–1828 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 51. 77. Quoted in Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 112. See also Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 95–97. 78. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 111. See also Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 96–97; Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 151–52. 79. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 111–12; Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 152; Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks, 26. 80. Champagne, Social Order and Political Change, 152. 81. Pitchlynn, Haag, and Willis, A Gathering of Statesmen, 100–101. 82. Ibid., 139–40. 83. Ibid., 140–43. 84. On free blacks in the Choctaw Nation, see Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 40. 85. Pitchlynn, Haag, and Willis, A Gathering of Statesmen, 145–46. 86. Ibid., 66. 87. Ibid., 101–3. 88. Kidwell, Choctaws and Missionaries in Mississippi, 113. 89. Ibid., 104. 90. William Ward to Thomas Henderson, December 16, 1825, folder 1, THP. 91. William Ward to Thomas Henderson, April 13, 1828, folder 4, THP. 92. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, September 30, 1826, frames 359–66; Richard Johnson to Secretary of War, August 20, 1826, in Goss, The Choctaw Academy, 32–33.

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93. General Tipton to Thomas McKenney, May 5, 1827, in Goss, The Choctaw Academy, 37. 94. Drake, “Choctaw Academy,” 267–68. 95. McKenney to Levi Colbert, March 17, 1828, LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 4, frame 340, National Archives. 96. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, n.d., folder 17, THP. 97. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, September 30, 1826, emphasis in original. Drake, “Choctaw Academy,” 267. 98. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, September 30, 1826, frames 363–65, emphasis in original. 99. Peter Pitchlynn to Secretary of War James Barbour, January 23, 1826, Peter Pitchlynn to Richard Mentor Johnson, October 5, 1826, both in LROIA, microfi lm 234, roll 773, frames 405–10, National Archives. 100. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, September 30, 1826, frames 359–66, emphasis in original. 101. Thomas Henderson to Peter B. Porter, August 1, 1828, Thomas Henderson to Secretary of War James Barbour “Report of the Choctaw Academy,” April 30, 1827, both in LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 773, frames 1009–15, 647–48, National Archives; Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, December 13, 1826, folder 2, THP. 102. On Johnson’s investments in cotton production, see Richard Mentor Johnson to Nicholas Biddle, April 26, 1838, MSS C J, Correspondence, 1830–1839, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky. 103. Charles Juzan to James Barbour, October 13, 1827, in Goss, The Choctaw Academy, 39–40. 104. Greenwood Leflore to James Barbour, June 27, 1827, in Goss, The Choctaw Academy, 39. 105. As McDonald declared, “I shall leave this country shortly, and will never return to it unless my opinions and feelings undergo a radical change.” James McDonald to Samuel S. Hamilton, July 14, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 773, frames 348–49, National Archives. 106. Thomas McKenney to James McDonald, May 30, 1826, LSOIA, microfilm 21, roll 3, frame 114, National Archives; Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, December 13 and 21, 1826, folder 2, THP. See also James McDonald to Alexander McKee, January 8, 1827, Peter Pitchlynn Papers, folder 39, 1827–1A, 4026.324, Gilcrease Museum, University of Tulsa; James McDonald to Samuel S. Hamilton, July 25, 1826, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 773, frames 351–53, National Archives. On McDonald’s return to Ohio to study the law, see James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, March 3, 1827, Peter P. Pitchlynn Papers, folder 41, 4026.325, and James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, May 5, 1827, Peter P. Pitchlynn Papers, folder 43, 4026.327, both in Gilcrease Museum, University of Tulsa.

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107. James McDonald to Thomas McKenney, “Report of the state of the [C]hoctaw school in Kentucky,” January 20, 1827, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 773, frames 789–96, National Archives. See also James McDonald to Alexander McKee, January 8, 1827; Richard Mentor Johnson to William Ward, April 28, 1828, folder 4, THP. 108. Peter Pitchlynn to Thomas Henderson, September 13, 1828, R. M. Johnson to David Folsom, September 12, 1828, both in LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 505–15, 518–27, National Archives. 109. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, December 12, 16, and 17, 1825, all in folder 1, THP; Drake, “Choctaw Academy,” esp. 271–77. 110. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, January 9, 1828, folder 4, THP. See also Drake, “Choctaw Academy,” 279–80. On Henderson’s implementation of the plan, see Thomas Henderson to Peter B. Porter, August 1, 1825, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 773, frames 1010–11, National Archives. 111. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, March 8, 1832, folder 7, THP. 112. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, December 17, 1825, folder 1, THP. 113. Statement by David Thomson, B. S. Chambers, E. P. Johnson, William Johnson, and William Liggett (copy), September 16, 1828, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 773, frames 1017–18, National Archives. 114. Ibid., frame 1018. 115. Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic Books, 2016), 179–82; Jamestown Journal (Jamestown, NY), August 5, 1835. 116. On Adaline and Imogene’s education, see Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, December 2, 8, and 31, 1825, all in folder 1, THP; Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, January 13, 1826, folder 2, THP; Drake, “Choctaw Academy,” 271; Guyatt, Bind Us Apart, 160–61, 179–82. 117. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, December 2, 1825. On Imogene’s teaching children to draw, see Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, January 13, 1826. 118. On Chinn’s house, see Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, December 17 and 31, 1825, Folder 1, THP. 119. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, December 8 and 31, 1825, and January 13, 1826. 120. For an extended analysis of the negotiations enslaved women had to make concerning sexual relations with enslavers, see Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), esp. 313–16, 353–55. On Chinn’s work in medical care at the Choctaw Academy, see Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, December 9, 1825, Folder 1, THP.

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121. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, December 31, 1825. 122. With respect to Johnson’s potential willingness to personally inflict violence on those he enslaved, as Henderson commented in response to Pitchlynn’s accusations, “The Col has . . . negroes who work out and are some times dirty, and . . . I have heard of the Co. whiping [sic] some very severely for insolence to the students.” Thomas Henderson to Col. Leflore, September 13, 1828, in LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 508–15, National Archives. 123. R. M. Johnson to David Folsom, September 12, 1828, emphasis mine. 124. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, March 24, 1830, folder 6, THP. 125. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, May 4, 1834, folder 9, THP. 126. Guyatt, Bind Us Apart, 182, 183; “Robbery of Col. Johnson,” New-York Spectator, July 16, 1835. 127. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, May 4, 1834. 128. Ibid. 129. Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro- Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 52–55. 130. Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 144–45; Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 225–26. Drawing on Adair, Block notes that even Adair indicated that he noted the existence of rape only in (in Block’s words) an “exceptional case.” For more on Romans’s economic exploits, see Kathryn E. Holland Braund, “Bernard Romans: His Life and Works,” in A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, by Bernard Romans, ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 5. 131. Romans, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, 139; James Adair, The History of the American Indians, ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011), 182. See also Kathryn E. Holland Braund, “Romans’s History as a Source for Understanding the Eighteenth-Century South,” in Romans, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, esp. 42, 62. 132. As ethnohistorian Kathryn Braund points out, some of Romans’s information concerning Choctaw and Chickasaw people came from discussions with “local deerskin traders and others regarding their customs.” Braund, “Bernard Romans,” 7. For Adair’s account of rape within the Choctaw Nation, see Adair, The History of the American Indians, 182. 133. Pitchlynn, Haag, and Willis, A Gathering of Statesmen, 80. 134. Tiya Miles makes a similar observation with respect to the Cherokee Constitution. See Miles, Ties That Bind, 54. 135. For an extended discussion of consent and how the law prevented enslaved black women from claiming legal rights over their own bodies, see Saidiya V. Hartman,

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Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth- Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 80–81. 136. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, March 1, 1830, folder 6, THP. 137. Ibid. 138. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, March 24, 1830. 139. Richard Mentor Johnson to Thomas Henderson, February 14, 1831, folder 6, THP. 140. Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 16. 141. George Vashon to Richard Mentor Johnson, January 23, 1834, folder 9, THP; Drake, “Choctaw Academy,” 292–97. 142. W. David Baird, Peter Pitchlynn: Chief of the Choctaws (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972), 57–58; Drake, “Choctaw Academy,” 293–94. 143. As author Ella Wells Drake points out, Pierre Juzan, Peter Folsom, George W. Harkins, Brazil Leflore, and Sam Garland became “nineteenth-century Choctaw leaders.” All of these young men hailed from elite slaveholding families and attended Choctaw Academy. Drake, “Choctaw Academy,” 296. 144. Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters, 62, 80, 128, 132. 145. See Jeffrey Fortney’s work on Robert Jones, tentatively titled Robert M. Jones: A Choctaw “Millionaire” in the American South, 1808–1873 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, forthcoming). 146. Harmon, Rich Indians, esp. 123–25.

9.

Adoption and the Politics of Indian Removal

1. William Clark, Thomas Hinds, John Coffee, “Refusal of the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Cede Their Lands in Mississippi,” communicated to the Senate, January 15, 1827, in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Indian Aff airs, vol. 2, 1815–1827 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832), esp. 708–17. See also James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: Th e Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 97. 2. William Clark, Thomas Hinds, and John Coffee to the Choctaw Nation, November 10, 1826, in Clark, Hinds, and Coffee, “Refusal of the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Cede Their Lands in Mississippi,” 710. 3. Selectmen, acting as commissioners on the part of the Choctaw Council [read by James McDonald] to Generals William Clark, Thomas Hinds, and John Coffee, November 11, 1826, in Clark, Hinds, and Coffee, “Refusal of the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Cede Their Lands in Mississippi,” 710–11, emphasis in original. 4. Selectmen, Acting as Commissioners on the part of the Choctaw Council to Generals William Clark, Thomas Hinds, and John Coffee, November 15, 1826, in Clark, Hinds, and Coffee, “Refusal of the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Cede Their Lands in Mississippi,” 715.

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5. Laurence M. Hauptman, Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), esp. 1–5; Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 145. 6. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 73–96. 7. James Taylor Carson, “State Rights and Indian Removal in Mississippi, 1817– 1835,” Journal of Mississippi History 57 (1995): 27–28; Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, esp. 145–47. 8. John Blair, March 24, 1830, in “Buffalo and New Orleans Road,” House Journal, Register of Debates in Congress, 21st Cong., 1st sess. (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1830), 656. See also D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 339; Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, 147. 9. As Secretary of War Peter B. Porter asserted, Southeast Indians were “actually embosomed within the organized and settled parts of our States and Territories.” P. B. Porter, “Annual Report of the Secretary of War to the President of the United States,” Cherokee Phoenix (New Echota, GA), January 7, 1829. 10. For one source on Southeast Indian population numbers at this time, see John Woods, February 19, 1828, in House Journal, Register of Debates in Congress, 20th Cong. 1st Sess., part 2 of vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1828), 1550. 11. Andrew Jackson to Secretary William Crawford, June 10, 1816, in Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, ed. John Spencer Bassett, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institutions, 1926), 244. 12. Clark, Hinds, and Coffee, “Refusal of the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Cede Their Lands in Mississippi,” 717. 13. William Clark, Thomas Hinds, and John Coffee to Secretary of War James Barbour, November 19, 1826, in Clark, Hinds, and Coffee, “Refusal of the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Cede Their Lands in Mississippi,” 709. 14. Selectmen, acting as commissioners on the part of the Choctaw Council [read by James McDonald] to Generals William Clark, Thomas Hinds, and John Coffee, November 11, 1826, in Clark, Hinds, and Coffee, “Refusal of the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Cede Their Lands in Mississippi,” 710. 15. Clark, Hinds, and Coffee, “Refusal of the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Cede Their Lands in Mississippi,” 714, emphasis mine. 16. Andrew Jackson to the President (James Monroe), March 4, 1817, in Bassett, Correspondence of Andrew Jackson, 2:279–80. 17. Andrew Jackson to Secretary William Crawford, June 10, 1816, 244. 18. Ibid. As Jackson would argue in his 1829 State of the Union Address to Congress, “A portion . . . of the Southern tribes, having mingled much with the whites

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and made some progress in the arts of civilized life, have lately attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama.” Andrew Jackson, Message from the President of the United States in Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of the First Session of the Twenty-First Congress, December 8, 1829 (Washington, DC: Duff Green, 1829). See also Theda Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 70–103. 19. Andrew Jackson to Secretary William Crawford, June 10, 1816, 244. 20. William Clark, Thomas Hinds, and John Coffee to Secretary of War James Barbour, November 19, 1826; see also Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, esp. 82–83. 21. Carson, “State Rights and Indian Removal in Mississippi, 1817–1835,” 29–30. 22. Socrates, “On ‘the Report of the Joint Committee on the state of the Republic,’ in the Legislature of Georgia, on the subject of the Cherokee Lands; purporting to prove the absolute jurisdictional right of the said state of the same,” in Cherokee Phoenix, February 28, 1828. 23. See William Penn, “Present Crisis in the Condition of the American Indians. No. XX,” in Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate, January 20, 1830. 24. Michael D. Green, The Politics of Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985), 84–90. 25. Ibid., 96. 26. Ibid., 38, 64. 27. Ibid., 75–76; William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 304–5. 28. Quoted in McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 402. 29. Ibid., 396. For the complex politics underpinning the Cherokee’s ratification of their 1827 constitution, see ibid., 394–401; Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro- Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 103–14. For an account of John Ross’s schooling, see Gary E. Moulton, John Ross: Cherokee Chief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 6–7. 30. As scholar Patrick Wolfe argues, “The reason why the Cherokee’s constitution and their agricultural prowess stood out as such singular provocations to the officials and legislators of the state of Georgia— and this is attested over and over again in their public statements and correspondence—is that the Cherokee’s farms, plantations, slaves and written constitution all signified permanence.” Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 396. 31. Quoted in McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 412, emphasis in original. See also ibid., 408–12; Miles, Ties That Bind, 150. 32. Quoted in McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 412. 33. Jackson, Message from the President, December 8, 1829. 34. Carson, “State Rights and Indian Removal in Mississippi, 1817–1835.”

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35. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 208–9; Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2010), 188. 36. James Monroe, “First Annual Message,” December 2, 1817, in The Writings of James Monroe, ed. Stanislaus Murray Hamilton, vol. 6, 1817–1823 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 40. 37. Oliver H. Smith, February 19, 1828, Abridgment of the Debates of Congress, From 1789 to 1856, vol. 10 (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1860), 20–21. Smith’s rhetoric, of course, will sound familiar to students of current debates around Indian sovereignty, annuity payments, and social welfare. See, for example, Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in Native American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 69–92. 38. “On the Causes of the Depopulation of the American Indians,” Analectic Magazine and Naval Chronicle, vol. 7 (Philadelphia, 1816). 39. Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 12–16. 40. William McLean, February 19, 1828, in House Journal, Register of Debates in Congress, 20th Cong., 1st Sess., part 2 of vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1825–1837), 1564. Joseph White of Florida made a similar argument: “I need not tell this House that [Indians’] subsistence is derived from hunting principally, and as their hunting grounds are diminished, by the encroachments of the white population in the States, that their diminution has been in the same ratio; and all concur that, in their present condition, reduced as they are to such limits, it must progress until they are utterly extirpated. They are rapidly melting away—no one can deny this— and the question is, how is this doom to be averted? The present policy must result in their annihilation.” Joseph White, February 20, 1828, in ibid., 1589. 41. Peter B. Porter, “Report of the Secretary of War,” November 24, 1828, in “Appendix,” Register of Debates in Congress, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1830), 10. 42. Adam King, April 17, 1828, in House Journal, Register of Debates in Congress, 20th Cong., 1st Sess., vol. 4 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1828), 663. 43. Joseph White, February 20, 1828, 1589. 44. John C. Weems, February 19, 1828, in House Journal, Register of Debates in Congress, 20th Cong., 1st Sess., part 2 of vol. 4, 1566. 45. John Bell, February 21, 1831, in House Journal, Register of Debates in Congress, 21st Cong., 2nd Sess., vol. 7 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1831), 775. 46. William Clark, Thomas Hinds, and John Coffee [to the Choctaw Nation], November 11, 1826, in Clark, Hinds, and Coffee, “Refusal of the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Cede Their Lands in Mississippi,” 711–12. 47. On Southerners’ importation of food, see Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 176–78.

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48. John Woods, February 19, 1828, 1548. 49. Ibid., 1552. 50. Ibid., 1558. 51. Ibid., 1548. 52. Samuel Vinton, February 20, 1828, in House Journal, Register of Debates in Congress, 20th Cong., 1st Sess., part 2 of vol. 4, 1572. 53. Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, esp. 90. See also discussion in Chapter 3, note 45. 54. See, for example, “Choctaw Chiefs’ talk to the Secretary of War,” June 2, 1830, LROIA, microfi lm 234, roll 169, frames 701–8, National Archives. See also Alexandra Harmon, Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 109. 55. For debates over race thinking in Southeast Indian societies, see Theda Perdue, “Race and Culture: Writing the Ethnohistory of the Early South,” Ethnohistory 51, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 701–23; Claudio Saunt et al., “Rethinking Race and Culture in the Early South,” Ethnohistory 53, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 399–406. 56. For the enduring legacies of racial slavery within Southeast Indian nations, see Miles, Ties That Bind, xiii–xvi; Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Claudio Saunt, Black, White, and Indian: Race and the Unmaking of an American Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 57. Selectmen, acting as commissioners on the part of the Choctaw nation [read by James McDonald], November 14, 1826, in Clark, Hinds, and Coffee, “Refusal of the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Cede Their Lands in Mississippi,” 713. 58. Natalie Joy, “Cherokee Slaveholders and Radical Abolitionists,” CommonPlace 10, no. 4 (July 2010), http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-10/no-04/joy/; John Demos, The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (New York: Knopf, 2004), 242. 59. Joy, “Cherokee Slaveholders and Radical Abolitionists.” 60. “To the Public,” Cherokee Phoenix, February 21, 1828. 61. Regarding “paper warfare,” in 1827 James McDonald wrote of fellow Choctaw Moses Foster Jr., “I have not heard lately from the Choctaw Nation, but I have received a letter from Moses Foster Jr. He had just returned from New Orleans, and was about to pay a visit to the Choctaws. He tells me that he was about to engage in a paper warfare with some of the citizens of Mississippi, and that he does not fear for the result.” James McDonald to Peter P. Pitchlynn, May 20, 1827, folder 44, 4026.328, PPP, emphasis in original. 62. Cherokee Phoenix, April 3, 1828. 63. Elijah Hicks, “An Address to the Citizens of the Coosewatee District,” Cherokee Phoenix, July 21, 1828. 64. For a discussion of the citizenship status of the children of white women and Cherokee men, see Miles, Ties That Bind, 111; Perdue, Mixed Blood Indians, 94–95.

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65. Cherokee Phoenix, February 21, 1828. 66. Miles, Ties That Bind, 75. 67. See ibid., 108–10. 68. Hicks, “An Address to the Citizens of the Coosewatee District.” My theorization on liberal citizenship is informed here by the work of David Kazanjian. See David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 9–10. 69. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 45. 70. “To the Public,” emphasis in original. 71. “Choctaws,” Cherokee Phoenix, February 28, 1828. 72. “Womam [sic],” Cherokee Phoenix, February 28, 1828, emphasis in original. 73. Miles, Ties That Bind, 20. 74. Ibid., 73–75; Joy, “Cherokee Slaveholders and Radical Abolitionists.” 75. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 366–68. 76. Miles, Ties That Bind, 123–24; McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 366, 388–410. 77. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 407. 78. John Forsyth, April 15, 1830, in Senate Journal, Register of Debates in Congress, 21st Cong., 1st Sess., vol. 6 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1830), 329. See also McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic, 402. 79. Andrew Jackson, Message from the President of the United States to the Two Houses of Congress at the Commencement of the Second Session of the Twenty-First Congress, December 7, 1830 (Washington, DC: Duff Green, 1830), 19. 80. Mary Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s,” Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999): 15–40. 81. Raleigh Register, August 19, 1830, emphasis in original. 82. Ibid., emphasis mine. 83. Ibid. 84. For parallel moves on the part of white New Englanders to write Indians out of northern territories, see O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting, esp. 118. 85. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831). 86. Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832). 87. For legal interpretations of Marshall’s ruling, see N. Bruce Duthu, American Indians and the Law (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 8–11, 197, 200–201; N. Bruce Duthu, Shadow Nations: Tribal Sovereignty and the Limits of Legal Pluralism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12–14, 82, 105–6; Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 219–23.

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Epilogue 1. Peggy Eaton, The Autobiography of Peggy Eaton (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 162–68. 2. Ibid., 168–69. 3. Mushulatubbee to John Eaton, September 28, 1829, Choctaw Emigration 1826–1830, microfilm 234, roll 185, frames 54–57, National Archives. 4. James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory to Removal (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 117–18; Frederick Hoxie, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made (New York: Penguin Books, 2013), 84–85. 5. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, March 21, 1830, folder 79, 4026.3184, PPP; Hoxie, This Indian Country, 86. 6. For Mushulatubbee’s and other Choctaw leaders’ critique of the treaty, see “Choctaw Chiefs talk to the Secretary of War,” June 2, 1830, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 701–8, National Archives. 7. Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, October 11, 1830, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.1, Choctaw Mission, microfilm A467, reel 758, frames 30–31, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 8. “Unsigned copy of letter from Choctaws to Eaton and Coffee. Indicating ‘We will treat provided the U.S. will give us a Liberal Treaty,’ indicating the ‘Coercion of laws’ (of Mississippi), upon their decision,” September 25, 1830, folder 87, 1830-11, 4026.3191, PPP. See also Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, November 17, 1830, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.1, Choctaw Mission, microfilm A467, reel 758, frames 33–38, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 9. Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, October 11, 1830. 10. For a copy of the draft treaty, see “Basis of a Treaty to be Submitted to the Commissioners of the United States on behalf of the Choctaw Nation,” September 25, 1830, folder 86, 1830-10, 4826.29 a + b, PPP. 11. Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, October 11, 1830. 12. “Basis of a Treaty to be Submitted to the Commissioners of the United States on behalf of the Choctaw Nation,” September 25, 1830; “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1830,” in United States, Indian Aff airs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, Treaties, comp. and ed. Charles J. Kappler (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), 310–19; Carson, Searching for the Bright Path, 122–24. 13. Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, October 11, 1830. Kingsbury also wrote that he “was told by a young man of intelligence & influence [possibly McDonald] who by the Treaty is to receive two sections of land, that two thirds of the people had left the ground before the treaty was signed.” See Cyrus Kingsbury to Jeremiah Evarts, November 17, 1830, frames 33–34. 14. William Ward to John Henry Eaton, November 14, 1830, LROIA, microfilm 234, roll 169, frames 783–786, National Archives, also in reprinted United States

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Congressional Serial Set, Senate Document No. 512, 23rd Cong., 1st Sess., vol. 2, part 4, 185; “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1830,” 310. 15. Col. William Ward to Samuel Hamilton, June 21, 1831, folder 101, 1831-6, 4026.3207, PPP, emphasis mine. 16. According to a congressional investigation, at least 572 families applied for land. However, the investigation also points out the disorga nized manner in which records were kept, suggesting that there may have been many more applicants. See “On claims to reservations under the fourteenth article of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, with the Choctaw Indians, Communicated to the House of Representatives May 11, 1836,” in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Public Lands, vol. 8, 1835–1837 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1861), 675. 17. Samuel J. Wells and Roseanna Tubby, eds., After Removal: The Choctaw in Mississippi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), vii. On the numbers of people forced to relocate, see “On claims to reservations under the fourteenth article of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, with the Choctaw Indians, Communicated to the House of Representatives, May 11, 1836,” 675. 18. While some speculate that James McDonald signed the final treaty, his signature does not appear on the ratified document. See, for example, Hoxie, This Indian Country, 88; “Treaty with the Choctaw, 1830,” 310–19. 19. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, January 27, 1829, folder 68, 1829-2, 4026.3164, PPP. 20. Niles’ Weekly Register, 4th series, 1, no. 25 (February 13, 1830), 410, emphasis in original. 21. Hoxie, This Indian Country, 93. 22. James McDonald to Alexander McKee, March 30, 1831, box 1, folder 22, Peter Perkins Pitchlynn Collection, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Norman, emphasis in original. 23. Phillip Carroll Morgan, “ ‘Who Shall Gainsay Our Decision?’: Choctaw Literary Criticism in 1830,” in Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, ed. Janice Acoose et al. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 126–46. See also James McDonald to Peter P. Pitchlynn, December 13 and 17, 1830, box 1, folder 19, Peter Perkins Pitchlynn Collection, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma Libraries, Norman. 24. On McDonald’s drowning, see Secretary of War Lewis Cass to Wm. S. Colquhoun, September 20, 1833, in U.S. Congress, American State Papers: Public Lands, vol. 7, 1834–1835 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1860), 14; Cyrus Kingsbury to David Greene, October 12, 1831, ABCFM, series ABC 18.3.4, Choctaw Mission, A467, reel 758, frame 97, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 25. Cyrus Kingsbury to David Greene, October 12, 1831. 26. Thomas Loraine McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal: With Sketches of Travels Among the Northern and Southern Indians; Embracing a War Excursion, and

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Descriptions of Scenes Along the Western Borders, vol. 2 (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1846), 118–19. 27. McDonald wrote to Peter Pitchlynn of news from David Folsom that “I have enemies among my own people, in a quarter that I would not expect.” Folsom never relayed who these enemies were, nor did McDonald raise such concerns again. James McDonald to Peter Pitchlynn, May 5, 1827, folder 43, 4026.327, PPP, emphasis in original. 28. Secretary of War Lewis Cass to Wm. S. Colquhoun, September 20, 1833, 14. On James McDonald’s debts, see Affidavit of James M. Pucket, January 16, 1833, Hiram Coffer, Administrator of James L. McDonald, September 1833, both in Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Records Concerning Indian Land Reserves, Reserve File A, ca. 1825–1907, box 15, folder 456, National Archives. 29. Affidavit of James M. Pucket, January 16, 1833; Joseph E. Penton’s Affidavit, September 3, 1833, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Records Concerning Indian Land Reserves, Reserve File A, ca. 1825–1907, box 15, folder 456, National Archives. 30. General D. H. Cooper, March 18, 1854, Record Group 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Records Concerning Indian Land Reserves, Reserve File A, ca. 1825–1907, box 15, folder 456, National Archives. 31. Ibid. On Jones as a slaveholder, see Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 80, 107. See also manuscript in progress by Jeff rey Fortney on Robert Jones, tentatively titled Robert M. Jones: A Choctaw “Millionaire” in the American South, 1808–1873 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, forthcoming). 32. For overviews of the recognition of Native sovereignty in Marshall’s rulings, see N. Bruce Duthu, American Indians and the Law (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 8–11, 197, 200–201; N. Bruce Duthu, Shadow Nations: Tribal Sovereignty and the Limits of Legal Pluralism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 12–14, 82, 105–6; Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 219–23. 33. For scholarship that focuses on the cultural and political implications of Marshall’s articulations of Native nations’ “domestic dependency” vis-à-vis the United States, see, for example, Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land; Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2008), 15; Priscilla Wald, “Terms of Assimilation: Legislating Subjectivity in the Emerging Nation,” boundary 2 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 77–104.

Acknowledgments

This book emerged out of a footnote from the late Michael Paul Rogin’s groundbreaking text Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. In the time it has taken me to track down the archival threads that began with Rogin’s note and then turn these threads into chapters, I have been fortunate to experience an incredible amount of support, camaraderie, and love. Indeed, this book feels more like a collection of conversations I’ve had over the past thirteen years than it does a solo endeavor. While I was in graduate school Walter Johnson encouraged me to take this project on, even though I was convinced I was a twentieth-century historian. His commitment to me as my adviser gave me the freedom and the confidence to run with this work. I am deeply grateful to him for his generous intellectual engagement with my research. I would also like to thank Lisa Duggan, Jennifer Morgan, Barbara Krauthamer, and Claudio Saunt. Each has fundamentally shaped the way I think about and write history. This project has greatly benefited from their insights and interventions. So many other colleagues, mentors, and peers have put their stamp on this book. I am profoundly grateful for all of them. During my years as a graduate student in the Program in American Studies at New York University, I found myself sitting back and taking notes while surrounded by a brilliant cohort of scholars, including Vivek Bald, Rich Blint, André Carrington, Miabi Chatterji, Andy Cornell, Jennifer Duff y, Miles Grier, Kerwin Kaye, Michael Palm, Emily Thuma, Manu Vimalassery, Adam Waterman, and Carisa Worden. I hold special gratitude for the enduring love and friendship Rich and Miles have shown me over the years, and I remain in awe of their luminous intellects and their commitments to social justice. I would also like to thank Madala Hilaire for her friendship, which kept me (and so many others) afloat during challenging years of graduate study. During a fellowship at 

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the McNeil Center for Early American Studies (MCEAS) at the University of Pennsylvania, I was lucky to cross paths with Irene Cheng, Brian Connolly, Paul Conrad, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, and Elena Schneider, whose company sustained me. The American Indian studies writing group at the MCEAS, including Paul Conrad, Laura Johnson, Andrew Lipman, Philip Mead, and Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, asked questions that forced me to clarify what I was writing about and made reading suggestions that helped me to situate early chapter drafts in the historiography of American Indian history. There is not a page of this book that has been written or edited without the influence of my writing group during my visiting teaching job at Smith College. Conversations with Barbara Krauthamer, Ted Melillo, and Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor buoyed me as I began to write the book. Breaking down the intersections of race, gender, and empire in U.S. history with these three kept the stakes of writing history in full view and created one of those rare intellectual spaces where it was possible to think through inchoate thoughts and questions out loud. Every time I sit down to write, I can especially hear Elizabeth’s voice telling me to signpost and to be fearless in my analysis. She has read every chapter of this book, many of them multiple times. I feel lucky to have her stunning brilliance, her soulful engagement with history, and, most especially, her friendship in my life. It is hard for me to imagine having finished this book without her. I would also like to thank several others for their extensive engagement with this work. Daniel Richter’s critiques of early chapter drafts pushed me to see how the stories within this book were connected and, in the process, helped me to figure out the overarching narrative of the book. Daniel Usner read the manuscript in its entirety. In addition to saving me from embarrassing mistakes, he offered generous insights and thoughtful reading suggestions that allowed me to better hone my arguments. From very early on Tiya Miles advocated for this work. She has read early versions of the manuscript, reread chapters, and even vetted paragraphs over email. Her scholarship has been a model for my own, and her subtle readings of my sources have made this a much better book. I also am indebted to Alyssa Mt. Pleasant for helping me navigate late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Haudenosaunee history as well as the voluminous historiography that surrounds it. I was completely out of my depth when I took on the second chapter of this project. Alyssa read it multiple times, each time using her laser-like analysis to show me how I could more effectively center Native epistemologies and motivations in my narrative. I also thank Jeff Fortney, Kallie Kosc, Brandon Layton, Jennifer Mieirs, and Richard Niemi for swapping sources with me, for sharing their genealogical insights, and for commenting on chapters. Jeff ’s copies of land files relating to Molly McDonald’s farm proved invaluable as I pieced together what happened to McDonald in her final

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years. I feel special gratitude to Jennifer and Richard for their willingness to share their family histories with me. As I moved between New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Northampton, Los Angeles, and Atlanta and traveled to archives, conferences, and seminars over the course of the life of this book, others still have contributed to my intellectual journey, including Sari Altschuler, Munia Bhaumik, Lisa Brooks, Kathleen BrownPerez, Marianne Bullock, Mark Cheathem, Margaret Connell-Szasz, Emily ConroyKrutz, Tanisha Ford, Eric Hinderaker, Fred Hoxie, Neil Kamil, David Kazanjian, Andrea King, Alison Klein, Lauren Klein, Justin Leroy, Courtney Lewis, Daniel Mandell, Jen Manion, Matthew Mason, Alice Nash, Chantal Norrgard, Lorie Novak, Jennifer Palmer, Khary Polk, Vijay Prashad, Jenny Pulsipher, Nancy Shoemaker, Susan Sleeper-Smith, Rachel St. John, Ann Toplovich, Deborah Willis, and Karin Wulf. Nihad Farooq, Kendra Field, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Rashauna Johnson, Jennifer Rhee, Neal Salisbury, Nadya Sbaiti, and Sandra Shuman listened patiently when I became obsessed with the details of my research and offered the very best company I could ask for. Along with Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, Lisa Armstrong and Jennifer Guglielmo have shaped my life in more ways than I can express here. They have shown me that it is possible— and powerful—to teach and write from the heart, and they have sheltered me, quite literally, during more than one storm (a shout out here to Jerry Stordeur for always having a generator in a New England blizzard). Several friends have been with me for the long haul, including Lisa McNey, Jon Meyer, Sabina Neem, Jera Niewoehner, Philip Perkis, and Sarah Rennix. I thank them for bringing so much love and light to my life over the past two decades (or more). My friend Rita Lasar passed from this life as this book was going into press. I will forever miss her fierce passion for this world and her deep commitment to making it more just for everyone. Financial support from a number of institutions made this book possible. Research support from the Huntington Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Newberry Library, and New York University allowed me to amass the archival resources that gave this project life. Archivists Renee Harvey at the Gilcrease Museum, Desiree Wallen at the National Archives at Atlanta, Earle Spamer at the American Philosophical Society, Chris Densmore at the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, and Sarah Horowitz at the Quaker and Special Collections at Haverford College tracked down sources for me, patiently listened to my hunches about where I might find new ones, and generously relayed their extensive knowledge of their institutions’ collections. Fellowships from New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University’s History Department, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania gave me the time to work out the conceptual framework of the project, providing the

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foundation upon which I built this book. A Hench fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) allowed me to spend a blissful year in the unparalleled print collection amassed at the AAS and gave me the resources and freedom to research and write the final chapter of the manuscript. I owe special thanks to Paul Erickson, Ashley Cataldo, Lauren Hewes, and Laura Wasowicz for pointing me to sources that I did not know existed. Indeed, it was Ashley who found the cover image for this book. Paul organized a roundtable of preeminent scholars, including John Demos, Robbie Ethridge, Thavolia Glymph, Clara Sue Kidwell, and Lisa Wilson, to read and discuss my work. I would like to thank them all for their careful engagement with my manuscript and their creative ideas as to how I might revise it. Thanks also to Nicole Eustace and Fredrika Teute, whose invitation to write a chapter for their edited volume Warring for America: 1808–1813, published by the University of North Carolina Press, inspired me to write out the ideas and stories addressed in Chapter 3. A fellowship from the University Research Council at Emory University gave me the semester-long release from teaching that allowed me to put the final polish on the manuscript. Emory University’s Center for Faculty Development and Excellence provided me with a Scholarly Writing and Publication grant, which gave me the resources to hire Cynthia Blakeley as a copy editor. Cynthia has a knack for finding just the right words to clarify what I’m trying to say; I thank her for taking such special care with my manuscript. Joyce Seltzer at Harvard University Press believed in this project and shepherded it through the publication process. Her sharp editorial eye and her impatience for vague language and extraneous detail significantly strengthened my prose. Brian Distelberg, Kathi Drummy, and Melody Negron helped me with important production details and kept me on schedule. I also want to thank Isabelle Lewis for her elegant digital renderings of faded nineteenth-century maps. I have been fortunate to spend the last several years in the Department of History at Emory University with a group of warm and supportive colleagues and an amazing staff, including Patrick Allitt, Elena Conis, Clifton Crais, Joe Crespino, Astrid Eckert, Leslie Harris, Becky Herring, Danny LaChance, Jeff rey Lesser, Kristin Mann, Jamie Melton, Mary Odem, Gyan Pandey, Matt Payne, Jonathan Prude, Jim Roark, Tom Rogers, Allison Rollins, Ellie Schainker, Sharon Strocchia, Allen Tullos, Brian Vick, Katie Wilson, Yanna Yannakakis, and Kelly Yates. I would especially like to acknowledge Leslie and Elena for their warm welcomes to Atlanta and for their guidance during my first years teaching at Emory as well as Danny for his keen readings of Chapters 3 and 4. Research support from students Andrew Britt, Cassandra Casias, Molly Yates, and Jessica Zou helped me to better orga nize primary source materials and clarify details in chapter drafts. Writing groups with Ellie Schainker and Nick Blood, and with Tanine Allison,

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Arun Jones, and Jonathan Strom, kept me focused on the manuscript in the midst of teaching and ser vice and offered camaraderie as I assembled the first draft of the book. I also benefited from the conversations that unfolded in the Atlanta-area Native Studies reading group, including those with Mandy Suhr-Sytsma, Levine Arnsperger, Gina Caison, Michael Elliott, Sarah Hill, Erin Suzuki, and Craig Womack. Kathleen Dean swooped in during my final throes with this manuscript, and I thank her for all the ways she helped me to the finish line. For years, my mom, Marta Peterson, received my evasive responses whenever she asked how this book was going. I am happy now to be able to tell her that it is finally finished! I thank her for all that she has given me, so often at her own sacrifice, including my opportunities for schooling. My younger siblings, Annie and Derek, have always been there to keep me honest and grounded in a way that only they know how. Neither my father, Norman, nor my brother Davin were here for the writing of this book, but I felt them with me the whole way. I would like to thank my dad for introducing me to history when I was little and for clarifying for me early on in life that master narratives privilege the powerful and the few. Losing Davin sent me to graduate school and pushed me to keep going with this project, even when it felt certain that it would never get finished. This book is out of love for him. I hold my deepest appreciation for those who are probably the least impressed by the fact that I have written a book. Benjamin Lipton and Melchia Crowne have taught me not to trust my intellect quite so much, which has been a beautiful and healing gift to my life. Javier and June are the loves of my life. In a book that is in many ways about households, it brings me great joy to say that I am honored to have built one with them.

Index

Figures indicated by page numbers in italics Abeel, Catherine, 53 Adair, James, 265–266, 390n130 Adams, John, 23 Adams, John Quincy, 203, 272, 283 adoption: adoptees as relinquishing Nativeness, 279–280, 301, 306; adoptees as subordinates, 161, 162; approach to, 9; background to, 2, 24, 29, 35–36, 41; barriers to, 65–66, 72–73; as charitable outlet for white women, 73–74; children’s resistance to, 77–78, 165, 203; and citizenship, 8; conflicting expectations for, 12, 45–46, 78–79, 273, 312; consequences for Native people, 138, 312–313; contemporary understanding of, 3; entitlement by adopters, 8; and expansionism, 32; and gender relations, 46, 51, 66, 69, 75, 78, 108, 135–138, 164; Haudenosaunee precedents, 53; history of, 3; and imperialism, 2, 37; justification, 36, 56; by missionaries, 37, 191–193; Mohican precedents, 53; motivations for adopters, 11, 12, 36–37, 60, 193; numbers of, 319n8; ongoing impact, 7–8, 313; and Quakers, 37, 44, 59–60, 61–62, 63, 78, 79; reasons for study, 5; and removal policy, 284; as

reproduction, 11–13; resistance from former adoptees, 205–206, 227–228, 278–279, 306; settler opposition to, 76–77; Southeast Indian precedents, 128, 151; by Southern settlers, 151–152; in Supreme Court rulings, 302; use of term, 2, 3; of war captives, 142, 151–152. See also assimilation; Native American children, in white families; residential schools adoption studies, 318n3 African Americans: characterizations of, 18, 22–23, 24, 25, 28, 98; commodification of, 133; associated with slavery, 3; indenture of, 23; labors of enslaved, 113–114, 171, 242, 261–262; paternal attitude toward, 22, 99, 101, 262–263, 264, 324n36; resistance to slavery, 122, 158, 168, 264, 266, 267, 270, 300; role in racial constructions of whiteness and Nativeness, 25, 326n45; self-emancipation of, 264, 351n97; and slaveholders’ constructions of gender, 114, 236, 241–242. See also free blacks; sexual violence; slavery; women, African and African American agriculture, Native, 16, 37–38, 87, 88, 241–242, 330n90

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INDEX

alcohol, 181, 231, 244, 286, 316 Algonquian people, 6, 64 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 37, 190, 191–193. See also Choctaw schooling; Kingsbury, Cyrus; missionaries; mission schools American Indians. See Native Americans Amonute (Pocahontas), 7 Anderson, Benedict, 296 Anderson, William P., 127–132 anti-Indian sublime, 212, 377n10 Apuckshunubbee, 116, 224, 225–226, 358n70 Arbor (Lee Compere), 137, 202–203, 204, 206 assimilation: adoption as means to, 2, 3–4, 29, 35–36, 41; contradictory language on, 40–41; Native people as incapable of, 285, 305; of settlers of Native practices, 39. See also adoption; “civilization” programs; factory system Aupaumut, Hendrick, 49, 67–68, 70, 71, 72, 340n116 Aupaumut, Margery Hendrick, 67, 340n116 Bailey, James, 62, 65 Baldwin, Elizabeth, 70 Barbour, James, 246, 250, 257 Barnard, William, 137, 202, 204, 206 Baynton, Douglas C., 324n36 Bell, John, 288 Ben (enslaved by Thomas McKenney), 137, 200–201, 203 Bhabha, Homi, 195 bicultural families / individuals: acculturation of, 239; defense as legitimate Native people, 292–293; introduction to, 91; Native leaders from, 206, 210, 224–225, 251; as not truly Indians, 138, 275, 292, 298–299, 301, 306, 392n18; as slave and plantation holders, 91, 113–114, 115, 117–118; use of half breed term, 347n45; worldview of, 135–136. See also intermarriage

Big Tree, 43, 48, 49, 50, 51 bio-politics, 28–29, 34, 185–186 blacks. See African Americans; free blacks; slavery; women, African and African American Blakey, William, 62 Block, Sharon, 199, 390n130 Bodley, William, 105 Bogy, Joseph, 347n47 Boudinot, Elias, 214, 288, 293, 294–295, 296, 297, 298 Brainerd School, 190, 192, 374n80 Brandon, Gerard, 281 Brant, Joseph, 47, 49 Brant, Molly, 47 Brashears, Delilah, 217 Brashears, Jesse, 278 Brashears, Turner, 134, 226 Braund, Kathryn, 390n132 Buffon, Comte de, 26 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 196, 202 Bushnell, David, Jr., 355n35 Caffery, Mary Donelson, 163 Caff rey, Nancy, 153 Calhoun, John C., 171, 189, 196, 202, 221, 222, 226, 372n48 Call, Richard Keith, 146 Camp, Stephanie, 324n36 Carson, James Taylor, 129, 132, 347n47, 359n98 Carter, Lydia (Osage girl), 11, 192–193 Carter, Lydia (plantation widow), 11 Chamberlain, William, 192 charitable work, 58, 73–74 Cherokee Nation: adoption of settler values, 295–297; antagonism toward Eaton, 304; centralized nation formation, 203–204, 282–283, 294–295; and “civilization” program, 39–40; conflicts over adoption of settler values, 297–298; Dinsmoor as agent to, 86, 87; economic adaptations by, 86–87; and factory system, 40, 178,

INDEX

370n14; kinship views, 294; land claims by Georgia, 281–282, 283; military defeat of, 61; opposition to removal policy, 293–295, 300; paper warfare by, 293–295; peace with Osages, 192; placement of children with whites, 62; settler opposition to leadership, 298–299, 393n30; and slavery, 116–117, 295–296, 297, 360n108, 396n67; Supreme Court cases on sovereignty, 302, 313; women, 86, 87, 116–117, 295, 297, 330n90. See also Brainerd School; Southeast Indians; women, Native American Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 302, 313 Cherokee Phoenix and Indian Advocate, 293–294, 295, 296, 297 Chickasaw Nation, 87, 88, 137, 178, 278, 280, 281, 382n4. See also Southeast Indians Child, Brenda, 358n86 children, discipline of, 131, 240 Chinn, Julia, 261–262, 263, 264, 265 Choate, David, 134–135 Choctaw Academy: blame of Ward for, 249; closure, 269; complaints against, 247–248, 259–260, 269; defense against complaints, 260–263; and end of Choctaw dream for national high school, 249, 250; establishment, 244–245, 246–247; expectations for, 256–257, 258, 269; as for-profit, 245, 259–260; Johnson’s authority undermined by students, 267–268; lack of alternatives to, 257–258; lack of comment on slavery, 258–259; political crisis from, 247–248; politicization of, 234–235, 246; relations between slaves and students, 263–268; as solely for male students, 268; students at, 256, 258, 319n8; students post-graduation, 269–270. See also Choctaw schooling Choctaw Constitution: introduction to, 251; impetus for, 251; on intermarriage, 252; racial dimensions, 251–254; on relations with slaves, 252–254, 264–265; on

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settlement rights, 254–255; on sexual violence, 266; on women’s property rights, 255 Choctaws: adoption precedents, 128; basis of sovereignty in property rights, 230, 231; bicultural households, 91, 113–115, 135–136; in cotton trade, 91, 112, 242; delegation to Washington, 224–226, 232; denied legal rights, 230–231; Dinsmoor as agent to, 1, 81, 82–83, 84, 85–86, 87, 88–90, 91–93, 100–101, 346n32; economic adaptations by, 90–91, 111–112, 123, 133–134, 359n98; and European imperial powers, 85, 89, 109–111, 344n13; expansion into land of, 98, 111, 119–121, 122–123, 357n64; and factory system, 123, 178, 179; final land cession negotiations east of the Mississippi, 272–273, 277, 278–279, 280–281; gender roles, 90, 92, 111, 112, 113, 114, 123, 138, 241, 268; Indian agents to, 345n23; kinship views, 91, 128–129, 293, 355n35; land cessions, 84–85, 105, 122, 216–217, 220, 222; land claims by Mississippi, 281; maps of homelands, 131, 218, 219; market activities of women, 107–108, 112, 123, 124–125, 221; masculinity rearticulated, 236; James McDonald as representative, 208–209, 209–210, 224; missionaries to, 237–238, 239–240, 384n32; naming practices, 119; and Natchez Trace, 88, 122; next generation leaders, 391n143; and pan-Indian resistance, 82, 103, 126, 357n68; placement of children with whites, 79, 126–129, 132–133, 135–138; plantation raiding, 81, 82–83, 92, 112–113, 126, 347n47; relations with settlers, 123–124, 127–128, 230–231, 270; removal of, 306–309, 397n13, 398n16; settler attitudes toward, 124; sexual violence, 265–266, 390n130; and slavery, 91, 112, 113–114, 118–119, 354n19; threat of U.S. interference in internal crises, 249–250; Treaty of Washington, 226–227, 232;



INDEX

Choctaws (continued) women, 112, 123, 138, 354n25. See also Choctaw Academy; Choctaw Constitution; Choctaw schooling; McDonald, James; McDonald, Molly; Southeast Indians; women, Native American Choctaw schooling: advocacy for, 223, 237, 255–256; concerns with, 240–242, 384n36; control by elite men, 256; disagreements, 235–236; in Doak’s Stand treaty, 222; establishment of in Choctaw territories, 237–238; fewer opportunities available for women, 268–269; loss of proposed high school, 250; McDonald on, 248–249; at Mushulatubbee’s home, 242–244, 384n29; politicization of, 234–235, 237, 245–246; racial framing of disagreements about, 245; support for, 236–237, 383n13; utility of, 135–136; in Washington treaty, 226–227, 232; women’s roles in, 138. See also Choctaw Academy; schooling Christianity, 67, 99, 236. See also missionaries “civilization” programs: development by Knox, 34; by missionaries, 34; Native responses to, 51, 82, 90–92, 297, 298, 344n19; opposition to, 91–92, 174, 275, 285–288; purpose, 39, 41, 135; refinement of, 82; as reflection of U.S. anx ieties, 37; replaced by removal policies, 205, 206; as “saving” Native people, 32–33, 34–35, 92; support for vs. removal, 289–290. See also assimilation; factory system; gender; removal policy Claiborne, John Francis, 130 Claiborne, William C. C., 122, 123–124 Clark, George Rogers, 13 Clark, Joseph, 65–66, 67, 69, 70, 79 Clark, William, 102, 272, 277, 278, 279, 280 Coffee, John: in Creek War, 140, 145–146; half breed argument, 280–281, 293; land cession negotiations, 272, 277, 278, 279, 280; land speculation, 145; removal treaty, 307, 308

Colbert, Dougherty, 137, 202, 257 Colbert, Levi, 137, 202 Cole, Robert, 224–225, 227, 233, 240–241, 242, 244, 247, 250, 251 Columbus, Christopher, 6 Compere, Lee. See Arbor conquest theory, 30 Cooper, Medlong, 134, 252 Cooper, William, 134, 252 Cornelius, Elias, 185, 192, 193 Cornplanter, 43–44, 47, 48–51, 52–54, 55, 59, 76 Cornwall Academy, 214, 223, 243, 319n8, 379n38 cotton trade, 91, 97–98, 112 Crain, Patricia, 191 Crawford, Samuel, 135–136, 221 Crawford, William H., 184, 190 Creek Nation: adoption precedents, 128; captivity of Nancy Caff rey, 153; and Choctaw Academy, 256; and “civilization” program, 39–40; civil war within, 145; competing political aspirations within, 142, 144, 145, 292, 362n19; and factory system, 178, 179, 370n14; Jackson on, 141, 167; kinship views, 147, 148; Knox on, 328n76; land cessions, 167–168, 251, 272; land claims by Georgia, 281–282; language, 362n16; loss of Spanish support, 61; McKenney’s relationship with, 204–205; placement of children with whites, 62, 137, 202; and Quakers, 62; schooling requests, 65, 202–203. See also Creek War; Southeast Indians Creek War: accounts of finding Lyncoya, 146–147; atrocities during, 146; attack on Tallushatchee, 140, 145–146; Jackson’s absence from family, 160; Jackson’s adoption of Lyncoya, 2, 140, 141, 160–161; Jackson’s entry into, 144–145; Jackson’s gifts home from, 161–162; Jackson’s justifications for, 142–143, 159–160, 166–167; land cession aftermath, 167–168; morale of militia,

INDEX

143–144; Tohopeka battle, 140, 166, 167, 363n31. See also War of 1812 Crockett, Davy, 146 Cumfer, Cynthia, 324n31, 363n27 Dearborn, Henry, 79, 84, 85, 86 Deer, Sarah, 7–8 Deloria, Philip, 324n33 Dinsmoor, Mary (née Gordon), 94, 95–96, 97, 100, 101, 348n56 Dinsmoor, Silas: adoption of James McDonald, 1, 10, 81–82, 102, 103–104, 105–106, 108, 126–129; as agent to Choctaws, 82–83, 84, 85–86, 87, 88–93, 91–92, 101, 103; ambitions and barriers, 83; changing attitudes on Native space, 94–95; and Cherokees, 86, 87, 94; and Chickasaws, 87; on Choctaws, 1, 92–93; Choctaws as memorabilia, 101, 102; convincing wife to join him in “wilderness,” 95–96, 100, 101, 350n81; dual allegiances, 102; and Alexander Hamilton, 127, 129; impact of actions, 83–84, 106; journey to Choctaw country, 87–88; marriage, 96, 348n56; and Molly McDonald, 126–127; paternalism of, 81, 100–101, 105; as plantation owner, 93, 95, 99–100, 104, 105, 125, 347n47, 351n100; racial assumptions, 89; and slavery, 96–97, 98–99, 100, 349n63, 351n97 Dinsmoor, Silas, Jr., 81, 100–101 discipline, of children, 131, 240 Donelson, Andrew Jackson, 156, 161 Donelson, John, IV, 168 Donelson, William, 158 Donly, John, 10, 132 Dowd, Gregory Evans, 343n4, 357n68 Doxtater, Mary (née Peters), 10, 66, 67, 70–71, 74, 340nn115–116 Drake, Ella Wells, 391n143 Drinker, Henry, 63 Dunbar, William, 97 Durant, Alexander, 62, 65



Eaton, John Henry, 146–147, 149, 268, 303–304, 307–308, 363n31 Eaton, Peggy, 303–305 education. See schooling Ellicott, Andrew, 120, 130, 188 Elliot (mission station), 237–238, 384n32 Erie Canal, 276 Eustis, William, 103 expansionism: adoption as means to, 32, 33; adoption as resistance to, 5, 45, 106, 137–138; boom and bust cycles, 211; into Choctaw territories, 84–85, 98, 119–121, 122–123, 216–217, 220, 222, 272–273, 277, 278–279, 280–281, 357n64; claims by Southerners, 14, 276–277, 302; conquest theory, 30; into Creek territories, 141, 167–168, 251; dislocating Native economies for, 39–40, 123, 176–179; and fear of provoking conflicts, 31, 38, 49; federal “ legal” approach, 93; by Georgia, 281–282, 283; history of, 13–14, 15–16, 82; justifications, 17–19, 19–20, 23–24, 93–94, 212–213, 324n33; and kinship beliefs, 17, 83; Louisiana Purchase, 85; by military force, 30, 31–32, 33–34, 38, 145, 167, 169; by Mississippi, 281; into Oneida territories, 66–67; and Quakers, 45; resistance to, 8, 14–15, 30–31, 45, 49, 277; settlers frame as retribution, 327n62; in Six Nations territories, 48, 276; slavery and, 16–17, 28, 58, 98, 178. See also “civilization” programs; imperialism; removal policy factory system: abolishment of, 201–201; bio-political vision for, 185–186; debt focus, 178, 225; financial difficulties, 182; fur trade, 182; headquarters, 179; implementation of, 40, 178–179, 370n14; and McKenney, 173, 175–176, 180–182; merchandise transportation, 181–182; Native commercial preferences, 181; political difficulties, 179–180, 182–183; profits, 372n53; promotion of, 183–185;



INDEX

factory system (continued) purpose of, 40, 173, 176–177, 179, 183; as temporary mea sure, 183, 371n40; trade items, 181 Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 45, 61, 68 families: as revealing histories of nationbuilding, 9; as sites of study, 321n23. See also kinship; national family; reproduction fanimingo chiefs, 128 Farmer’s Brother, 48, 63, 74–76, 77 “The Female Combatants” (cartoon), 20, 21 First Seminole War, 168 Fischer, Kirsten, 323n29 Florida, 168 Folsom, David: bicultural background, 224–225; on Choctaws denied legal rights, 230; and Choctaw treaties, 225, 226; on “civilization” among Choctaws, 296; educational vision, 223, 227, 232, 235, 237, 244–245, 255; election as chief, 251; expectations met by, 273; half breed argument against, 270; and McDonald’s enemies, 399n27; Mushulatubbee as rival, 243, 247; placement with whites, 132–133, 223, 239; and removal policy, 307 Folsom, Nathanial, 132, 136 Folsom, Peter, 391n143 Forman, William Gordon, 120 Forsythe, John, 298–299 Fort Mims, 143, 145 Foster, John, 130 Foucault, Michel, 28, 186 France, 14, 39, 61, 85, 109, 111, 128 Franklin, Benjamin, 16, 54 free blacks, 23, 252, 254, 300, 325n37 fur trade, 39, 110, 182, 335n35 Gabriel’s Rebellion, 121 Gaines, George, 89, 99, 103 Gallay, Alan, 354n19 Galloway, Patricia, 128 Garland, Sam, 391n143

gender: and bicultural households, 113–114; and Cherokee nationalism, 296, 297; and “civilization,” 28, 34, 37, 51, 68, 83; and notions of virility, 25–26, 287; and political visions, 46; role in Choctaw land claims, 217; role of Africans and African Americans in construction of, 18, 113–114, 236, 382n4; role of Native women in construction of, 18; synthesis of Native and settler ideas about, 74; and U.S. imperial governance, 23–24. See also adoption; agriculture, Native; kinship; paternalism; patriarchy; reproduction; women, African and African American; women, Native American; women, Quaker; women, white Genesinguhta (Quaker mission), 76 Georgia, 281–282, 300, 306, 393n30 Gibbs, Adin, 238, 243–244 Glymph, Thavolia, 356n55 Gould, Harriet, 214 Haitian Revolution, 121 Haley, William, 107, 108, 109, 115, 354n21 Half Town, 43, 48, 49, 50, 51 Hamilton, Alexander (Molly McDonald’s son), 109, 119, 127, 129–132, 135, 136–137, 138, 214, 217, 220, 221, 226, 352n6, 358n70 Harkins, George W., 391n143 Harris, Sylva, 386n63 Hartman, Saidiya, 199 Haudenosaunee (Six Nations): adaptations by, 67; background, 46–48; concerns about adoptions, 65–66; and Erie Canal, 276; leadership in, 52; Quakers invited to treaty negotiations, 62–63; relations with Algonquians, 64; relations with settlers, 49, 50, 53–54; women, 71–72. See also Oneida Nation; Seneca Nation; women, Native American Hawkins, Benjamin, 62, 117, 118–119, 124, 167, 168

INDEX

Heiskell, Samuel Gordon, 146 Henderson, Thomas, 258, 260, 261, 262, 390n122 Hicks, Elijah, 294, 295–296, 298 Hinds, Thomas, 216, 222, 272, 277, 278, 279, 280 Hine, Darlene Clark, 326n54 Holmes, Elkanah, 74–75 Horsman, Reginald, 343n10 Hoxie, Frederick, 310 Hunter, George, 97, 98, 349n67 Hutchings, Andrew Jackson, 156, 159, 161 imperialism: adaptations in the face of, 42, 137–138, 170; Dinsmoor’s agency as symbol of, 92; economic, 206; European, 18, 43, 46, 85; and Native- Quaker alliances, 61–64; overview of early U.S., 12–17; and masculinity, 46; pan-Indian resistance to, 8, 14–15, 30–31, 294; paper warfare as resistance to, 294; as U.S. family story, 2, 37, 321n23. See also expansionism indenture, 23 Indian agents, 84. See also Dinsmoor, Silas Indian Civilization Bill, 193–194, 201, 245 Indian Committee. See Quakers Indian policy debates, 284. See also adoption; “civilization” programs; expansionism; factory system; removal policy Indian Removal Act, 273, 299, 306. See also removal policy Indians. See Native Americans intermarriage, 114–115, 117, 136, 214, 252–253, 288. See also bicultural families / individuals Iroquois. See Haudenosaunee Jackson, Andrew: acquisition of family ties, 154, 155–156; adoptions by, 140–141, 152, 156; on assimilation of Native people, 285; awareness of slavery and adoption practices, 152–153; biography of, 363n31;



changing discourse on Native people, 165–166, 168–169; conflict with Native slaveholders, 143, 169–170; on Creeks, 141, 167; and Dinsmoor, 104; Doak’s Stand treaty, 222; on enslavement of Native people, 163–164; Florida campaigns, 168; gifts home from Creek War, 161–162; half breed argument to discredit Native leaders, 279–280, 392n18; household relations, 156–159; land speculation, 145, 155; marriage, 155–156, 365n61; and McKenney, 205–206; Native visitors to Hermitage, 367n94; paternalism of, 152, 159, 163, 168–169; on plantations, 139–140, 172; removal policy, 105, 205, 271, 277–278, 283, 299, 302; as slaveowner, 155, 156–159; and Supreme Court decisions, 313; tarnished reputation, 149–150, 155. See also Creek War; Lyncoya Jackson, Andrew, Jr., 139, 152, 156, 159, 160–162 Jackson, Hannah, 10, 70, 71, 73, 79 Jackson, Rachel, 139, 155–156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 163, 365n61 Jacobs, Harriet, 199 Jacobs, Margery, 10, 70 Jamestown settlement, 6–7 Jefferson, Thomas (U.S. official): on agrarian economy, 39; bio-political vision for Native people, 28–29, 327n55; and expansionism, 13, 14, 16, 87; and factory system, 178–179, 183; and Georgian land claims, 281–282; and indigenous memorabilia, 102; lack of personal experience with Native people, 326n47; Louisiana Purchase, 85; Notes on the State of Virginia, 24, 32; on race and reproduction, 24–28; simplistic view of Native people, 37; and slavery, 16–17 Jefferson, Thomas (Apuckshunubbee’s son), 103, 116, 358n70 Jemison, Mary, 53 Jenny (enslaved by Richard Mentor Johnson), 263



INDEX

Jenny (purchased and emancipated by William Cooper), 134 Johnson, Adaline Chinn, 261, 263, 264, 265 Johnson, Imogene Chinn, 261, 263, 264 Johnson, Richard Mentor: Choctaw Academy at home of, 234, 245, 246–247; criticisms of, 259–260; family with Julia Chinn, 261; paternalism of, 259–260, 262; patriarchal authority undermined by students, 236, 262–264, 265, 267–268, 270; response to criticisms, 263; as slaveowner, 261–262, 264, 390n122; spatial dimensions of plantation authority, 263–264. See also Choctaw Academy Jones, Robert, 108, 151, 220, 257–258, 269–270, 312 Juzan, Charles, 255, 258 Juzan, Pierre, 391n143 Kazanjian, David, 326n45 Kendall, Amos, 165, 170 Kentucky Baptist Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Heathen, 193 Kidwell, Clara Sue, 216, 384n29, 384n36 King, Adam, 287 King, Peter, 263 Kingsbury, Cyrus: at Brainerd School, 190; and Lydia Carter, 192; and Choctaw schooling, 223, 232, 238, 245, 379n38, 383n13; and Choctaw missions, 237–238, 239–240, 384n32; on James McDonald’s death, 311; on Mushulatubbee, 244, 385n53; Native students as laborers, 191, 241; on removal treaty, 307, 308, 397n13; on Washington treaty, 379n40 kinship: and Anglo household structure, 19; and British colonialism, 19; changing notions among U.S.- educated Native people, 295–296; Cherokee, 294; Choctaw, 91, 128, 293, 355n35; contested meanings, 42, 331n109; Creek, 147, 148; and diplomacy, 50, 128, 129; and expansionism,

9, 17, 83; Haudenosaunee, 50; and inequality, 11; matrilineal descent, 38; Native concepts of, 42, 292; and race, 23, 25; and slaves, 152; Southern settlers, 154; use of term, 331n109 Kirkland, Samuel, 64 Knox, Henry, 24, 31–35, 38, 39–40, 44, 49, 77, 328n76, 329n77 Krauthamer, Barbara, 239, 382n4 Lancasterian education system, 190–191, 260 land cessions. See expansionism Leacock, Eleanor, 330n90 Lebanon (OH), 211 Leflore, Brazil, 391n143 Leflore, Greenwood, 10, 129, 132, 217, 251, 258, 270, 273, 307, 308 Leflore, Louis, 132, 136 Louisiana Purchase, 85 Lucy (enslaved by Richard Mentor Johnson), 263, 266 Lyncoya: accounts of Jackson’s finding, 140, 146–147; apprenticeship to saddle maker, 170–171; as companion for Andrew Jr., 160–161, 162; as compensation for Jackson’s absence, 153, 160; death, 171–172; designation as “son” by Jackson, 169; distinction from enslaved people of African descent, 162–163; does not return to homelands, 4; and expansionism, 41; introduction to, 2, 10–11, 140, 143; and Jackson’s characterization of Indians, 280; Jackson’s hopes for, 170; Kendall on, 165; life with Jacksons, 162, 164–165; loss of political value, 171; and plantation space, 172; as reflection of Jackson’s benevolence, 142, 148–149, 150; as reflection of triumph over Native people, 147; status in Jackson household, 153–154, 161–162, 162–163, 164–165; as wartime relic, 162 Mackey, David, 278 Mad Dog, 31

INDEX

Madison, James, 175, 183, 184, 189, 326n47 Manteo, 6 marriage. See intermarriage Marshall, Humphrey, 73 Marshall, John (chief justice), 207, 302, 313 Marshall, John (Quaker), 73 Massachusetts, 3 McCurtain, Daniel, 224, 233, 241 McDonald, James Lawrence: advocacy for mother, 108, 135–136, 221–222, 228–229; and alcohol, 231–232, 310, 316; belief in Native and settler coexistence, 207, 209–210, 228; on bicultural Choctaw leaders, 292–293; bill on legal rights for Native people, 310; birth and childhood, 125, 352n6; on Choctaw Academy, 247–248, 249–250, 258; and Choctaw Constitution, 255; as Choctaw diplomat, 205, 208–209, 210, 224, 247; on Choctaw education, 223, 227, 235–236, 248–249, 250, 255–256, 257; death, 311–312, 316, 399n27; on denied Choctaw rights, 230–231; desire for and return to Choctaws, 196–197, 214; dislike for clerical work, 195, 375n92; education during placements, 129, 132–133; exoticized by McKenney, 197–198; expectations met by, 273; on fi nal Choctaw land cession negotiations east of the Mississippi, 272–273, 278; in Jackson, 258, 388n105; legal training and practice, 205, 208, 211–212, 222–223; life after Choctaw removal, 309–311; on paper warfare, 294, 395n61; placement with Dinsmoor, 10, 81–82, 102, 105–106, 108, 125, 126–129, 130–132, 135–137, 312; placement with McKenney, 10, 36, 173–174, 188–189, 193, 194–196, 197; placement with Quakers, 79, 82; portrait, 215, 315–316; racism in Ohio, 212, 213, 214; and removal treaty, 300–301, 307, 308, 398n18; re sistance from, 206, 226–228, 278, 300; settler



expectations for, 196; silence on women’s schooling, 269; sovereignty basis in property rights, 210, 229–230, 231; as successful “civilization” example, 187–188; uncertain status according to settlers, 302; Washington treaty negotiations, 225–226, 227–228, 231–233 McDonald, Molly: ancestry, 113, 115–116, 354n21; approach to, 108–109; archival resources on, 109; authority retained by, 117–118; birth, 109, 352n6; childhood amid economic transformations, 111; children, 109, 355n30; difficulties with written documents, 135–136, 229; economic initiatives, 107–108, 124–125, 220; end of life, 312; marriages, 115, 117–118; as minority in homeland, 216; motherhood, 116; name of, 352n5; naming of elder son, 119; placement of son Alexander with William Anderson, 127; placement of son James with Silas Dinsmoor, 1, 106, 108, 126–128, 135–137, 312; property rights, 217, 220–221, 232; and slavery, 113–114, 118, 119; slave swindle experience, 135–136, 221–222, 228–229, 232 McGillivray, Alexander, 31, 61, 65 McIntosh, William (Taskanugi Hatke), 251, 282 McKee, John, 124, 225, 237, 345n23, 351n100 McKenney, Thomas Loraine: adoptees as subordinates, 41, 204; adoption of James McDonald, 10, 173–174, 188–189, 194–196, 369n1; adoption of other Native boys, 137, 174, 202–203, 204–206; advocacy for Indian “civilization,” 187–188, 194; approach to, 175; background, 175; bio-political vision of, 185–186; and Choctaw Academy, 247, 257; civilization bill, 193–194, 201, 372n53; Indian policy plans, 186–187; and indigenous memorabilia, 102; loss of federal job, 205–206; on James McDonald, 187–188, 197–198, 231, 311; on mission schools, 186, 188, 190, 191;



INDEX

McKenney, Thomas Loraine (continued) and mission societies, 189–190, 192–194; and Quakers, 189; reasons for adoptions, 36–37, 174, 193; and removal policy, 202; sexual dimension toward household subordinates, 200–201; as superintendent of Bureau of Indian Affairs, 196, 202; as superintendent of Indian trade, 173, 175–176, 179–182, 183, 184–185; in Washington treaty negotiations, 226, 227, 232 McLean, John, 205, 210–212, 377n3 McLean, William, 286–287 McLoughlin, William, 283 McRae, Alexander, 217 McVain, James, 206 Meinig, D. W., 189 memorabilia, indigenous, 101–102, 161–162 Mieirs, Jennifer, 116 Miles, Tiya, 23, 117, 230, 297, 321n23, 360n108, 396n67 military force, 30, 31–32, 33–34, 38 militia, volunteer, 146, 363n27 missionaries, 34, 59, 64, 69, 193–194, 277. See also American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions mission schools: attendance at, 201, 319n8; Brainerd School, 190, 192, 374n80; family imagery for, 36, 192, 374n80; McKenney’s vision for, 186, 188; students as laborers, 191, 241–242. See also Choctaw schooling; schooling Mississippi, 121–122, 216, 281, 306, 310 Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, 309 Mitchell, Samuel, 345n23 Mohawk Nation, 47 Mohican people, 68, 72. See also Stockbridge Nation Monroe, James, 171, 189, 227, 285 Morgan, Phillip Carroll, 311 Murray, William Vans, 177, 371n40 Muscogee Nation. See Creek Nation Mushulatubbee: attempt to regain support, 244, 385n53; on bicultural opponents, 292;

and Choctaw Academy, 234–235, 244–247; educational concerns, 241; educational vision, 227, 235–236, 385n48; Folsom as rival, 243, 247; land cessions by, 225; on missionaries, 236–237; political crisis precipitated by, 247; removal as chief, 251, 387n75; removal from homeland, 306–307; school at home of, 238, 242–244, 384n29; as slaveholder, 240; in Washington treaty negotiations, 224, 225, 227, 232 Nail, Joel, 255 Nancy (enslaved by Andrew Jackson), 155 Natchez Trace, 87–88, 121, 122, 129–130, 358n80 national family, 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 60, 76, 77, 79, 102, 104, 125, 174, 206, 271, 274, 275, 301 Native Americans: and alcohol, 286; attenuated national autonomy, 60–61; changing discourses on, 165–166, 168–169, 171, 198, 280; contemporary child removal from, 7–8; engagement with U.S. colonial practices as double-edged, 138, 299; history of settler interactions, 6–7; on kinship, 38, 42, 292; on land ownership, 38–39; market activities, 37–38, 39–40; pan-Indian movements, 30–31, 82, 126, 212, 213, 291, 293–294; on race, 112; settler attitudes toward, 324n31; as slaves, 6, 27, 163–164; sovereignty, 5, 24, 32, 35, 38, 42, 45, 46, 51, 64, 67, 93, 209, 210, 229–230, 231, 300, 301, 302, 313; Supreme Court cases on, 302, 313; transportation networks into Native land, 189, 276; vanishing Indian trope, 169, 171, 213, 305, 394n40. See also adoption; agriculture, Native; assimilation; bicultural families / individuals; “civilization” programs; expansionism; imperialism; Native American children, in white families; removal policy; Southeast Indians; women, Native American; specific nations

INDEX

Native American children, in white families: by Choctaws, 132–133, 135–136; as common practice, 10–11; Cornplanter’s initiative, 44, 49–51, 52, 55, 59; economic lessons learned by, 132–133, 136–138; graduates as Native representatives, 206, 209, 273; Haudenosaunee concerns, 54, 65–66, 74–76; and kinship, 42; Native initiative, 1–2, 42, 137–138; reasons for placement, 4–5, 12, 41–42, 45, 51–52, 65, 66, 108–109, 273, 312; by Stockbridge, 10, 44, 65–66. See also adoption; bicultural families / individuals; McDonald, James; residential schools Neolin, 15 New York, 276 Niles’ Weekly Register, 310 Northrup, Sarah, 214 Obail, Henry, 44, 49, 55, 63, 77 O’Brien, Greg, 119, 347n45 Office of Indian Trade, 173, 175–176, 183, 195. See also factory system Ohio, 212 Oneida Nation, 47, 48, 62, 64, 65–66, 67, 69–70 Onondaga Nation, 47, 71 Osage Nation, 192 Overton, John, 155 pan-Indian movements, 30–31, 82, 126, 212, 213, 291, 293–294. See also United Indian Nations paper warfare, 294, 395n61 Parrish, John, 63 Parthene (enslaved by Richard Mentor Johnson), 264 paternalism, 22, 324n36. See also Dinsmoor, Silas; Jackson, Andrew; Johnson, Richard Mentor Patience (enslaved by Richard Mentor Johnson), 263 patriarchy: challenges to, 204, 255, 262, 263–264, 267–268; and expansionism, 83;



and household construction through slavery, 96–97; importance in ideas about social order, 19, 23, 323n29; Native people as threat to, 122, 169–170, 206–207, 213–214; Native people expected to adopt, 33–34, 40, 86; protective claims of, 148; and racial hierarchies, 23–24, 122, 153, 198–199, 261, 263–264; rights over households, 156, 198–199, 263; U.S. kinship as, 42; and James Vann, 117; and women’s role, 72 Pearl River Valley, 107, 115, 131, 216–217 Peggy (Molly McDonald’s sister), 113, 115, 116 Penn, William, 56 Perdue, Theda, 344n19, 347n45 Peters, Mary. See Doxtater, Mary Pickering, Timothy, 40, 55, 63–64, 76, 77 Piker, Joshua, 128 Pitchlynn, James, 225 Pitchlynn, John, 92, 134, 136, 224 Pitchlynn, Peter: at Choctaw Academy, 257–258, 259, 262, 267, 270; on Choctaw Constitution, 251–252; placement with whites, 10, 132, 239, 257, 359n93; and removal treaty, 308 Pitchlynn, Sophia (née Folsom), 92, 132, 136, 224, 225, 238 plantations, 111, 172, 347n47 play-off system, 110 Pocahontas (Amonute), 7 Porter, Peter B., 287, 392n9 Preston, David L., 50, 337n61 Proclamation of 1763, 15–16 Prucha, Francis Paul, 372n48, 372n53 Pushmataha, 224, 225, 226, 232, 347n47 Quakers: adoption of Seneca children, 36, 44, 50–51, 59–60, 63; adoptions by, 44, 61–62, 76, 79; charitable work focus, 58; concerns about adoptions, 77–78; conflicting expectations over adoptions, 78–79; diplomatic relations with Native



INDEX

Quakers (continued) people, 55, 62–63; domestic labors of women as barrier to adoption, 72–73; and expansionism, 45; federal support for, 63–64; history of Native relations, 56–57, 58–59; marginalization of, 57–58; and McKenney, 189; missionary work among Native people, 64, 189, 342n149; “mission families” focus, 79; Native people on adoptions by, 50–51, 55, 64, 65–66; on Native women, 71–72; reasons for adoptions, 37, 45–46; requirements for adoptees, 78; of Stockbridge and Tuscarora girls, 44, 66, 67; vision for Native education, 69–70; women, 72–74, 341n132. See also women, Quakers race: changing notions among U.S.-educated Native people, 132–134, 295–296; colonialism justified by, 17–18; depictions of people of African descent, 22–23, 24; depictions of Native people, 19–20, 23–24; and gender, 382n4; Jefferson on, 24–27; Native people on, 112, 292, 347n45; and reproduction, 11, 17, 19, 214, 322n7. See also bicultural families / individuals; intermarriage; reproduction racehorses, 360–361n1 Raleigh Register, 301, 302 Red Jacket, 63 Red Sticks, 142, 143, 144–145, 151, 166, 167, 292, 357n68 Reid, John, 146, 363n31 Remini, Robert, 155, 351n97 removal policy: and adoption, 284; arguments against, 289–291, 395n51; arguments for, 274–275, 288–289, 306; and Choctaws, 306–309; debates over, 283–284, 284–287; impact of adoptees on, 273–275; by Jackson administration, 206, 271, 283, 299, 302; and McKenney, 202; national security argument, 289, 291; Native opposition to, 275–276, 292,

294–295, 300, 305–306; negative impact on Native people, 291; racial purity argument, 287–289, 301; Supreme Court cases on, 302, 313; vanishing Indian argument, 394n40. See also “civilization” programs; expansionism reproduction: adoption as mode of, 11, 12–13; characterizations of African and Indian, 18–19; and debates on Indian policy, 285; and inequality, 11; and intermarriage, 214, 288; Jefferson on, 25–28; Knox on Native, 34–35; and right to rule, 285. See also intermarriage; kinship residential schools, 7, 199–200, 206, 320n18, 358n86 Revolutionary War, 13, 16, 20, 22, 47 Rhodes, John, 107, 108, 115, 220 Richter, Daniel K., 342n149 Ridge, John, 203, 214, 288, 292, 294, 295, 297, 298, 367n94 Rifkin, Mark, 327n55, 331n109 Roanoke settlement, 6 Robards, Rachel Donelson. See Jackson, Rachel Rogin, Michael Paul, 169, 366n84 Romans, Bernard, 265–266, 390n132 Ross, John, 203, 283, 298, 304, 305 Ross, John Henry Eaton, 303–305 Ross, John Osage, 192 Sally (Molly McDonald’s sister), 113, 115, 116 Sandy (enslaved by Andrew Jackson), 157–158 Sargent, Winthrop, 121 schooling, 65, 190–191, 260, 372n48. See also Choctaw Academy; Choctaw schooling; mission schools; residential schools self-determination. See sovereignty, Native Seminole people, 40, 168 Seneca Nation: adoption precedents, 53; disillusionment with children’s placements, 74–76; in fur trade, 335n35; as

INDEX

Haudenosaunee, 46; placement of children, 36, 43–44, 48–49, 49–51, 59–60, 63; and Revolutionary War, 46 Seven Years’ War, 14, 46, 47, 57, 110, 337n61 sexual violence, 28, 155, 158, 198–200, 201, 261, 262, 264–267, 326n54, 390n130 Shammas, Carole, 19 Shaw, Leonard, 40 Silver, Peter, 212, 377n10 Simmons, Henry, 65–66, 67, 79 Six Nations. See Haudenosaunee slavery: Africans and African Americans associated with, 3; and arguments concerning birthrates, 27; association with field labor, 241–242; in bicultural households, 113–114; and Cherokees, 116–117, 295–296, 297, 360n108, 396n67; and Choctaw Academy, 258–259, 263–265, 266–268; Choctaw Constitution on, 252–254, 264–265; and Choctaw masculinity, 236; by Choctaws, 91, 112, 113, 118–119; and denial of kinship rights, 2, 3, 100, 152, 253, 295; and Dinsmoor, 98–99, 100, 104, 349n63, 351n97; documentation of sales, 133–134; and exchange economy, 134; expansionism and, 16–17; fear of uprisings, 121–122; by Jackson, 155, 156–159; by Johnson, 261–262, 264, 390n122; justification of, 98; literature on Native slaveholders, 116–117; by Molly McDonald, 118, 119, 135–136, 221–222, 228–229; and missionaries, 239; by Mushulatubbee, 240; Native people as slaves, 6, 27, 163–164; Native slaveowners as threat to settlers, 203, 206–207, 270; Native struggles over ownership rights, 135–136, 221–222, 228–229; self-determination via ownership, 96–97, 210, 229–230; sexual violence, 28, 155, 158, 198–199, 201, 261, 262, 264–265, 266–267, 326n54; slaveholder rights, 198–199, 263–264; by Southeast Indians, 4, 9, 116–117, 118–119,



170, 204; violence required to maintain, 119, 121–122, 157–159, 262; and white household formation, 100, 364n48. See also African Americans; women, African and African American Smallwood, Stephanie, 349n66 Smith, Oliver H., 285–286, 394n37 Southard, Henry, 193 Southeast Indians: adoption precedents, 128, 151; allies sought by, 293–294; dislocation of economies of, 39–40; fanimingo chiefs, 128; fear of conflict with, 31, 38; importance of land to, 305–306; kinship views, 292; as obstacles to U.S. expansion, 144; and pan-Indian resistance, 31, 82, 103, 126, 293–294; paper warfare by, 294, 395n61; placement in white homes, 1–2, 4–5, 80, 108–109; Porter on, 392n9; postwar defeat of, 61; resistance to land cessions, 277; as slaveholders, 4, 9, 116–117, 170, 204; slaveowners as threat to settlers, 203, 206–207, 270. See also bicultural families / individuals; Cherokee Nation; Chickasaw Nation; Choctaws; Creek Nation sovereignty, Native, 5, 24, 32, 35, 38, 42, 45, 46, 51, 64, 67, 93, 209, 210, 229–230, 231, 300, 301, 302, 313 Spain, 31, 85, 89, 111, 120 Stockbridge Nation, 62, 64, 65–66, 66–67, 67–69, 70, 72, 79. See also women, Native American Strimble, Joseph, 72–73 Swanwick, John, 177 Swift, Zephaniah, 183 Tallushatchee, 145–146 Tapenahoma, 247, 250, 251 Tecumseh, 82, 103, 126, 357n68 Terrill, John, 10 textile weaving, 42, 69, 70–71, 74, 86 Theodore (child in Jackson household), 162, 366n84



INDEX

Thomas, Isaac, 187 Thomas, Philip E., 189 Trade and Intercourse Acts, 34 Trahern, Wesley, 217 transportation networks, 189, 276, 343n10 treaties: Canandaigua, 63; Dancing Rabbit Creek, 308–309; Doak’s Stand, 216–217, 220, 222, 225, 226; Fort Confederation, 122–123; Fort Jackson, 167, 168; Fort Stanwix, 53; Greenville, 61; Hoe Buckintoopa, 123; Indian Springs, 282; Lancaster, 54, 65; Mount Dexter, 123; San Lorenzo, 85, 120; Washington, 225–226, 227–228, 231–233, 234, 244 Trimble, Joseph, 62, 77–78 Turnbull, George, 217 Tuscarora Nation, 47, 62, 64, 65–66, 66–67, 72 Tyson, Isaac, 188 United Indian Nations, 49, 59, 61, 67, 68. See also pan-Indian movements Usner, Daniel H., Jr., 179 van Hoak, Stephen, 110–111 Vann, James, 117, 119, 297 Vann, Joseph, 203 Vann, Peggy, 117, 297 Vaun, Samuel, 124 Velasco, Don Luis de, 6 Vinton, Samuel, 291 Viola, Herman, 181 Walker, Enoch, 64 Wall, David, 263 Wallace, Anthony, 102, 326n47 wampum, 72, 181, 371n27 Wanchese, 6 Ward, William: and Choctaw Academy, 234, 244, 245, 246, 247–248, 249, 256; and Choctaw removal, 309; as Indian agent, 244; on Mushulatubbee, 385n48, 385n53 War of 1812, 82, 105, 142, 153, 174, 212, 361n9. See also Creek War

Washington (MS), 129–130 Washington, George, 43–44, 47–48, 49, 50, 55, 63, 76, 177, 178 Weems, John C., 288 Wells, Samuel J., 91, 309 Wheeler, Rachel, 68 White, Joseph, 287, 394n40 White Path, 298 Wickersham, Enoch, 73 Wilson, Thomas, 62, 77–78 Wolfe, Patrick, 393n30 women, African and African American: characterizations of, 18–19, 98, 199; and the Cherokee Constitution, 295; and Choctaw sovereignty, 236, 253–254, 267; in contests over Southern mastery, 236, 262–264, 267–268; enslaved barred from kinship rights, 2, 3, 100, 152, 253, 295; free, 134, 135, 252, 254, 325n37; labors of, 96, 261–262, 325n37; and relationships with Native men, 264; re sistance to slavery by, 122, 158, 264, 266, 270; sexual violence against enslaved, 28, 155, 158, 199, 201, 261, 262, 264–265, 266–267, 326n54. See also gender; intermarriage; reproduction women, Native American: and agricultural techniques, 37, 242, 330n90; characterizations of, 18–19, 39; control over household resources, 38, 117–118; fewer possibilities for schooling for Choctaw, 268–269; in Haudenosaunee territories, 71–72; influence of U.S.-educated, 66; lack of documentation on, 67, 109; market activities of Choctaw, 107–108, 112, 123, 124–125, 221; motherhood roles, 138; political authority, 38; resistance by, 109, 138; roles of, 38, 354n25; settler discourse adopted for, 297; sexual violence against, 199; significance of spinning and weaving for Stockbridge and Haudenosaunee, 4, 42, 69, 70–71; in Southeast as slaveholders, 108, 116–119, 220–221; Stock-

INDEX

bridge Nation, 68–69; as symbol for Revolutionaries, 20, 22; and wampum, 72. See also agriculture, Native; gender; intermarriage; reproduction; specific nations women, Quaker, 72–74, 341n132 women, white: as adopters of Native American children 10, 11, 70, 73, 79, 101, 192, 303–306; characterizations of 18, 20, 23; commitments to expansionism, 95; investments in racial slavery, 157, 349n65;



relationships with Native men, 214, 288; and Republican motherhood, 23, 72, 214, 325n40. See also gender; intermarriage; reproduction Woods, John, 289–290, 294, 395n51 Worcester, Samuel, 193, 302 Worcester v. Georgia, 302, 313 Yoholo Micco, 137, 202 Zainaldin, Jamil S., 3