Ebony and Ivy (39 page)

White southerners were now poised to claim tens of millions of acres from multiple Native nations. The 1830 Indian Removal Act authorized the federal government to treat with Native nations to swap lands in the East for territories across the Mississippi. The following year, Chief Justice John Marshall declared Indians “domestic dependent nations” in
Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia
. The decision invoked the scientific notion of a hierarchy of the human races to depict the political subordination of all indigenous peoples as inevitable.
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Those same political pressures had reshaped evangelical outreach to Native Americans and African Americans. A Bible Society founder and future president of Rutgers College, Philip Milledoler designed missions to Indian nations west of the Mississippi River. Planters and settlers eyeing agricultural lands in the southeastern states helped push national policy toward removal, and missionary activity deferred to their politics. Simultaneously, Rev. Milledoler also joined Williams president Edward Dorr Griffin in promoting African colonization. Father Milledoler and Henry Rutgers served as the founding vice president and president, respectively, of the New York Colonization Society.
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Although many northerners opposed Indian removal, it was precisely the success of the racial clearances in the South that offered the most compelling evidence that a campaign to relocate free black people and conduct religious crusades on the African continent and throughout the colored world were viable. The prolonged attack upon Native presences gave millions of Americans reason to believe that all subject peoples could be disappeared. It was through Indian removal that the desire to eliminate nonwhite, non-Christian presences came to dominate the popular culture.

“Where the Indian always
has been
, he enjoys an absolute right still to
be
,” Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen declared in opposition to Georgia's steps to remove the Cherokee nation. The future chancellor of the University of the City of New York (New York University) and future president of Rutgers University was one of the most prominent defenders of the Indians in the southeastern states. It belongs among the great speeches of United States history, if only for its elegant defense of the separation of powers and its articulation of the principle of state subordination to federal authority. Frelinghuysen warned that the violation of treaties with Indian nations would undermine the integrity of the United States government. Even mere contracts constrain all parties, but the Cherokee possessed more than pieces of paper recording ancient promises. They were a sovereign nation, the senator thundered. European powers had recognized their sovereignty throughout the colonial era, and the United States had repeatedly affirmed their national status. “I ask in what code of the law of nation, or by what process of abstract deduction, their rights have been extinguished?” These treaties constituted exchanges of obligations, and now Georgia sought to keep the gains but toss off the responsibilities. “Truth and honor have no citadel on earth—their sanctions are despised and forgotten, and the law of the strongest prevails,” Frelinghuysen charged. Raw greed threatened the constitution. Native people had ceded hundreds of millions of acres of land to the United States by purchase and by treaty, “yet we crave more.” That hunger was so great, so insatiable, that it could be neither satisfied nor restrained by contract, honor, or principle.
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When President Jackson visited Harvard in 1834, the residents of Cambridge sharply divided over whether and how to protest his Indian removal policy. By the time that Jackson left the White House, federal relocation programs had affected virtually every nation east of the Mississippi and north to Lake Michigan. Native peoples from New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Midwest—including the Oneida, Winnebago, and Black Hawk—were uprooted, and the policy remapped the South. The “Five Civilized
Tribes”—Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole—were cleared. The government cultivated political and economic conditions that made removal the only option for many communities, and federal troops warred against Native nations that did not comply. Martin Van Buren of New York was secretary of state in Andrew Jackson's cabinet and part of the northern bloc that sided with Georgia. In 1838 President Van Buren concluded this tragic era with the deadly forced march of the Cherokee along the “Trail of Tears.”
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Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen, president of Rutgers and
New York University
SOURCE: Library of Congress

Many northerners condemned Georgians for supporting any permutation of state and federal power—whatever its constitutionality—that promised to clear Indians off rich agricultural lands. Southerners responded by lampooning these fiery defenses of Cherokee territorial rights from northerners whose recent family
histories were intertwined with the violent subordination of Indian peoples and whose regional histories included the erasure of scores of Native sovereignties. What if his ancestors were “a blood-thirsty race?” Congressman Edward Everett of Massachusetts cautiously allowed. What if they “treated the Indians barbarously?” A former Harvard professor and a future president and trustee of the college, Everett argued that a prior breach was a poor defense for a new injustice.
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President Edward Everett of Harvard
SOURCE: Library of Congress

While northerners could find fault with the necessity and legality of Indian removal, they could hardly disown the underlying body of ideas. Countless white people in New England and the Mid-Atlantic were convinced of not only the possibility of racially homogenizing their regions but also the value of that project. They were building a social geography consistent with their political and economic desires. The presuppositions of removal campaigns—particularly the biological basis of civilization and citizenship—were informed by racial ideas that had ascended in every region of the antebellum nation.

Congressman Everett shared the New Jersey senator's sense of the potentially tragic consequences of Indian removal. Everett signed a copy of Frelinghuysen's speech and sent it to the librarian of Harvard, John Langdon Sibley. “I cannot disguise my impression, that it is the greatest question which ever came before Congress, short of the question of peace and war,” Everett estimated. He argued that the reputation of the United States in all its foreign affairs was at issue. Georgia sought to strip a sovereign and friendly nation of its land and open that territory to white settlement. It declared the Cherokee its subjects in order to acquire the power to turn them into exiles and refugees. Its primary justification was to protect the Cherokee from an aggressively expanding white population. “Who urges this plea?” asked Frelinghuysen. “They who covet the Indian lands.” Proponents offered a circular explanation that Indians had to be driven away to secure them from the people driving them away.
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Frelinghuysen and Everett made impassioned defenses of the humanity and equality of the Cherokee. “The Indians are men, endowed with kindred faculties and powers with ourselves,” the senator appealed, “they have a place in human sympathy, and are justly entitled to share in the common bounties of benignant Providence.” They were no less the children of God and no less a part of the divine plan. The northerners cited Thomas Jefferson's affirmation of Cherokee civilization. Everett recalled that the Virginian had helped to organize the Cherokee government. These Indians had embraced Christianity, commercial trade, farming and advanced agricultural techniques, and democracy. They had skilled
political leaders, successful businessmen and merchants, artisans, and professionals. “Men as competent as ourselves” were being robbed of privilege and property, Everett countered.
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These crusades peaked in the 1830s. As Congressman Everett was sending Harvard a copy of Frelinghuysen's speech, Elliot Cresson was forwarding a signed copy of the annual report of the Pennsylvania Colonization Society to Harvard president Josiah Quincy. A wealthy merchant and college benefactor, Cresson was one of four Philadelphians to hold a $1,000 life membership in the American Colonization Society. He worked as an ACS agent, and he had raised funds for the cause in England. “The removal of our coloured population is, I think, a common object,” wrote Chief Justice Marshall in 1831, the year of
Cherokee v. Georgia
. “The whole union would be strengthened by it, and relieved from a danger whose extent can scarcely be estimated.” Justice Marshall joined former president James Madison in arguing the practicality and constitutionality of selling federal lands to fund African colonization.
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The advocates of Indian removal did not always mirror the communities urging the relocation of other peoples. Senator Frelinghuysen's robust defense of the Cherokee led the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to invite him to extend that compassion to enslaved black people. The senator fit the profile of an antislavery advocate. He was a leading social and religious activist and was involved in a range of reform movements, including temperance, the improvement of prisons, and public education. Garrison had also been a colonizationist, but, like many people in the humanitarian wing of the ACS, he turned to abolition as the organization became hostile to emancipation and as African Americans expressed unified and strident opposition to the plan. Frelinghuysen seemed to sit in that liberal camp, and he had earlier worked with progressives such as Arthur Tappan and Gerrit Smith, both of whom transitioned from colonizationism to abolitionism.
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The editor had reason to believe that the senator could be coaxed toward antislavery. During an 1824 fund-raiser for the New Jersey Colonization Society, Frelinghuysen had rehearsed many of the ideas that later informed his defense of the Cherokee. He emphasized the philanthropic aims of colonization: providing a refuge
for the victims of the slave trade rescued at sea and creating a “home” for the free black communities of the United States. He hinted at the association's antislavery potential, however distant. He declared slavery unjustifiable and rebuked the nation for denying physical and spiritual liberty to millions of people. Frelinghuysen even defended the intellectual and cultural capacity of African peoples, arguing that suggestions of their inferiority were erroneous in a society that outlawed their advancement and invoking the Haitian Revolution and its black generals as examples of their capacity.
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Theodore Frelinghuysen simultaneously considered the free black population “a separate, degraded, scorned, and humbled people.” That bleak assessment closed a lecture that was otherwise sympathetic to the plight of free and enslaved African Americans. Frelinghuysen had grown up in a slaveholding house. His father, Frederick Frelinghuysen, was the stepson of the Reverend Jacob Hardenbergh, the president of Queen's College (Rutgers) and a slave owner. After graduating from New Jersey in 1770, Frederick Frelinghuysen became the first tutor at Queen's. He married Gitty Schenk—of the wealthy Dutch slaveholding family—and owned slaves throughout his life.
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Senator Frelinghuysen's racial beliefs regulated his compassion. The ideas that grounded his virile defense of the Cherokee also informed his final judgment against the emancipation of black people. As Frelinghuysen explained, race was “a line of demarcation drawn deep and broad; and durable as time.” No matter how fully one sympathized with the enslaved, race made abolition, to quote President Wilbur Fisk of Wesleyan University, an exercise in “moral quackery.” Fisk was complaining that a recent publication had quoted him in ways that suggested he was an abolitionist. He publicly rejected abolition and announced his support for colonizing black people. Frelinghuysen also saw removing African Americans as a superior alternative to the “madness of self-destruction” inherent in abolition. He began his chancellorship at the University of the City of New York with a pro-colonization tour of the city. Later, as a vice presidential candidate on the Whig ticket in 1844, Frelinghuysen offered his long tenure in the American Colonization
Society as evidence of goodwill toward southern slaveholders.
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