To find America’s soul, one must reckon with its original sin, writes Debashree Dattaray.
Route I
Every step we took was one away from the songs,
old dances, memories, some of us dark and not speaking English,
some of us white, or married to the dark, or children of translators
the half-white, all of us watched by America, all of us
longing for trees for shade, homing, rooting,
even more for food along the hunger way.[1]
—Linda Hogan, ‘Trail of Tears: Our Removal’
In 1829, a gold rush took place on Cherokee land in Georgia. With the possibility of such cosmic proportions of wealth, land speculators including President Andrew Jackson demanded that the US Congress devolve all land properties from the indigenous communities of the region. Consequently, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act (1830). This eventually led to the forced relocation of Eastern Woodlands Indians of the Southeast region of the United States—Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, and Seminole—to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. Military and indigenous records suggest that approximately 100,000 indigenous people were forcibly removed from their homes during that period, and that some 15,000 passed away from exposure, malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease during the journey west.
The relocation was in direct violation of the British Proclamation of 1763, which had designated the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River as Indian Territory. Even though the region had been marked as exclusive to the indigenous peoples, many Euro-American land speculators had entered these areas, and the British and later the US governments ignored these acts of trespass.
The Trail of Tears invokes a story of deprivation, disenfranchisement and gradual eradication of an entire civilisation in the United States. In 1987, Congress designated the Trail of Tears as a National Historic Trail and by 2009, the original trail had more than doubled in size due to the addition of newly documented routes.
Military and indigenous records suggest that approximately 100,000 indigenous people were forcibly removed from their homes during that period, and that some 15,000 passed away from exposure, malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease during the journey west.
On 31 May 1838, Reverend Steven Foreman—Cherokee citizen and member of the National Council—awaited soldiers to come and forcibly remove him from his home in southeastern Tennessee and writes thus in a letter:
From the date of my letter you will perceive that I am still in Cherokee Nation East …How much longer we shall be permitted to remain in our own lands, to enjoy our rights and privileges, I do not know. From the present state of affairs, we shall very soon be without house and home.[2]
The words reflect the Reverend’s deep-rooted love for the echoing Great Smoky Mountains, integral to Cherokee imagination and culture for generations. Further, he also voices well-founded apprehensions of the “ethnic cleansing” to follow. The Trail of Tears can be seen today as one of the many devastating events in aftermath to Columbus’s “discovery” of America.
The United Nations Security Council defined ethnic cleansing as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”[3] With the racial rhetoric supporting removal, President Andrew Jackson’s response to the Act with terms such as “savages”, “red men”, “children of the forest”[4], the Trail of Tears was a watershed moment and an infamous chapter of America history—a sordid drama of politics, power, betrayal and ambition. Aptly, the literal Cherokee translation of the event is “the trail where we cried.” The intellectual history of the ideas and the policies that made the Trail of Tears possible could be directly connected to the evolution and maturation of a United States of America.
Route II
“…the heart has no tears to give—it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Sometime around Thanksgiving Day (ironical in its implications!) in 1862, Harriet Beecher Stowe met President Abraham Lincoln, who allegedly greeted her with the following words: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” Published in serialised form in 1851–52 in The National Era, an anti-slavery paper from Washington, DC, and in a two volume book form in 1852 by John P Jewett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life among the Lowly created a tumult in the political, cultural, literary and emotional climate of the United States of America.Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed US literary history and also gave rise to deeply contradictory and often violently antagonistic perceptions of race, gender, region and nation. The author’s vision of the death of Uncle Tom as a crucified and glorifying Christ, rising from the dead and speaking to her as “the black man, cut and bleeding under the blows of the slave whip”, had led to the writing of the cataclysmic novel.
Two reasons embedded in Stowe’s emotional and political imagination may be articulated behind the vision. First, the death of her infant son, Charley, evoked the lamentation. Second, the novel is a sharp indictment and protest against the Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated northerners to capture and return runaway slaves. For eighteen years, Stowe lived in Cincinnati—separated by the Ohio River from a slave holding community—where she came in contact with runaway slaves, who form the basis of her story. Evoking tears and outrage, the book is also responsible for racist essentialisms with the depiction of Uncle Tom as docile, religious and childlike. According to critics, “romantic racialisms” in relation to the portrayal of blacks, northerners and southerners has also perpetuated stereotypes of the African American within the American psyche. Today, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter (1850) and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), the novel draws our attention to the volatility of the antebellum socio-political and cultural landscape in the United States.
Two reasons embedded in Stowe’s emotional and political imagination may be articulated behind the vision. First, the death of her infant son, Charley, evoked the lamentation. Second, the novel is a sharp indictment and protest against the Fugitive Slave Law, which mandated northerners to capture and return runaway slaves.
Both Stowe’s novel and Uncle Tom’s character do not posit a seamless evolution of the African American identity, but can in fact signify the ruptures therein. “Feeling right” is Stowe’s clarion call, which, however, is insufficient in itself without “acting right”. Therefore, the protest against the Fugitive Slave Law in Stowe’s fiction must be understood in connection with the Underground Railroad. This would in turn help articulate an epistemological debate around literature and social reform, US legal and political thought.
One of the modes of direct defiance of the Fugitive Slave Acts (1793 and 1850, repealed 1864) was the development of the Underground Railroad. In the antebellum period, this was a system by which runaway slaves were aided by abolitionists and sympathetic Northerners such that they could reach places of safety in the north or in Canada. The clandestine activities of the movement and the usage of railway terms prompted the name, though it was neither underground, nor a railroad. “Various routes were lines, stopping places were called stations, those who aided along the way were conductors, and their charges were known as packages or freight.”[5]
The network of the Underground Railroad spanned the 14 northern states and the promised land of Canada. One of the major “conductors” in the movement, also known as the “Moses of her people” was Harriet Tubman, who took hundreds of slaves to safety. For the world, the Underground Railroad offers a story of endurance, faith and courage on one hand. As a caveat, it also draws attention to the ongoing pattern of force, betrayal and a persistent denial of freedom.
The clandestine activities of the movement and the usage of railway terms prompted the name, though it was neither underground, nor a railroad. “Various routes were lines, stopping places were called stations, those who aided along the way were conductors, and their charges were known as packages or freight.”
Published in 1872, William Still’s Underground Railroad: Authentic Narratives and First Hand Accounts is one of the most comprehensive first-hand accounts of the men, women and children who rode the legendary and dangerous “Railroad” to an uncertain destiny, which could spell freedom or the death knell. Still was made executive director and secretary to the General Vigilance Committee. This was an assistance group for the Underground Railroad formed by a group of Philadelphia abolitionists in the winter of 1852. Second only to Harriet Tubman, Still’s contribution to the Underground Railroad is noteworthy, as is his painstaking record-keeping of heart breaking narratives of the runaway slaves, the minutes of the Vigilance Committee along with excerpts from letters, newspapers, and legal documents.
Indeed, the movement of the Underground Railroad creates an unforgettable route to the deadly struggles, brutal hardships and narrow escapes of the slaves in the United States. The Underground Railroad allows us to move beyond a critical paradigm which may allow the United States to be either only trapped or to be transcendent.
Route III
“Being in possession of a few Black People and being crost in my affections, I debased myself and took one of my black women by the name of Doll, by her I have had these children named as follows, the oldest Elizabeth about the age of Seventeen, the next the name of John about the age of Eleven, the next the name of Polly about the age of Seven years. My desire is to have them as free citizens of this nation. Knowing what property I may have, is to be divided amongst the Best of my friends, how can I think of them having bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh to be called their property.”
—Captain Shoe Boots to the Chiefs in Council, October 20, 1824[6]
In the detailed historiography of African Americans and Native Americans in The Blackwell Companion to African American History, Tiya Miles and Barbara Krauthamer explain the racial formation within Native American communities. According to them, “Indians in the southeast may not have initially shared Euro-Americans’ interest in racial classification and hierarchy, but the growing colonial population in the southeast—along with the continual expansion of slavery—precipitated changes in Native Americans’ ideas about race and slavery.”[7]After 150 years of contact with the Europeans, the Cherokee Nation delegitimised Cherokee families that included black members and outlawed marriage between Cherokees and black slaves, even as it legalised Cherokee-white intermarriage.
In Ties that Bind, Tiya Miles utilises the historical experiences of the Shoe Boots family in order to redefine the metanarrative of US history. In fact, after 150 years of contact with the Europeans, the Cherokee Nation delegitimised Cherokee families that included black members and outlawed marriage between Cherokees and black slaves, even as it legalised Cherokee-white intermarriage. The fluid relationship between blacks and Cherokees became more rigid and stringent. Blacks were systematically thrust on subordinate positions in Cherokee society, legally and socially.
In both these Nations, the family was subjugated to laws of racial prejudice and discrimination. In its insistence on citizenship rights within the Cherokee Nation, the Afro-Cherokee Shoe Boots family disrupted the ideal family unit as prescribed by American codes. By centring on the family as a category, Miles traces social change and transformation in dual National contexts: the United States and the Cherokee Nation. Between 1820 and 1830, members of the newly formed National Committee such as John Ross, Charles Hicks, and John Ridge with their upbringing as an emergent Cherokee biracial westernised aristocracy, revamped Cherokee governance into a centralised order, replacing the mores of traditional community consensus.
Shoe Boots’ petition to the Cherokee Council for freedom of his Afro-Cherokee children not only provides historical proof of the encounter between Native Americans and Afro-Americans, it also disturbingly draws attention to slavery as a practice within Native communities, a people who themselves faced intense oppression at the hands of the European colonisers. While Shoe Boots adopts a confessional tone at the supposed indiscretion (influenced by the Euro-American prejudice against intermarriage), he effectively connects his case to traditional laws of Cherokee kinship. His petition is successful as he bridges the connection between Cherokee father’s role in the family, the matrilineal heritage, and newly formed ideas of race and blackness.
Shoe Boots’ petition to the Cherokee Council for freedom of his Afro-Cherokee children not only provides historical proof of the encounter between Native Americans and Afro-Americans, it also disturbingly draws attention to slavery as a practice within Native communities, a people who themselves faced intense oppression at the hands of the European colonisers.
The Afro-Cherokee family of Shoe Boots and Doll in Georgia and Oklahoma exemplify the nuanced world of both Africans in the Cherokee Nation and the Cherokee Nation in America through a number of key events in American history: the US colonisation of the indigenous southeast, the formation of the first Native American Constitutional government, the systemic introduction and practice of slaveholding among American Indians, the forced removal of southern Indians west of the Mississippi, and the American Civil War. The story of Shoe Boots and Doll has been recognised by chroniclers of Cherokee history as the first black-Cherokee marriage. While there definitely might have been instances of Afro-Cherokee alliances in earlier times, this was the first relationship to be recorded in the Cherokee national government. Miles thus juxtaposes history, anthropology, law and literature in order to negotiate with a central paradox: why would Cherokees reinforce a system of racial persecution and oppression through slavery, while resisting their own subjugation? Shoe Boots and Doll’s relationship encapsulates questions on the issue of slavery, meaning of race and conceptions of sovereignty.
Through a micro-history of a local institution and a family unit such as the Shoe Boots, we find an instance of intimate contact between Afro-Americans and Cherokees in the United States. This further examines joint Indian and African enslavement, American Indian participation in the larger US southern slave economy and black experience as slaves of Indians. The story of Doll, therefore, leads to the creation of a narrative based on the impossibility of expressing the horror of slavery and also on the complex historical route of an Afro-Cherokee identity, which had been hitherto bypassed or neglected. As Tiya Miles notes, “We wrap history around ourselves and we use it to define who we are and we sometimes don’t want to face the fact that the stories we’ve always heard may have been flawed or limited or even wrong.”[8]
The Soul
“I will acknowledge contemporary lands,
I will trail the whole geography of the globe and salute courteously
every city large and small,
And employments! I will put in my poems that with you is heroism
upon land and see,
And I will report all heroism from an American point of view.”
—Walt Whitman, ‘Starting from Paumanok’, Leaves of Grass, Book II
In many ways, the seeds of Leave of Grass were sown in the political tumult of the 1850s. Walt Whitman, one of America’s most contemporary poets, sought to heal a nation ravaged by slavery and consequent antagonism, the collapse of the party system, political corruption, class divisions and gender inequalities. He aspired to take cognisance of the individual through an exploration of the “gargantuan ‘I’”.
Walt Whitman, one of America’s most contemporary poets, sought to heal a nation ravaged by slavery and consequent antagonism, the collapse of the party system, political corruption, class divisions and gender inequalities. He aspired to take cognisance of the individual through an exploration of the “gargantuan ‘I’”.
Today, this very “I” seems to emerge from and respond to the socio-political crises in the United States. The terrifying modern character of the “I” (and the eventual “You”) leads to an intimate understanding of the nation’s fabric, which needs to take within its fold subversive political rhetoric and fundamental questions of personal identity.
The routes depict the rites of passage that lead to the formation of the “soul” of America. They function as fundamental texts, which may attempt to recover the latent possibility of rethinking political futures beyond regressive structures where the primary concern has been acquisition.
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[1] http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57881 Accessed on 14 June, 2016
[2] Quoted in Coates, Julia. Trail of Tears (Greenwood: ABC-CLIO, 2014). 1
[3] Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), 27 May 1994, section III.B at http://www.his.com/~twarrick/commxyu4.htm#par129. Accessed 14 June, 2016
[4] Andrew Jackson’s Second Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1830 – From Amy H. Sturgis. Trail of Tears and Indian Removal. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007), 101 – 105
[5] http://www.britannica.com/topic/Underground-Railroad Accessed 14 June, 2016
[6] Cherokee Nation Papers, roll 46, no. 6508, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma.
[7] Miles, Tiya and Barbara Krauthamer, “Africans and Native Americans,” in The Blackwell Companion to African American History, ed. Alton Hornsby (Malden, MA: Blackwell 2005), 121–39. Print, 124.
[8] http://www.onbeing.org/program/toward-living-memory/transcript/1347 Accessed 14 June, 2016
