Treaty of New Echota

The Treaty of New Echota was a removal treaty signed in New Echota, Georgia by officials of the United States government and several members of the so-called Ridge faction within the Cherokee Nation on December 29, 1835. The Ridge Party held that the Cherokee would lose their eastern lands sooner or later and that removal to the west was the only way to preserve the Nation, while the Ross Party argued both that the Cherokee Nation should remain in its current homeland and simultaneously that the United States government should pay more money for the Cherokee to remove themselves westward.

The Treaty

In the treaty, the United States agreed to pay the Cherokee people $5 million in compensation (an amount earlier demanded by John Ross), cover the costs of relocation, and give them equivalent land in the Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma) in exchange for all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi River. According to popular history, this treaty was signed by a rogue group, but in fact the twenty were representatives of the committee of several hundred meeting in New Echota which had been designated specifically for that purpose by the National Council the previous October, and their actions were approved unanimously by that committee of several hundred the day afterwards. None of those present had been legally elected to office, but then neither had those of the Ross Party since the scheduled 1832 elections were suspended by John Ross, albeit with the consent of the National Council and the agreement of the Ridge Party.

Objections from the Ross Party

After news of the treaty became public, the officials of the Cherokee Nation from the Ross Party instantly objected that they had not approved it and that the document was invalid. John Ross and the Cherokee tribal council begged the Senate not to ratify the treaty (failure to ratify would thereby invalidate it). However, the measure passed in May 1836 by a single vote. Ross later drew up a petition asking Congress to void the treaty--a petition he personally delivered to Congress in the spring of 1838 with almost 16,000 signatures attached, more persons than the Cherokee Nation had within its territory by a few hundred, more even than the combined total of those in the Cherokee Nation, the Oconaluftee Cherokee in North Carolina outside the territorial limits of the Nation, and the Old Settlers in Arkansas Territory.

Cherokee removal

The petition was ignored by President Martin Van Buren, who soon thereafter directed General Winfield Scott to forcibly move all those Cherokee who had not yet complied with the treaty and moved west, even though the treaty allowed those who wished to remain in the east to do so. The Cherokee people were almost entirely removed west of the Mississippi (except for the Oconaluftee Cherokee in North Carolina, the Nantahala Cherokee who joined them, and two or three hundred married to whites). After their arrival in the Indian Territory, a group of Ross supporters attacked members of the Ridge faction, allegedly to enforce the Cherokee law outlawing sale of Cherokee land to foreign powers. Several signers of the treaty were assassinated, including Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, and his nephew Elias Boudinot. The true reason may have been that the Ridge Party had already integrated itself into the political structure of the Old Settlers, which Ross demanded recognize his absolute authority upon his arrival. As a result, the Cherokee nation subsequently endured 15 years of civil war.

ee also

*Timeline of Cherokee removal

References

*Haywood, W.H. "The Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee from its Earliest Settlement up to the Year 1796". (Nashville: Methodist Episcopal Publishing House, 1891).
*Klink, Karl, and James Talman, ed. "The Journal of Major John Norton". (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1970).
*McLoughlin, William G. "Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic". (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
*Mooney, James. "Myths of the Cherokee and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee". (Nashville: Charles and Randy Elder-Booksellers, 1982).
*Moore, John Trotwood and Austin P. Foster. "Tennessee, The Volunteer State, 1769-1923, Vol. 1". (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1923).
*Wilkins, Thurman. "Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People". (New York: Macmillan Company, 1970).

External links

* [http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/Vol2/treaties/che0439.htm The text of the treaty]