Cherokee Stand Watie » HistoryNet

Always a clear-thinking man, even on a day when kinsmen were murdered and vengeful fellow Cherokees dogged his heels, Stand Watie knew that he had to maintain a straight face and stay calm if he wanted to remain alive.

The son of an old friend had ridden from one of three murder scenes and brought him a warning. The youth remained collected and spoke calmly with Watie, who was inside a small store he kept in northeastern Indian Territory. Knowing that enemies could be listening, the young man bargained loudly for sugar and softly told Watie what had happened and where to find the horse called Comet standing bridled and ready. Deliberately, Watie left the store and rode off safely. He would remain in jeopardy for almost six years.

The murders, which took place on the morning of June 22, 1839, pushed Watie into the leadership of a small and unpopular Cherokee faction for the rest of his life. The tribal majority blamed Watie and his faction for the removal of the Cherokees along what became known as the Trail of Tears. Watie’s uncle, the prominent chief Major Ridge, Watie’s cousin John Ridge and Watie’s brother Elias Boudinot (also known as Buck Watie) all died that day in the new Cherokee Nation in the West. Stand Watie faced few worse days in his adventurous and violent life that saw him become a Confederate brigadier general. On the losing side twice in his life, he had intimate familiarity with dashed hopes and lost causes.

The Cherokees, linguistic kinsmen of the Iroquois, numbered about 30,000 in 1605 and lived in what is now Georgia, Tennessee and western North Carolina. Smallpox and other diseases struck often in the 1700s. By 1800, the Cherokee population was probably about 16,000. In the Georgia Compact of 1802, Georgia gave up the land that became Alabama and Mississippi with the understanding that the federal government would force the Cherokees west. The Cherokees refused, and Washington stalled. Most of the tribe decided that assimilation gave them the best hope to stay in their homeland. Cherokees began to take on white ways, seeking education, material profit and cultural interchange. Assimilation, though, didn’t work as planned. Growing economic power on the part of the Cherokees enraged white Georgians, who redoubled expulsion efforts.

To some natives the solution was obvious, and one-third of the tribe had moved west of the Mississippi River by 1820. They were eventually pushed all the way to what would become Oklahoma. The bulk of the tribe went to court, and the debate over relocation simmered. Meanwhile, the tribe (which numbered about 14,000 in the Southeast in the mid-1820s) began to suffer a debilitating internal split. Perhaps 20 percent of the Cherokee people successfully adapted to white lifestyles, some becoming affluent Southern slave-owning planters.

Among the most prominent slave-owning Cherokee aristocrats were the Watie and Ridge families. The faction of the tribe headed by the Ridges and Waties owned most of the estimated 1,600 slaves held by tribesmen. Cherokee slave owners tended to work side by side with their chattels, children were born free, and intermarriage was not forbidden. Only about 8 percent of tribal members (1 percent of full-blooded families) actually owned slaves. Because of the influence of mission schools, many Cherokees were intensely anti-slavery. Poorer than the Ridge-Watie faction, the traditionalists had neither the money nor the inclination to move West.

In 1827, the Cherokees created their first central government to better deal with the white world. At a convention the next year, John Ross was elected principal chief–a post he held until his death in 1866. Ross, born in 1796 in Tennessee, was mostly Scottish, having only one-eighth Cherokee blood. But he was Cherokee to the core and enormously popular.

His rivals turned out to be the sons of old-time full bloods. Major Ridge and his brother, David Watie (or Oowatie), were descended from warrior chiefs. Both men married genteel white women and rose in society, dressing and acting like planters. The family was close, and family members wrote more often and better than most whites of the time. Some 2,000 family letters were found in 1919. Following Sequoyah’s development of a syllabary in 1821, Cherokees took enthusiastically to reading and writing. When Stand Watie began writing is not certain, but his only surviving letters date to the Civil War.

Stand Watie was born in Georgia, probably in 1806; his early life is obscure. He was educated at a mission school, but less thoroughly than his brother Elias Boudinot, who was born Buck Watie but took the name of a white benefactor. Elias became a newspaper editor, and Stand held the job briefly during his brother’s absence. Stand Watie married several times, losing a number of wives and children to disease. The family did not record dates and details.

Watie’s rivalry with John Ross, whose bywords were unity and opposition to removal, slowly began to grow after 1832. Most of the Cherokees who had not moved West in the removal treaties of 1817 and 1819 continued to be against relocation, and Ross was their spokesman. The Ridge faction thought relocation to be in the best interests of the people. Major Ridge, a full-blooded Cherokee, and his son John Ridge felt that the educated and wealthy Cherokees could probably survive in Georgia but that the others would be led into drunkenness and then cheated and oppressed. War would be the inevitable result. Each faction thought the other was corrupt. The Ridge-Watie party allied itself with U.S. President Andrew Jackson and his supporters, and connived behind the backs of the Cherokee councilmen, who usually opposed them.

The atmosphere became poisonous as rival Cherokee delegations went to Washington, D.C., with different plans, and President Jackson played both sides against each other–fostering allegations of bribe-taking. In 1835 the issue came to a head. Ridge’s faction helped draft a treaty that would require Cherokee removal west of the Mississippi in return for about $5 million. Ross and the council rejected the treaty, holding out for $20 million and other terms; they would not move on Ridge-Watie terms. By October it was clear that most Cherokees sided with Ross. It was also clear that the government would not pay $20 million.

Then, in December 1835, the Ridge-Watie party committed what amounted to suicide. Major Ridge, John Ridge and the Watie brothers were the only prominent Cherokees to sign the Treaty of New Echota, in Georgia, on December 29. A free-blanket offer attracted some 300 to 500 people–probably 3 percent of the tribe–to the signing place. Only about 80 to 100 people eligible to vote were present. Ross and the legitimate council were nowhere near. The treaty was roundly denounced–even by such unlikely allies as Davy Crockett and Daniel Webster. Cherokees in the East had to leave the Southeast in return for a payment of $15 million and 800,000 acres in Indian Territory (in what would become northeastern Oklahoma and part of Kansas). The Cherokees were to be removed within two years. The Ridge-Watie faction (’treaty party) thought the terms generous–that they had gotten a good price.

Whether or not the terms were generous, the treaty was a disgrace, as it was opposed by some 90 percent of the tribe. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the treaty invalid, but President Jackson refused to void it. The Martin van Buren administration did likewise. Ross and his anti-treaty party fought a losing court battle, and they were not well-prepared for removal when it began. In 1837, only about 2,000 Cherokees went West; most of the others held out, perhaps not believing they would be forced to leave their homeland.

The so-called Trail of Tears (the Cherokees called it Nunna daul Tsuny, Trail Where We Cried) came in 1838, when Federal troops and Georgia militia removed the holdout tribe members to Indian Territory (about 1,000 avoided capture by hiding in the mountains). As many as 4,000 Cherokees may have died from disease, hunger, cold and deliberate brutality by volunteer Georgia troops and regulars led by a reluctant General Winfield Scott. The Ridge-Watie parties had been among the first to depart to the new country, arriving in 1837. They had gone in comfort and had located themselves on choice Indian Territory land. Because most of the Cherokees who followed suffered during the migration and after their arrival in the West, resentment against the Ridges and Waties grew.

Historians disagree about the level of brutality on the Trail of Tears, but most historians agree the suffering and death continued in the West, mainly because of epidemic diseases. And historians also agree that the treaty was invalid, the military high-handed, the preparations and logistics inefficient, and the intent rapacious. The Cherokees certainly thought so, and feelings against the treaty party ran higher and higher. Ironically, Major Ridge himself had helped write the death penalty into the Cherokee Constitution for those selling tribal land without authorization. Many years earlier, he had killed a fellow chief named Doublehead who was convicted by the tribal council of such a land deal. Clearly, Ridge knew the penalty.

More than 100 members of the anti-treaty party met at Double Springs on June 21 and pronounced death sentences in secret–outside the council and without vested authority–purportedly to keep John Ross from finding out about their plans. Either Ross had reached the end of his patience with his enemies–or he simply could do nothing to stop the killings.