“Fraught with Disastrous Consequences for our Country”: Cherokee Sovereignty, Nullification, and the Sectional Crisis

Abstract

““Fraught with Disastrous Consequences for our Country”: Cherokee Sovereignty, Nullification and the Sectional Crisis” explores how the national debates over Indian sovereignty rights contributed to the rise of American sectionalism. Although most American citizens supported westward expansion, the Cherokee Nation demonstrated effectively that it had adopted Western civilized standards and, in accord with federal treaty law, deserved constitutional protections for its sovereignty and homelands. The Cherokees’ success divided American public opinion over that nation’s purported rights to constitutional protections. When Georgian leaders and the state militia harassed Northern white American missionaries who supported Cherokee sovereignty rights, even citizenship rights seemed in question. South Carolina’s leaders capitalized on the Cherokee debate by framing their own protest against federal tariffs as a complementary states’ rights issue. Thus, in 1832, nine months after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Cherokee sovereignty protections against Georgia’s removal efforts in Worcester v. Georgia, South Carolina issued an Ordinance of Nullification, proclaiming its state right to nullify federal taxation. Current historiography tends to suggest that most Americans at that time ignored Cherokee sovereignty to confront South Carolina’s Nullification challenge. Alternatively, this project proposes that the debates over Cherokee sovereignty exacerbated Americans’ fear over South Carolina’s Nullification crisis, because together they representing a two-state challenge to federal authority. While current historiography also recognizes that expansion was a critical feature of American sectionalism, the debate over Indian sovereignty within already established Eastern states demonstrates that the politics of expansion was not simply a Western borderlands issue. Nullification threatened the Union because Georgia and President Andrew Jackson simultaneously ignored the U.S. Supreme Court’s authority to interpret constitutional law, while promoting the vital importance of constitutional law. To explore the sectional tensions that linked Cherokee sovereignty and Nullification, this project reviews the earlier period in American politics when these issues evolved separately to demonstrate the effect of their eventual connection. The first chapter provides an example that shows how the Cherokees protected their treaty rights successfully during this earlier period. Chapter Two considers the unique histories of South Carolina and the Cherokee Nation, and their collective challenges to the evolving American political economy. Chapter Three explores how the non-white republic of the Cherokee Nation contributed to the weakening of race-based slavery positivism, despite its own investment in slavery. Chapter Four demonstrates how a widening circle of congressional figures began connecting publicly the debates over Cherokee removal, tariffs, and slavery, made especially visible during the Webster-Hayne debates in the Senate. Chapter Five delineates the national discord over the extra-legal violence against white missionaries who protected Cherokee interests. As evident through the recently discovered prison journal of Rev. Samuel Austin Worcester—of Worcester v. Georgia—this chapter also demonstrates that despite their rhetoric otherwise, Jacksonians recognized the sectional toxicity when the American public connected Cherokee sovereignty and Nullification.