John Ross: Address to a General Council of the Cherokee Nation

About the Author

John Ross was born along the Coosa River in present-day Alabama on October 3, 1790. Ross was a Cherokee by virtue of his descent from his Cherokee grandmother. His maternal side of the family introduced him to Cherokee culture, and his father, a trader from Scotland, ensured that he received a formal education. By the time he was a young man, John Ross was comfortable in both the Cherokee and Anglo-American worlds and was prepared to assume a leadership role in his tribe. He became a successful planter and businessman, establishing a trading post and ferry service with his brother, Lewis. After fighting on the side of Andrew Jackson's army in the Creek Civil War (1813–1814)—a conflict between traditionalist Creek who resisted American encroachment into their territory and more accomodationist Creek who wanted to adopt aspects of Anglo-American culture and maintain peaceful relations—Ross assumed the responsibilities of clerk to the Cherokee chief Pathkiller. He was elected to the Cherokee national council in 1817 and from 1818 to 1827 presided over the committee that handled the nation's day-to-day affairs. Ross became principal chief pro tem upon Pathkiller's death in 1827. That same year he was elected to the committee that drafted the Cherokee national constitution. In 1828 the Cherokee elected Ross as their first principal chief under the new constitution, a position he held until his death in 1866.

Ross held the Cherokee Nation together through its greatest crisis, the expulsion of the tribe from its homeland in the Southeast. In the 1820s politicians in Georgia began demanding that the Cherokee leave the state. For the next ten years Ross fiercely opposed the United States' efforts to appease Georgia and remove the Cherokee. In the early 1830s he supervised a legal challenge to Georgia's trespasses on Cherokee sovereignty. In December 1835 the leaders of a dissident faction (often called the Treaty Party) negotiated the Treaty of New Echota, which required the Cherokee to depart for the West in two years. Ross unsuccessfully lobbied Congress and the president to reject the treaty, which was signed by only a small minority of the tribe and without the consent of the Cherokee government. Ross was never able to persuade the U.S. government to change its course on removal, and in 1838 he left with his nation for new Cherokee lands in the Indian Territory, in what is now northeastern Oklahoma. A quarter to a half of the Cherokee population, including Ross's first wife, died as a direct consequence of their removal. The relocation was so devastating to the Cherokee that in the latter years of the nineteenth century it came to be known as the Trail of Tears.

Once in Indian Territory, Ross was reelected chief of the reconstituted Cherokee Nation and oversaw the enactment of a new constitution. In the 1840s and 1850s he led them through a political reunification of competing factions and an economic and social renascence, as they rebuilt schools, churches, and businesses. The American Civil War, however, ended the brief period of prosperity. At the war's outbreak in 1861, the Cherokee Nation signed a treaty of alliance with the Confederacy. Ross had tried to keep the Cherokee neutral in the conflict, but he was unable to persuade the rest of the government to his side. The war brought a Union invasion into the Cherokee Nation, which again prompted civil conflict among the Cherokee and produced widespread death and property destruction. In 1862 Ross abandoned the Confederate alliance, affiliated with the Union, and traveled to Washington, D.C., to try to protect Cherokee interests with the U.S. government. He remained in Washington for the duration of the war and died there on August 1, 1866.