John Ross:  Address to the Cherokee Nation

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The Treaty of New Echota had provided that the Cherokee would have two years from the date of its ratification by the U.S. Senate to remove to Indian Territory. During that time Ross begged, pleaded, and lobbied the U.S. government to reconsider the treaty and to delay or cancel the relocation. By the spring of 1838 the time had passed for the Cherokee to remove, and the United States had lost its patience. While Ross was in Washington advocating for delay, President Martin Van Buren sent the U.S. Army into the Cherokee Nation with orders to round up the Cherokee and prepare them for relocation. The army, supported by volunteers from the neighboring southern states, combed the southern countryside gathering up people; soldiers took by force those who refused to go and marched them to the internment camps. Almost all of the Cherokee, perhaps as many as sixteen hundred, were housed in squalid, hastily built stockades. Over a brutally hot summer, hundreds died from exposure and from dysentery, cholera, and other diseases. Hundreds more died as they were being transported by boat to the West.

Deeply disheartened by these events, Ross returned to the Cherokee Nation in July and addressed his people from Camp Aquohee, one of the internment stockades. He tells them that the Cherokee government had done all within its power to change the United States' course of action but that “when the strong arm of power is raised against the weak and defenseless, the force of argument must fail.” He reports that he has persuaded General Winfield Scott, who was ordered by Van Buren to complete the removal of the Cherokee, to postpone their departure until fall, when the weather would be “more propitious.” In the address, Ross tries to calm his people, who have been angered and demoralized by their capture and internment. He praises them for the way they have accepted their fate, calls upon them to comply with the removal peacefully, and attempts to reassure them that they will be provided for on their journey to the West. He empathizes with the plight in which the Cherokee found themselves, “encamped in the forests along the sylvan brooks where you once gathered your flock of sheep and herds of cattle.” “Here,” Ross laments, “homeless and outcasts, we are only for a short space to be permitted to taking a passing view of the houses and farms we once inhabited & cultivated & the places in which we happily worshiped Almighty God.”