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ОглавлениеReturn J. Meigs and the Cherokees
Return J. Meigs had for nearly twenty years270 occupied the position of United States agent for the Cherokee Nation. As a soldier of the Revolutionary war he had marched with Arnold through the forests of Maine and Canada to the attack on Quebec in 1775.271
He had also, by his faithful, intelligent, and honest administration of the duties of his office as Indian agent, secured the perfect confidence of his official superiors through all the mutations of administration. He had acquired a knowledge of and familiarity with the habits, character, and wants of the Cherokees such as was perhaps possessed by few, if indeed by any other man.
Any suggestions, therefore, that he might make concerning the solution of the Cherokee problem were deserving of grave consideration. His views were submitted in detail upon the condition, prospects, and requirements of the Cherokee Nation in a communication to the Secretary of War.272 To his mind the time had arrived when a radical change in the policy of managing their affairs had become essential. Ever since the treaty of 1791 the United States, in pursuance of a policy therein outlined for leading the Cherokees toward the attainment of a higher degree of civilization, in becoming herdsmen and cultivators instead of hunters, had been furnishing each year a supply of implements for husbandry and domestic use. In consequence a respectable proportion of that nation had become familiarized with the use of the plow, spade, and hoe. Many of their women had learned the art of spinning and weaving, and in individual instances considerable progress had been made in the accumulation of property. Agent Meigs now thought that the point had been reached where the Cherokee people should begin to fight their own battles of life, and that any further contributions to their support, either in the shape of provisions or tools, would have only a tendency to render them more dependent upon the Government and less competent to take care of themselves. Those who were already advanced in the arts of civilized life should be the tutors of the more ignorant. They possessed a territory of perhaps 10,000,000 acres of land, principally in the States of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, for the occupation of which they could enumerate little more than 10,000 souls or 2,000 families. If they were to become an agricultural and pastoral people, an assignment of 640 acres of land to each family would be all and more than they could occupy with advantage to themselves. Such an allotment would consume but 1,280,000 acres, leaving more than 8,000,000 acres of surplus land which might and ought to be sold for their benefit, and the proceeds (which he estimated at $300,000, to be paid in fifty annual installments) applied to their needs in the erection of houses, fences, and the clearing and breaking up of their land for cultivation. The authority and laws of the several States within whose limits they resided should become operative upon them, and they should be vested with the rights, privileges, and immunities of citizens of those States. These views met with the concurrence of the administration, and would possibly have been carried into effect but for the intense hostility thereto of not only the unprogressive element among the Cherokees themselves but of the officials and people of the States most interested, who could not view with complacency the permanent occupation of a single acre of land within their limits by the aboriginal owners.
