The Trail of Tears

First they fell upon their knees
and then upon the aborigines.

-William M. Evarts

Andrew Jackson was certainly a different kind of President.

His predecessor John Quincy Adams, the son of a president, had spent a good part of his youth in Europe, accompanying his father to France and the Netherlands, studying in Leiden, travelling to Russia, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, even marrying his London born wife Louisa while abroad. He was by breeding and training a diplomat.

Jackson was born in a cabin. His father died from a logging accident just before his birth. Sporadically schooled, Jackson fought in the Revolution, was captured by the British and slashed by a British officer when he refused to clean his boots. After the war he became a rough and tumble country lawyer, disputing land claims, defending assault and battery charges, and speculating on Indian lands. In 1812 he became a military hero when he defeated the British in New Orleans, and continued his military career seizing Florida in the First Seminole War. Jackson was from the frontier, and he had no use for Indian rights.

There was no love lost between Adams and Jackson. Jackson had won the popular vote in 1824, but with no clear electoral majority, Adams won the election in the House of Representatives. In 1828 Jackson won both the popular and electoral majorities. When the time finally came for Jackson to assume the presidential office, he refused to pay the traditional courtesy call on the outgoing President; Adams, in turn, skipped the inauguration of Jackson.

Georgia had just passed a law prohibiting whites from living on Indian territory without a license from the state. The law’s intent was to get rid of white missionaries who were helping the Indians resist removal. When "Sharp Knife" Jackson took office, the struggle over Indian removal entered its final phase. Jeremiah Evarts urged the Cherokee to challenge the law in the Supreme Court. The Marshall court ruled that Indian tribes were indeed sovereign nations and state laws had no force on tribal lands, to which Jackson is said to have defiantly replied, "John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it!"

A federal Indian Removal Act was making its way through Congress with strong support from the South and West. Jeremiah Evarts started a petition campaign opposing the legislation and supporting the Cherokee's rights. Starting with a few carefully written memorials, he drew up petitions to be sent to Washington. Copies of the petitions were printed and sent to the ABCFM network of congregations to gather names, along with specific instructions for printing additional petitions:

Print a short memorial, on one leaf of a sheet of letter paper, and a circular on the other leaving the circular for the outside of the letter. To save press-work, you might have both printed pages face inwards; for the memorial part should have no writing on either side, and should go clean…

Petitions were sent from Bath, Brunswick, Bucksport, Bluehill, and Bridgton Maine; from Chester, Campton, and Cornish New Hampshire; from Andover, Brighton, Cambridge, and Dunstable Massachusetts; from Pittsford, Thetford, Weatherfield, and St. Johnsbury in Vermont.

Hundreds of petitions with tens of thousands of signatures were sent to Congress, but politicians ridiculed their efforts. Richard Wilde was disgusted by "these everlasting political homilies - this mawkish mixture of sentiment and selfishness -this rage for instructing all the world in their appropriate duties." Wiley Thompson charged the petitioners with drawing on "the vast accumulation of trash which appeared in the columns of the National Intelligencer over the signature of William Penn." President Jackson ridiculed the Indian land claims and remarked that they could not assert title to lands "merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase."

After vigorous lobbying and debate, the Jackson forces narrowly won the vote on the Removal Bill and President Jackson signed the measure on May 28th, 1830. Evarts was deeply disappointed that so many people failed to stand up for morality and justice. "My comfort is that God governs the world; and my hope is, that when the people of the United States come to understand the subject, there will a redeeming spirit arise; for I will not believe that the nation is yet lost to truth and honor."

Despite his disappointment, Evarts couldn’t stop working. He continued his travels and exhortations for the cause, but he was obviously exhausted. Returning from a trip to Cuba, he sensed that death was near:

"Whether I make my grave on the land, or in the ocean, I submit cheerfully to Him. It will be as He pleases; and so it should be."

Arriving in Charleston, he was dying, but he showed a happy tranquility in his final days. Given the last rites, "You will soon see Jesus as he is..," he exclaimed — "Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful glory! We cannot comprehend — wonderful glory! I will praise, I will praise him! .... Wonderful — glory—Jesus reigns."

Jeremiah Evarts died on May 10, 1831 in Charleston, South Carolina. His body was returned to New Haven and buried in the Grove Street Cemetery.

In 1831 the Choctaw were removed to the west, the Seminole were removed in 1832, the Creek in 1834, then the Chickasaw in 1837, and finally the Cherokee in 1838. One in four Cherokee died from exposure, disease, and starvation en route to their new lands in Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears.

~

“There are many humorous things in this world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages". - Mark Twain

Education for All

Jeremiah Evarts was never healthy; portraits show him as frail and skeletal, with prominent nose and ears, his hair combed forward to conceal a receding hairline. His doctors recommended travelling south for his health, and his evangelical interests drew him towards the Cherokee and Choctaw, so he was in South Carolina on a mission when his wife Mehetabal bore his fifth child Billy in Boston in 1818. Jeremiah didn’t sound too hopeful when he wrote in his journal, “I commend the babe to protection of Heaven, and pray that its soul may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus, however it may please God to dispose of its temporal estate.”

Jeremiah was corresponding secretary for the ABCFM, and travelled a great deal on behalf of the society. The pressure from white settlers on the Indian tribes which occupied lands in the southeast was intense, and Evarts worked to help the Indians integrate into white society through conversion and education. His 1818 trip took him to Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In 1822 he visited Georgia, eastern Tennessee and Virginia. In 1823, after he visited western Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire, then New York, Philadelphia, Princeton, and Washington, he continued southward through Virginia, Tennessee and Mississippi, spending several weeks visiting missionary stations among the Cherokees and Choctaw and continuing to New Orleans from where he sailed back to New York.


When Jeremiah was at home in Boston, John Jay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Ellery Channing regularly came to call. Lafayette visited Boston in 1824 and when he reviewed schoolboys lined up on the Boston Common, the Marquis made sure to personally shake the hand of six year old Billy, the grandson of his old compatriot Roger Sherman.

Billy entered Boston Latin School, which at that time stood opposite King’s chapel on School Street, and where his school mates included Henry Ward Beecher and John Lathrop Motley. He particularly excelled at reciting Latin and won the school prize for elocution.

“I certainly was taught to say in the most perfect manner the longest list of Latin nouns and prepositions that I did not want to learn at all, became intimately acquainted with their whole pedigree and relations with large sums and words that I never expected to meet in my subsequent life at all; but having learned that, I could learn other things very easily."




The ABCFM missionaries helped bring printing presses to the Cherokee, who developed their own alphabet and had fonts of type cast in their alphabet. In 1827 the Cherokee adopted a written constitution, modeled on the Constitution of the United States, which declared the Cherokee to be a sovereign nation with complete jurisdiction over their territory, and they had a national newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, published in both English and Cherokee using the syllabary developed by Sequoyah. The Cherokee had no intentions of moving.

In 1827 Jeremiah travelled to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, where he lobbied Congress to retain funding for civilizing efforts. In 1828 Jeremiah took Billy along with him to Washington and introduced him to John C. Calhoun, who was a great admirer of Evarts’ grandfather Roger Sherman. Calhoun took a liking to Billy and introduced him to the president, John Quincy Adams.

Samuel T. Armstrong printed the Panoplist at 50 Cornhill Street in Boston. Cornhill Street, near Faneuil Hall and Scollay Square, was the center of Boston’s book trade and home to printers, engravers, bookbinders and booksellers. Paul Revere had had his engraving shop at Cornhill after the revolution. Armstrong printed a stereotyped Bible and sold books by Martin Luther, Calvin, Cotton Mather and the like.

At this time in Boston steam and horse powered presses were just starting to be put into use, rollers were replacing ink balls, type was being founded and stereotyping was being employed. There were numerous daily newspapers, and book publishing was on the rise. With so many presses in operation and so many skilled craftsmen, there were more authors publishing their work in Boston than anywhere else in the country.

Armstrong was a member of the first Boston society of printers (43 members) which set prices for composition and presswork and rules for apprentices and journeymen. It worked to secure improvements in the manufacture of paper, ink and type. Armstrong left his printing establishment in 1825 (its successors would eventually merge into Houghton Mifflin) to enter politics, and later became mayor, lieutenant governor and acting governor of the state.

In 1829 Armstrong and Mayor Harrison Gray Otis visited the colored students’ school in the Belknap Street church. In grammar school Billy Evarts received one of the medals which Benjamin Franklin had endowed to be awarded annually to the most deserving student in each school. At the Belknap Street School, three colored students, Charles Battiste, Nancy Woodson and William Nell were pronounced the most deserving scholars. In lieu of the Franklin Medals given to white scholars such as Billy Evarts, Mr. Armstrong gave each colored scholar a gift certificate to Loring’s Bookstore for the Life of Benjamin Franklin.

Billy and the rest of the white medalists were invited to an awards banquet at Faneuil Hall, but the colored scholars were not. William Nell, however, decided to go anyway, and got in with one of the waiters and pretended to wait on tables. While he watched the honors awarded to the white scholars Mr. Armstrong caught sight of him and whispered to him, “You ought to be here with the other boys.” Of course, Nell thought the same idea. Twenty-five years later, the remark still rankled as he recalled his thought at the time: “If you think so, why have you not taken steps to bring it about?”

~

In the fall of 1829, Jeremiah, writing as "William Penn", wrote twenty-four essays in the National Intelligencer, which blasted the new Jackson administration and its proposed Indian removal policy.

"Most certainly an indelible stigma will be fixed upon us, if, in the plenitude of our power, and in the pride of our superiority, we shall be guilty of manifest injustice to our weak and defenseless neighbors." If the Indians were driven from their homes to destruction, "then the sentence of an indignant world will be uttered in thunders, which will roll and reverberate for ages after the present actors in human affairs shall have passed away."

Was this to be a nation of law or of men?

The Panoplist

The printing press was the empowering symbol of enlightenment and enrichment in early America. By the beginning of the nineteenth century presses had become plentiful enough in America so that news could be quickly printed anywhere in the country. Jeremiah Evarts wrote in amazement “We of the present age, who have lived thirty years, have seen greater changes within our time, than could have been seen, at other periods of the world, in several centuries.”

He was right. Free from the old colonial relationship with England, entrepreneurship and invention took hold in America. There was a sudden increase of mass produced goods, including books, newspapers, and magazines. The Stanhope press, made of cast iron rather than wood, and using levers rather than the old “wine-press” screw was introduced in England in 1800, and George Clymer improved on the design in Philadelphia in 1812 with his own lever action "Columbian" press.

The new presses were much easier and more efficient to run, cutting the required number of impressions in half, and the print quality was markedly improved. Paper was being manufactured in this country. Anthony Haswell started the first mill in Vermont, in Bennington, in 1784, making just enough paper for his own newspaper; by 1820 there were fifteen mills supplying the needs of the state. With reduced costs, popular novels were suddenly finding their way into the culture. Evarts noted with dismay the proliferation of “that light and frothy stuff, which under a hundred names, our booksellers’ shops were pouring upon the public.”

In 1810 Evarts moved from New Haven to Charlestown to become editor of the Panoplist, which had been founded as a counterweight to Unitarianism at Harvard. This move opened the door for Evarts; the Awakening became Evarts personal mission as he addressed the issues which challenged society: education, the promotion of religion, inroads on the Sabbath, the call to evangelize through foreign missions, and temperance.

It’s a little hard to believe that before the generations of hard drinkers, one of my forebears would be a founding member of the Massachusetts Society for the Suppression of Intemperance. The new western lands in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Kentucky were producing grain which was more easily transported when converted to whiskey. In the early 1800’s the estimated per capita consumption of hard liquor was around six gallons per person, which is a little south of where it stood in Tyringham in the mid 1960’s when I was growing up.

My two grandfathers would sit on the side terrace in Tyringham before dinner on summer evenings with Ritz crackers, cheddar cheese, Edward with his J. W. Dant straight on the rocks, and Arthur with his Early Times, with a little “branch” water.

- Edward: “Can’t you wait for the ice to melt?”
- Arthur (my maternal GP, just returned from a cruise on the Kungsholm): “The liner had seven bars.”
- Edward: “You probably needed all of them.”

John Jay, the first Chief Justice had been elected to the board of ABCFM, ordered two complete sets of the Panoplist, and subscribed both for himself and for his town library, when Evarts’ first son was born and baptized in April 1813 as “John Jay Evarts”. Jay had written Evarts in January, complimenting his writing, which “abounds in just sentiments, handsomely expressed.” Jay wished to contribute to the printing press in Serampore, India, but worried about transmitting funds as the War of 1812 made sending money through England problematical.

Evarts helped form the New England Religious Tract Society in 1814. The society consolidated publication and distribution in order to circulate inexpensive tracts through a network of village based church societies. By the end of the 1820’s it had more than 2600 branches and distributed nearly six million tracts annually. Just as today we hear appeals for “a laptop for every child”, the evangelical movement sought “A Bible for every family, a school for every district, and a pastor for every 1000 souls.” Local branches held meetings, raised money, circulated publications, and communicated directly with headquarters in Boston. This efficient network was unrivalled on a national scale in its day.

In issue after issue, the Panoplist sent out pleas for funds for printing presses and for paper on which to print. Presses were being set up in India, Ceylon, Greece, and the Sandwich Islands.

I am anxious to have a printing-press also established in Benares, by which school-books might be speedily multiplied, and treatises on different subjects might be printed, and generally dispersed throughout the country. Without this, the progress of knowledge must be very slow, and the Hindoos long remain in their present very fallen state, which is very painful to a benevolent mind.

In the early nineteenth century it was common for periodicals to reprint articles first published elsewhere. While printing technology had been widely spread, it was still a labor intensive operation with hand set type. Prior to steamships, canals and railroads, it was easier to reprint information in Kentucky or California or Ceylon or the Sandwich Islands than to transport bulk printed materials from the point of manufacture, and the technology had not yet been sufficiently mechanized to make publication in large quantities economically feasible.

As mechanization of print took hold, the model began to shift from “distribute and print”, to “print and distribute”. Prior to the telegraph, there were no wire services, and no central clearing houses for giving attribute to authors and copyright holders. While a copyright law had been passed in England in 1710, the colonies were not covered by the act and there was a long history of pirating in America. The first copyright law in the United States was passed in 1790, protecting books, maps and charts, but it was poorly enforced. Evarts felt the pain:

"We have not so much occasion to complain, that the strictly original parts of our work have been republished without our consent. In former years, however, such republications were not uncommon. A friend of ours, in a neighboring state, said to the publisher of a magazine, "There are four religious magazines in this state, all of which live by stealing from the Panoplist." The printer of one of these four determined to republish our whole work without our consent, or even our knowledge. He used it as an argument with his patrons, that he should present them with matter, which cost the editor of the Panoplist much labor and expense, but as it cost himself nothing, and he printed his work cheap in the country, and on inferior paper, he could afford it at an inferior price."

Jeremiah Evarts

When Jeremiah Evarts was eleven, his parents sent him off to school in Burlington, twelve miles south of their farm, on the shore of Lake Champlain. A frail child, he soon found himself attracted to the life of books and ideas rather than a life working the soil, and he quickly distanced himself from his family’s close attachment to the land. When Jeremiah turned seventeen, he travelled on horseback back to East Guilford to study with the Reverend John Elliott, and entered Yale the following fall of 1798.

Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards (and thus first cousin to Aaron Burr), was president of Yale at that time. As early as 1776 he had described Americans as having a unique national identity, a new people with common religion, manners, interests, and language. Appalled by the radicalism of the French revolution, Dwight vigorously challenged “infidelity” from the pulpit, led the Federalist Party in the political arena in Connecticut, and encouraged efforts to maintain the influence of religion in public life. One of his principal accomplishments, central to the “Second Great Awakening", was to help found the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM).

The ABCFM sent missionaries to India, Ceylon, the Sandwich Islands, China, Singapore, Siam, Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria, Persia, to the Zulus in Southern Africa, and to the Cherokees and Choctaws in Georgia and Tennessee. The ABCFM prohibited unmarried people from entering the mission field, but to help prospective missionaries, they maintained a list of “reasonably good-looking” young women who were pious, educated, fit and available for matrimony. Missionaries established schools and set up printing presses wherever they were stationed, as printing and literacy were crucial elements in the process of Bible translation and evangelism.

When Jeremiah Evarts arrived at Yale he was only a year off the farm. His classmates described him as spare, homespun, a bit stiff and awkward, but honest. He obviously made the most of New Haven, attending debates at the state’s general assembly and meeting and dining with representatives, the governor, and the lieutenant governor. While he avoided the more riotous behavior of many of the students, he did find time to play some football, and he wasn’t afraid of controversy. His junior year essay addressed the question: “Are the Abilities of Females Inferior to those of Males?” which is a question my father would have warned me to never, never, consider in public. He was elected president of the Brothers Society, chosen orator by the Moral Society, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He passed exams in Greek, Horace, Cicero, Algebra, Surveying, Trigonometry, and Navigation, but evidently the need to preserve republican virtue and the American future through religion and morality dominated his thoughts.

The election of Jefferson (and Burr) in the “revolution” of 1800 upended the Federalist view of the world. This upheaval undoubtedly contributed to Jeremiah’s conversion experience during the revival that swept through the college in 1802. For Jeremiah, conversion called him away from the family farm into a world where he would struggle every day to improve the moral life of his country, searching for the “Soul of America” through both his private and public life.

Like most young grads, after Jeremiah graduated from Yale in 1802 (which started the Evarts family affinity for Yale and their aversion to “Hell and Harvard”) he cast about for various occupations. He taught school in Peacham, Vermont for a year. He knew he was not cut out to be a farmer or a merchant, so he decided to study law. He studied in New Haven, and in September 1804 married Mehitabel Sherman Barnes, the recently widowed daughter of Roger Sherman, the New Haven patriot who had signed not only the Declaration of Independence, but also the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.

The following spring Jeremiah received his law degree and delivered a commencement address on the vanity of pursuing fame. He soon began writing essays which were published in the Connecticut Evangelical Magazine. He was admitted to the bar in 1806. Jeremiah thought he could be a successful lawyer “if only I could get the business”, but he was not terribly successful, perhaps because he could never get over his obligation to assist “unjust” clients. He soon considered moving to Massachusetts to either practice in a new setting, write, or sell books. In January of 1809, he was asked to become assistant editor of The Panoplist in Boston. This was his opportunity to move on.

Vermont

John Evarts was perhaps the first of my forbears to come to America. He emigrated from Yorkshire and settled in Concord, Massachusetts around 1638. He lived in Concord where at least two of his children were born, before moving to Connecticut around 1650. The Evarts family farmed around Guilford for the next four generations.

After a century of plowing, overgrazing, deforestation, and erosion, the soil was becoming exhausted and the population growth limited options for farming new land locally. After the revolution my progenitor James Evarts, like many of his contemporaries, moved to Vermont, looking to resettle outside the inbred cluster of farms on the coast. Jeremiah Evarts was born in 1781 to James and Sarah Todd Evarts in Sunderland, Vermont, about fifteen miles north of where I live today in Bennington.

Settlements were being developed throughout the Republic of Vermont in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Ethan and Ira Allen, who also lived in Sunderland, had travelled across the Green Mountains four years earlier to meet with fellow settlers at the tavern in Windsor to declare the creation of the Republic of Vermont, independent from the jurisdictions of New York and New Hampshire.

The Evarts family farmed in Sunderland for a few years, but found that southwest Vermont was better suited for water powered mills, such as the paper mill Anthony Haswell was building in Bennington, than for agriculture. The Evarts soon moved north and helped settle the town of Georgia in the productive Champlain Valley. By 1790, Georgia, with its timber resources and fertile soil, was one of the most prosperous communities in northern Vermont.