“It is glorious news. The laws of the state are declared by the highest judicial tribunal in the country to be null and void. It is a great triumph on the part of the Cherokees.... The question is forever settled as to who is right and who is wrong.”
Yet Andrew Jackson would not stand for such a settlement. “John Marshall has made his decision,” Jackson thundered, “now let him enforce it.” This was the single instance in American history where the President so bluntly and openly defied a Supreme Court ruling. The situation grew more bleak. Worcester was released from jail only after appealing to the “good will” of the state of Georgia. Matters worsened as Georgia conducted its Cherokee Lottery of 1832, and thousands of white men descended onto lots carved out of the Cherokee land.
Boudinot and several other Cherokee leaders, including John Ridge, grew discouraged to the point of resignation. Jackson’s attitude as President, coupled with Georgia’s unrelenting attack and the Supreme Court’s inability to stop it, caused a change of heart in Boudinot and Ridge. Boudinot stepped down from the Phoenix and, with Major Ridge, became an important spokesman for a minority faction of Cherokees which was prepared to move west. However, John Ross continued to speak for the vast majority who rejected any discussion of removal.
By 1835, the rift between the Ridge party and John Ross’ followers had become open and intense. Seeking to take advantage of this division, Jackson appointed a New York minister, J.F. Schermerhorn, to deal with Boudinot and Ridge. The Cherokee supporters of Ross hated this “loose Dutch Presbyterian minister” and referred to him as “The Devil’s Horn.”
On several occasions, Ross attempted to negotiate a reasonable solution with Washington. He was frustrated at every turn. In November of 1835, he and the visiting John Howard Payne were arrested by the Georgia militia. In jail, Payne heard a Georgia guard singing “Home Sweet Home” outside his cell. Payne asked the man if he knew that his prisoner had written the song; the guard seemed unimpressed. After spending nine days in jail, Ross and Payne were released without any explanation for their treatment.
Ross traveled on to Washington to resume negotiations. While he was there, Schermerhorn and the Ridge party drew up and signed a treaty. Endorsed by a scant one-tenth of the Nation’s 16,000 Cherokees, this treaty ceded to the United States all eastern territory in exchange for $5 million and a comparable amount of western land. Cherokees throughout the Nation registered shock and betrayal; Boudinot and Ridge, their lives already threatened numerous times, would be murdered within four years. Yet despite Ross’ protestations of fraud, the U.S. Senate ratified the minority Treaty of New Echota by one vote. A new President, Martin Van Buren, authorized Gen. Winfield Scott to begin the removal of all Cherokees in the summer of 1838.
Scott, while determined to carry out the removal, tried in vain to restrain his troops from inflicting undue hardships. Scott’s soldiers moved relentlessly through the Nation. As one private remembered it in later years:
Smithsonian Institution
Ginatiyun tihi, or Stephen Tehee, was born in Georgia six months before the removal of the Cherokees to the West. He served as a tribal delegate to Washington in 1898.