Author Stan Rice has just published the second of three novels (Elizabeth’s Exile) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit who, in middle age, walked with a contingent of other Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears from the Appalachians to what is now Oklahoma, after losing their land and possessions. As Rice’s novel explains, this was totally illegal, as the law under which Andrew Jackson prosecuted this Trail of Tears was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
The Trail of Tears was, indeed, grim, and there was a lot of suffering, something you will also find in Diane Glancy's Pushing the Bear. But Rice makes it clear in this novel that the United States Army, which was in charge of this forced deportation, was trying to make things easier for the Cherokees. They provided horses, wagons, and tents. They even vaccinated all the Cherokees against smallpox, using a procedure that had been developed in Europe only a couple of decades earlier.
It was not the federal troops who were abusive of the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears. It was the citizens and militia of the state of Georgia. It was Georgia that profited from expropriating Cherokee land and fortunes, which included gold mines, agricultural lands, orchards, and livestock, and the federal government that footed the bill for transporting, feeding, and (at least a little bit) caring for the Cherokees. It was the Georgia militia who conducted raids into Tennessee—which was illegal—to grab whatever they could of value.
This was most graphically illustrated by the way the citizens and militia of Georgia grabbed the land and property of Cherokees even before they had left to join the westward march. The Georgians would dig up fresh graves and take jewelry from the corpses. This much is historical fact; Rice did not invent this. The federal troops were wrong, but the Georgians were evil.
In this novel, Chief John Ross denounced the evil of the Georgians. Their response was, “Let their blood be upon us and on our children.” I am fairly sure this did not actually happen, but Rice was making a clear reference to the mob of Jews who called for the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. These are the words that, according to the Bible, they used. Some fundamentalist preachers and churches have said that this is the reason that the Jews were persecuted in the millennia after Jesus’ crucifixion. This cannot possibly be true. But Rice was making an important point. The Georgians were raping and pillaging the Cherokees in 1838. A few decades later, it was the Georgians who were being pillaged by the Union Army in the Civil War.
The Trail of Tears was racially motivated, but race did not matter. Elizabeth was seven-eighths white, but she was forced on the Trail anyway, because of her association with the Cherokee tribe.
Some people at the time made the argument that the Trail of Tears was necessary in order to placate the Southerners so that they would not secede from the Union. I heard a historian make exactly this claim at a Native American symposium at which I gave a presentation. If Andrew Jackson’s successor, Martin Van Buren, had told Georgia they could not take Cherokee lands and goods, they would have seceded right then and there. But history has clearly shown that Georgia was insatiable and giving them what they wanted in 1838 did not placate them in 1861.
The Cherokee leaders—including the man who eventually became Chief, John Ross—fought alongside Andrew Jackson in his war against the Creek tribe in the war of 1812. They naturally assumed Jackson would remember this and look upon the Cherokees as allies, not as enemies. But Jackson did not show any gratitude to the Cherokees.
The point is that if we make compromises today—such as a very old Henry Kissinger suggesting that the Ukraine give up its fight against Russia a couple of years ago, or most famously Neville Chamberlain giving into Hitler’s demands in 1939—in the hopes of placating the powers of evil, it will ultimately prove futile.
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