Battle Against Indian Removal
Evarts was influenced by the effects of the Second Great Awakening and served the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions as its treasurer from 1812-1820 and Secretary from 1821 until his death in 1831.
Evarts was the editor of The Panoplist, a religious monthly magazine from 1805 until 1820, where he published over 200 essays. He wrote twenty-four essays on the rights of Indians under the pen name "William Penn". He was one of the leading opponents of Indian removal in general and the removal of the Cherokees from the Southeast in particular. He engaged in several lobbying efforts including convincing Congress and President John Quincy Adams to retain funding for civilizing efforts. He was a leader of the unsuccessful fight against President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830. This law led to the forcible removal of the Cherokees in 1838, known as the Trail of Tears.
Historian John Andrew III explains how Evarts hoped to defeat the Indian Removal Act: "Evarts' tactics were clear. He planned to organize a phalanx of friendly congressmen to present the case against removal on the floor of the House and Senate, hoping to convince enough Jacksonians that the immorality of removal required them to vote against the Indian Removal Bill. At the same time, he would continue to barrage the public with letters, pamphlets, and articles on the Indian question, along with whatever other information might create a groundswell of public opinion against removal."
In 1830, Georgia passed a law which prohibited whites from living on Indian territory after March 31, 1831 without a license from the state. This law was written to enable removing the white missionaries that Jeremiah had organized through the ABCFM. These missionaries were trying to help the Indians resist removal through efforts to integrate them into the white society through conversion and education. In the wake of the passage of the Indian Removal Act, Jeremiah encouraged the Cherokees to take their case against this and other laws that they felt were intended to annihilate them to the Supreme Court of the United States, which they did in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia.
Read more about this topic: Jeremiah Evarts
Famous quotes containing the words battle against, battle, indian and/or removal:
“How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we are marching into battle against an enemy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“... the big courageous acts of life are those one never hears of and only suspects from having been through like experience. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“The white man’s mullein soon reigned in Indian corn-fields, and sweet-scented English grasses clothed the new soil. Where, then, could the red man set his foot?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Many a reformer perishes in his removal of rubbish,—and that makes the offensiveness of the class. They are partial; they are not equal to the work they pretend. They lose their way; in the assault on the kingdom of darkness, they expend all their energy on some accidental evil, and lose their sanity and power of benefit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)