Conclusion: Geography of Sovereignty
While Apess and Ridge faced questions of sovereignty and dispossession on opposite ends of the country, Apess kept the Cherokee removal in conversation with the Mashpee. Apess’s access to information about Removal can be attributed to the expediency of the movement of newspapers, where newspapers from Georgia could reach Massachusetts in less than a week. In fact, in his Indian Nullification, Apess includes a letter to the Harvard College corporation that remarks “Perhaps you have heard of the oppression of the Cherokees and lamented over them much, and thought the Georgians were hard and cruel creatures; but did you ever hear of the poor, oppressed and degraded Marshpee Indians in Massachusetts, and lament over them? If not, you hear now, and we have made choice of the Rev. Wm. Apes to relieve us, and we hope that you will assist him. And if the above complaints and reasons, and the following resolutions, will be satisfactory, we shall be glad, and rejoice that you comply with our request.”[1] The Mashpees have clearly either received correspondence or newspapers that detail the laws and reports that the Georgia State Legislature tried to enact to dispossess the Cherokees. The authors of the letter warn Harvard against acting in any sort of similar manner. Beyond explicit acknowledgements, “Apess and the Mashpee saw the issues of the Cherokee in Georgia and the South Carolina nullification crisis as interrelated and used both sides of the nullification discourse to call out the state of Massachusetts on the contradictions of its federally leaning politics in order to gain greater political autonomy for Mashpee.”[2] While on the surface it appears that Apess and Ridge sought and achieved opposing goals: Apess assisted Mashpee leaders to persuade the Massachusetts General Assembly to grant the Mashpee tribe sovereign status without the oversight of overseers and Harvard; and Ridge and the Treaty Party signed the Treaty of New Echota, leading to the settlement of the Cherokee in Indian Territory.
But an important commonality lies between these men: They both worked to dismantle the benevolent paternalism that controlled their tribes and reclaim their sovereignty. While Ridge’s actions did cause the deaths of hundreds along the Trail of Tears, along with that of his own and his allies, he acted in the only way he saw possible to allow the Cherokee to remain a sovereign, independent people.
[1] Apess, Indian Nullification, pp. 24.
[2] Neil Meyer, “‘To Preserve This Remnant:’ William Apess, the Mashpee Indians, and the Politics of Nullification,” The European Journal of American Studies 13, no. 2 (Summer 2018): https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12635.