Chief John Ross: Cherokee Sovereignty and the Long Fight Against Removal

How a Cherokee merchant became one of his nation’s longest-serving leaders, and how the Cherokee Nation used law, diplomacy, and persistence to defend its sovereignty before and after removal.

John Ross was principal chief of the Cherokee Nation for most of four decades of crisis and rebuilding. He led a constitutional government through petitions, delegations, litigation, a treaty the Cherokee National Council rejected, forced removal, political reunification in Indian Territory, and the Civil War.

Ross did not prevent removal. But his career makes clear that the Cherokee Nation was not merely acted upon. It was a government with laws, councils, courts, a bilingual press, diplomats, and citizens who used every available political tool to defend their land and sovereignty.

The companion article, The Indian Removal Act and Its Consequences, explains what the 1830 law authorized and how removal unfolded across five southeastern nations. This article follows one leader and the government he served, through that history and beyond it.

A Cherokee Upbringing

John Ross was born on October 3, 1790, at Turkey Town, a Cherokee town on the Coosa River near present-day Centre, Alabama.¹ His father, Daniel Ross, was a Scottish trader. Sources vary in naming and describing his Cherokee mother, who is commonly identified as Mollie or Molly McDonald or Ross.²

He grew up in Cherokee communities and also received English-language schooling, including study at South West Point Academy in Tennessee.¹ Ross would spend decades moving between Cherokee councils and the offices of Washington, arguing his nation’s case in English to American officials.

As a young adult, Ross developed commercial ties through trade and federal supply contracts, and he later operated a store at Ross’s Landing on the Tennessee River, the site of present-day Chattanooga.¹ He served with Cherokee forces allied with the United States in the Creek War of 1813–14, and in 1813 he married Quatie, also known as Elizabeth Brown Henley.²

By the late 1820s, Ross was a prosperous slaveholding farmer and merchant near the meeting of the Oostanaula and Etowah rivers, close to present-day Rome, Georgia.¹ Enslaved Black people labored in his household and enterprises, part of the Cherokee Nation’s involvement in the slaveholding South.²

Building a Constitutional Nation

Ross came of age as Cherokee territory was shrinking. According to the National Park Service, more than 90 percent of Cherokee lands were ceded between 1721 and 1819.³ Cherokee leaders responded by building a constitutional government, which strengthened national procedures for decisions about land and diplomacy and made it harder for individuals to claim authority to cede national territory.⁴

By the end of the 1810s, Ross was serving as president of the National Committee, one of the two branches of the Cherokee legislature.² In 1824, he was one of four delegates, with George Lowrey, Major Ridge, and Elijah Hicks, who presented a memorial from the Cherokee Nation to Congress.⁵ Major Ridge’s presence in that delegation is a reminder that the leaders who later divided over removal had long worked side by side.

In 1827 the Cherokee Nation adopted a written constitution at its capital of New Echota, in present-day Georgia, with Ross among those who helped draft it. It established a bicameral legislature, a national court system, and an elected principal chief.² The next year the Cherokee Phoenix began publication at New Echota, printed in English and in the syllabary developed by Sequoyah. (For that story, see Sequoyah and the Cherokee Syllabary.)

In 1828, Ross was elected principal chief under the new constitution.² According to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, his tenure, which continued until his death in 1866, was the longest of any principal chief.⁶

To Cherokee leaders, the constitution showed a nation governing itself within its own boundaries. To Georgia, it challenged state authority. The two views were about to collide.

Georgia’s Laws and the Nation’s Lawyers

Between 1827 and 1831, Georgia passed laws extending state jurisdiction over Cherokee territory and restricting or nullifying Cherokee governmental authority.⁷ The discovery of gold on Cherokee land intensified the pressure, and in 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act.

The Cherokee Nation added litigation to its larger strategy of petitions, diplomacy, and constitutional government. Represented by William Wirt, a former U.S. attorney general, it brought suit directly in the U.S. Supreme Court. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the Court held that it lacked original jurisdiction because the Cherokee Nation was not a “foreign state” under Article III; Chief Justice John Marshall described it instead as a “domestic dependent nation.”⁸

A year later, Worcester v. Georgia arose from Georgia’s prosecution of the missionary Samuel Worcester, who had refused to obtain a state license to live in the Cherokee Nation. Ross was not a party to that case, but Marshall’s ruling held that Georgia lacked authority to impose its laws within Cherokee territory. The Cherokee Nation, Marshall wrote, was “a distinct community occupying its own territory… in which the laws of Georgia can have no force.”⁹

Georgia did not bring its laws into line with the decision, and federal officials did not compel it to comply.¹⁰ For the wider enforcement dispute, see the Indian Removal Act article.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s 1832 land lotteries purported to distribute Cherokee land to white Georgians.⁷ Ross and his family moved to a farm at Flint Springs, Tennessee, a few miles from Red Clay, where the Cherokee National Council now met.¹¹

Petitions, Delegations, and a Divided Nation

Through the early 1830s, Ross and other Cherokee delegates pressed their nation’s case in Washington through delegations, memorials, and petitions to Congress. Their argument was consistent: the United States had made treaties with the Cherokee Nation, and those treaties bound it.

Not every Cherokee leader agreed on what to do next. Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot, the founding editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, concluded that removal could no longer be prevented and that the nation’s best remaining hope was to negotiate the strongest possible terms before its land was simply taken. Boudinot left the Phoenix in 1832 as disagreements over removal, editorial independence, and national policy deepened. These men had been leaders of the same national institutions Ross led, and their disagreement with him was over strategy under extreme pressure.⁴

In October 1835, the Cherokee General Council appointed a delegation, headed by Ross, with full powers to negotiate a settlement with the United States.¹² The next month, the Georgia Guard crossed into Tennessee and arrested Ross at his Flint Springs home, along with the writer John Howard Payne, who was staying there, and seized Cherokee national papers.¹¹ Ross was soon released.

On December 29, 1835, while Ross’s delegation was preparing to travel to Washington, a group of Cherokee men signed the Treaty of New Echota with U.S. commissioners. Ross and the National Council said that the signers lacked authority under Cherokee Nation law to cede national land; in Ross’s words, they held no “office nor appointment in our Nation.”¹²

The Cherokee National Council did not approve the treaty. More than 15,000 Cherokee people signed petitions protesting it, a show of national opposition organized through the Nation’s own political institutions. The U.S. Senate nevertheless ratified the treaty in May 1836 by a vote of 31 to 15, just enough to meet the two-thirds majority the Constitution requires.¹³

That September, Ross and the council wrote to Congress from Red Clay:

“The instrument in question is not the act of our Nation; we are not parties to its covenants; it has not received the sanction of our people. The makers of it sustain no office nor appointment in our Nation… We are denationalized; we are disfranchised.”¹²

From Resistance to Survival

The Treaty of New Echota set a removal deadline in May 1838. Ross spent the next two years petitioning Congress, seeking delay, and negotiating for better terms, without accepting a treaty he believed lacked Cherokee authority.

After federal troops and state militia rounded Cherokee people into stockades, Ross and other leaders then asked to supervise the remaining removal. General Winfield Scott agreed, and Cherokee leaders organized the remaining detachments.¹⁴ They arranged travel, food, wagons, and family groupings, but the process remained compulsory: every detachment traveled under the terms of a treaty the Cherokee National Council had rejected.

Ross traveled with the final water-route party in late 1838. His wife, Quatie, died during the journey in February 1839, after an illness commonly described as pneumonia. The later story that she gave her blanket to a sick child is widely repeated but weakly supported by evidence.¹⁵

For the camps, detachments, routes, and human toll of removal, see the companion article The Trail of Tears: Cherokee Removal, Survival, and Rebuilding.

Reunion and Conflict in Indian Territory

The Cherokee people who arrived in Indian Territory in 1839 did not arrive in empty country. Western Cherokee communities, often called the Old Settlers, had moved west in earlier decades and maintained their own government. Members of the Treaty Party had also emigrated before the forced removal.¹⁶

Reuniting these communities proved painful. Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot were killed in separate attacks on June 22, 1839; Boudinot’s brother Stand Watie survived. The killings occurred amid intense Cherokee factional conflict over the unauthorized cession of national land. No documentary evidence has established that Ross ordered them.⁴

On July 12, 1839, leaders of the eastern Cherokee and of the Old Settlers signed an Act of Union, and on September 6, 1839, a convention adopted a new constitution for the reunited Cherokee Nation.¹⁷ The 1839 constitution established a new governmental framework for the reunited Cherokee Nation, and Ross was elected principal chief of the reconstituted Nation that year.³ The Cherokee Nation still marks the constitution each year with its National Holiday in Tahlequah.¹⁸

Political conflict and violence continued for years. In 1846, a treaty among the Cherokee factions and the United States sought to settle their disputes. According to the Cherokee Nation, it made clear that the Nation was one nation, with its lands “secured to the whole Cherokee people for their common use and benefit.”¹⁶ In the decades that followed, the Nation rebuilt its government, courts, and schools, and in 1844 it established a national newspaper, the Cherokee Advocate.¹⁶

The Civil War and Final Years

The Civil War divided the Cherokee Nation again. Ross favored Cherokee neutrality, but surrounded by Confederate forces and allied nations, the Cherokee Nation signed a treaty of alliance with the Confederacy on October 7, 1861.¹⁹ Stand Watie, a leader of the former Treaty Party, became a Confederate colonel and later a brigadier general.¹⁹

Ross left Cherokee territory with Union forces in 1862 and spent much of the war in Washington and other Union-held places, seeking federal support.¹⁹ In 1863, the pro-Union Cherokee National Council revoked the Confederate treaty and passed an act freeing enslaved people in the Nation.²⁰

The war left the Cherokee Nation devastated and divided. In 1866, Ross, aged and ill, again went to Washington to negotiate. The Nation signed a new treaty on July 19, 1866. It restored relations with the United States on hard terms, including land cessions and railroad rights-of-way, and it required the Nation to recognize the citizenship rights of Cherokee Freedmen, a question that has continued to shape Cherokee political and legal life.²¹

Ross died in Washington on August 1, 1866. He was buried in Wilmington, Delaware, and his remains were later returned to the Cherokee Nation and reinterred near Tahlequah.²

A Contested and Enduring Legacy

Historians and Cherokee people have long debated Ross’s choices. His supporters, then and since, have seen in him a leader who refused to let a small group sign away a nation’s land and who held the United States to its own treaties and laws. His critics, including many in the Treaty Party, argued that his resistance delayed a negotiated departure and left the Cherokee people to face removal under the worst conditions. Both interpretations engage the same central events, but they assign different weight to Ross’s choices, the treaty crisis, and the possibilities available under U.S. pressure.

What is not in dispute is that the Cherokee Nation rebuilt and maintained its government after removal. It continues to exercise sovereign authority from Tahlequah under its present constitution, within a governmental tradition shaped by the nineteenth-century rebuilding Ross helped lead.¹⁶

Ross’s life also raises questions that remain part of civic life: What can courts do when other branches will not enforce their rulings? Who has authority to make an agreement on behalf of a people? And what does it mean for a government to keep its word?

Continue exploring this history with The Indian Removal Act and Its Consequences, The Trail of Tears: Cherokee Removal, Survival, and Rebuilding, and Sequoyah and the Cherokee Syllabary.

Endnotes

1. New Georgia Encyclopedia, Alice Taylor-Colbert, “John Ross (1790–1866)”: georgiaencyclopedia.org
2. Encyclopedia of Alabama, Andrew Denson, “John Ross”: encyclopediaofalabama.org
3. National Park Service, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, “What Happened on the Trail of Tears?”: nps.gov
4. Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (Penguin, 2007).
5. Memorial of John Ross, Geo. Lowrey, Major Ridge, and Elijah Hicks, Delegates from the Cherokee Nation of Indians, April 16, 1824, H. Doc. 18-133: govinfo.gov
6. National Historical Publications and Records Commission, “Papers of Chief John Ross”: archives.gov
7. New Georgia Encyclopedia, Tim Alan Garrison, “Cherokee Removal”: georgiaencyclopedia.org
8. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831).
9. Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832), opinion of Chief Justice John Marshall.
10. Federal Judicial Center, “Executive Enforcement of Judicial Orders”: fjc.gov
11. National Park Service, “John Ross Farm”: nps.gov
12. John Ross and the Cherokee National Council to the Senate and House of Representatives, Red Clay Council Ground, September 28, 1836, in Moulton, ed., The Papers of Chief John Ross, vol. 1; text via National Park Service, “Protest of the Treaty of New Echota”: nps.gov
13. U.S. Senate, Executive Journal, 24th Cong., 1st sess., May 18, 1836, recording ratification of the Treaty of New Echota, 31–15.
14. National Museum of the American Indian, Native Knowledge 360°, “Forced Cherokee Removal”: americanindian.si.edu
15. Encyclopedia of Arkansas, Cody Lynn Berry, “Quatie Ross (1791–1839)”: encyclopediaofarkansas.net
16. Cherokee Nation, “History”: cherokee.gov
17. The Constitution and Laws of the Cherokee Nation (1840), Act of Union, July 12, 1839, and Constitution of the Cherokee Nation, September 6, 1839.
18. Oklahoma Historical Society, Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Rennard Strickland, “Cherokee (tribe)”: okhistory.org
19. Oklahoma Historical Society, Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, James L. Huston, “Civil War Era”: okhistory.org
20. “Cherokee Nation and Freedmen: A Historical Timeline,” Cherokee Phoenix, September 27, 2017: cherokeephoenix.org
21. Treaty with the Cherokee, July 19, 1866, 14 Stat. 799, including Article 9 on the rights of Freedmen.