Throughout the debate over Indian removal in the 1830s, abolitionist support of the Cherokee cause was contingent upon a romanticized picture of Indian slaveholding. As part of their support for the Cherokee Nation’s fight against removal, abolitionists found themselves in the unusual position of acting as apologists for Indian slaveholding, mounting a defense that drew heavily from the testimony of Cherokee leaders. Abolitionists accepted such testimony as fact, even when they had good reason to doubt its truthfulness, because it reinforced their own ideas about Indians, slavery and civilization.
Such a rendering of Cherokee slaveholding was exemplified in the letter that Cherokee leader David Brown wrote to the Family Visitor. The basic outlines of Brown’s letter were already familiar to reformers, many of whom had read similar accounts in official missionary reports and travel narratives. First, he was careful to emphasize that white Americans bore the responsibility for introducing slavery to the Indians, whose lack of civilization had left them vulnerable to the adoption of such vices. Second, he asserted that Indians were more benevolent masters than their white counterparts and, consequently, that slaves preferred to live in the Cherokee Nation. Finally, he insisted that Indians were likely to emancipate their slaves in the near future (which, as he suggested, would be done through African colonization, still a radical enough antislavery position in 1825). Framing Cherokee slaveholding in this way was a successful rhetorical strategy used by Cherokee leaders during the removal crisis to reassure their antislavery supporters that although some Indians owned slaves, black chattel slavery was qualitatively different among Indians than among whites.
Indian leaders did not always feel compelled to explain either their acceptance of slavery or their ownership of slaves. Before the rise of the radical antislavery movement in the late 1820s and early 1830s, Cherokee slaveowners often proudly referred to their use of slave labor, which they deftly linked to their simultaneous progress in civilization. In 1826, John Ridge, a Cherokee political leader and wealthy slaveowner, responded to a query from Albert Gallatin about the progress of civilization in the Cherokee Nation. Using recent census data that indicated, among other things, a large and growing population of black slaves, Ridge stated proudly that Cherokee slaveowners lived as well as their white counterparts. Their houses and furniture were well made, he declared, and “[s]ervants attend at their meals, & the same rules and etiquette is observed at table as in the first families of the whites.”