Elias Boudinot, editor, was born at Oothcaloga in the Cherokee nation, now northwest Georgia, the son of Oo-watie (later known as David Watie), a Cherokee warrior, and Susanna Reese, the daughter of a white trader and a Cherokee woman. Originally named Galagina, which translates in English to "Buck," he attended the Moravian mission school in the Cherokee nation from 1811 to 1818 and the American Board of Commissioners Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, from 1818 to 1822. Buck took the name of the president of the American Bible Society, Elias Boudinot (although the Cherokee youth sometimes spelled it Boudinott), in 1817 en route to Cornwall. Moravian and American Board missionaries noted Boudinot's intellect and piety, and in 1820 he converted to Christianity. Upon his permanent return home from school in 1825, Boudinot served as clerk of the Cherokee Council (until 1827), but his real interests were religious and intellectual rather than political. In 1826 he toured major American cities on behalf of his people to raise money for a printing press and types in the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah. The lecture he delivered in Philadelphia, published as An Address to the Whites (1826), is a classic expression of enlightenment attitudes toward culture and "civilization." Boudinot believed that Indians "must either become civilized and happy, or sharing the fate of many kindred nations, become extinct." He envisioned the Cherokee nation, with the assistance of white benefactors, "rising from the ashes of her degradation, wearing her purified and beautiful garments, and taking her seat with the nations of the earth." While he was in the Northeast in 1826, Boudinot married Harriet Ruggles Gold, whom he had met while he was a student at Cornwall. This interracial union provoked an uproar among New Englanders that challenged Boudinot's belief that accomplished Indians could take their seats alongside whites--that is, be treated as equals--and forced the Foreign Mission School to close. Despite charges that she would become a "squaw," Harriet returned to the Cherokee nation with her husband, and they had six children before her death in 1836. In 1837 Boudinot married American Board missionary Delight Sargent, also a white New Englander, with whom he had no children. Boudinot's tour was professionally as well as personally successful. The council purchased the press and appointed Boudinot editor of the bilingual, biweekly Cherokee Phoenix. The prospectus for the paper appeared in October 1827 and the first issue in February 1828. While Boudinot borrowed material on national and world news from other publications, he also printed Cherokee laws and announcements and penned an editorial. The difficulty of setting type in the syllabary meant that the amount of Cherokee text in the Phoenix never equaled the English. The American Board subsidized Boudinot's salary, and so he worked with missionary Samuel Austin Worcester on the translation and publication of hymns and the New Testament. He also translated Poor Sarah (1833), an inspirational story originally serialized in missionary periodicals. Although he was not a politician, Boudinot became convinced in 1832 of the futility of Cherokee resistance to removal west of the Mississippi River. Southern states demanded federal action to extinguish Indian title to land within their chartered borders, and President Andrew Jackson sought to oblige them. In 1832 the U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of the Cherokees in Worcester v. Georgia, a case involving the unlawful arrest of Boudinot's collaborator, who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the state of Georgia, but the Court lacked the power to enforce the decision. As white intruders streamed into Cherokee country and threatened, robbed, and assaulted Cherokees with impunity, Boudinot began to believe that only removal would end the Cherokees' suffering. He wanted to open columns of the Cherokee Phoenix to a debate of the issue. Principal Chief John Ross refused on the grounds that the Phoenix was the official organ of the Cherokee nation and therefore should print only the nation's official position on the issue - steadfast opposition to removal. Consequently, Boudinot resigned as editor in 1832. He served on official delegations to Washington, D.C., in 1834 and 1835, but he focused his energies on trying to convince Ross to negotiate. Despairing of accomplishing that goal, he joined his cousin John Ridge and uncle Major Ridge in promoting a removal treaty. In December 1835 a small group of Cherokees met at Boudinot's house and signed the Treaty of New Echota in clear violation of the Cherokee law that made unauthorized land cession a capital offense. The vast majority of Cherokees repudiated the treaty and its signers. Boudinot defended his actions in a pamphlet, Letters and Other Papers Relating to Cherokee Affairs (1837): "Instead of contending uselessly against superior power, the only course left, was, to yield to circumstances over which they [the Cherokees] had no control." Because Ross prevented discussion of the issue, "the people have been kept ignorant of their true condition." As a result, he argued, "we can see strong reasons to justify the action of a minority of fifty persons--to do what the majority would do if they understood their condition--to save a nation from political thraldom and moral degradation." Boudinot and his family moved west in 1837, a year before the U.S. Army rounded up the majority of Cherokees and imprisoned them in hot, crowded, unsanitary stockades to await transportation to the West over the infamous "trail of tears." They settled at Park Hill, near the new Cherokee capital of Tahlequah (present-day Oklahoma), where Boudinot planned to resume his work with Worcester, who had relocated there following his release from the Georgia penitentiary. After the Cherokees had suffered at least 4,000 deaths on their forced migration to the West under the terms of the Treaty of New Echota, an unknown group of men executed Elias Boudinot and the Ridges for their role in removal. Boudinot died at Park Hill. His ignominious death does not detract from his literary legacy, which rested on a profound belief in the Cherokees' ability to adapt to changing circumstances, triumph over adversity, and "rise like the Phoenix." American National Biography Online. (http://www.anb.org/articles/20/20-00092.html?a=1&f=boudinot&ia=-at&ib=-bib&d=10&ss=1&q=22) Retrieved 7/8/2009.
From the description of C. E. Haynes letter, 1838 February 2. (University of Georgia). WorldCat record id: 430826769
