A Most Controversial Marriage

This is an edited version of an essay I wrote that helped form what would become my Master’s thesis at Yale Divinity School on the life of Elias Boudinot. I’ve used a few stories from that thesis on this blog before, but lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about his interracial marriage to Harriet Gold, and decided I would tell y’all the story.

“It is through pride & prejudice–that all this clamour has been raised against the Indians.” ~Colonel Benjamin Gold[1]

“Let intermarriages between them and the whites be encouraged by the government… It will redound more to the national honor to incorporate, by a humane and benevolent policy, the natives of our forests in the great American family of freemen, than to receive with open arms the fugitives of the old world.” ~William H. Crawford[2]

The Education of an Indian

Galegina was born on the Cherokee homeland in either 1801 or 1802 to David Uwati and his wife Susanna Reese, who was of mixed Cherokee and European heritage. His extended family included an uncle, The Ridge, who was among the most influential men in the Cherokee nation. Although he was partially of Euro-American ancestry on his mother’s side, Elias Boudinot would always refer to himself as a “full blood” Cherokee. From a young age, the boy who became known as Buck showed an aptitude for learning. He was first tutored by Moravian missionaries who had settled on what is now the border of northern Georgia and southern Tennessee.[3] As he continued to excel, he studied under Congregationalists in Brainerd.[4] It was quickly apparent that he would outgrow the local opportunities for education, prompting his teachers to write the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to ask if there was room at their Cornwall School for the young Cherokee prodigy.

The Cornwall School had been founded in late 1817 to provide schooling for an Indigenous Hawaiian man, Obookiah, who according to the New Englanders had found his way to New Haven through New England whaling ships.[5] Timothy Dwight, president of Yale and the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, had met Obookiah and been made aware of his supposed plight. Alone in a foreign country, the young man was penniless. The first mention of the school comes in a letter from a New York philanthropist to the correspondence secretary of the American Board of Commissioners. He wrote that “they should have a permanent residence and permanent instructor”, which might in time “grow into a great institution at which should be assembled heathen from any part of the world.”[6] Behind this school came the weight of the young nation’s largest Christian missionary organization, which though it generally focused abroad had recently begun sending preachers among Native Americans.[7] John Demos has provided a monograph The Heathen School telling the story as he puts it of “hope and betrayal;” however, his volume focuses more on the school as an institution and the stories of specific students without as much attention paid to the larger context of Native American removal. For this essay, the primary importance of the school and the conflicts over interracial marriage that closed it is that they provided a proving ground for those who would resist the removal of Southeastern Native American tribes. It is also important to note that the New Englanders and Demos focus on the school and Obookiah from an explicitly white, paternalist perspective. For instance, although they refer to Opukaha’ia (as he should more properly be named) as a boy, when in fact he had reached twenty years of age before leaving his home. He had also undergone extensive training to become a priest in the religion of his people. His purposeful travel to New England should be viewed—as David A. Chang has shown in his remarkable volume The World and All the Things Upon It—as part of a larger project by indigenous Hawai’ians to gain the knowledge of Euro-Americans.[8] Boudinot has not often been, but should be seen, as part of a similar project on behalf of the Cherokee. The greatest of the allies he acquired was Jeremiah Evarts, a Yale educated lawyer and reformer who served first as treasurer and later as the correspondence secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He knew Elias Boudinot, and thought highly of him as a scholar and a man.[9] Theologically, Evarts was a congregationalist who stood firmly in the tradition of Jonathan Edwards. His primary teacher at Yale—where he had been the valedictorian—was Timothy Dwight, Edwards’s grandson. He was close friends with men like Samuel Hopkins and Joseph Bellamy who had studied under Edwards. In addition to his work with the ABCFM, Evarts was an accomplished essayist, who published his own newspaper, The Panoplist, from 1805-1820.

While at the ABCFM school, Boudinot showed great promise as a scholar. Using only basic information from a textbook, he calculated the precise timing of the August 26, 1822 solar eclipse. These calculations along with other samples of his work was sent to Jedidiah Morse, leading professor at Yale, as evidence of the intellectual potential Indigenous youth showed.[10] Indeed, the teachers at the Cornwall school hoped that Boudinot would proceed to Andover Seminary and become a Congregationalist minister. It seems that this likely would have been the route his life followed had he not been struck with an illness. Of course, illness was no stranger to Natives in the nineteenth century. By this time, plague blankets had been survived, as well as succeeding waves of smallpox and other infectious diseases. Boudinot’s sickness, whatever it might have been, confined him to bed for several months. During this time, he was housed and nursed in the Gold family’s home. Colonel Benjamin Gold was a proprietor of the school, and his family had often hosted students for sabbath luncheons.[11] Eventually, afraid that he would die, the school and his family agreed that Elias should return to the Cherokee homeland. This might have been due to the many deaths of students at the school, including the pupil for whom it was founded. In 1823 then, Elias found himself traveling home for the first time in five years. After arriving home, he recovered. During the duration of his illness, he was no doubt kept apace of the developing conflict over his cousin and confidant, John Ridge—whose proposal of marriage to Sarah Northrup, daughter of the school’s steward, ignited a nationwide controversy.

John Ridge had arrived at the mission school with Elias in 1818, but he was from the beginning more favored by local residents. When his wealthy, plantation owning father—The Ridge—visited the hamlet, the entire town was impressed.[12] It would seem then that if any of the Cornwall scholars could get away with proposing to a white woman, it should have been John Ridge. Immediately though, the union was embroiled in controversy. The school, church, and larger community were scandalized by the potential of this interracial marriage. Despite his position as a member of the Cherokee elite, many locals did not consider Ridge to be an equal, suitable for marriage to a white New England woman. Much has been written about the difference between marriages of white men to Indigenous women, which was viewed as less scandalous.^[13] The editor of the Litchfield American Eagle, Isaiah Bunce, described such intermarriage as “a new kind of missionary machinery.”^[14] Bunce continued that “this was the fruit of the missionary spirit, and caused by the conduct of the clergymen at that place and vicinity who are agents and superintend the school.” He declined to name Sarah Northrup, but listed the agents and board of the school, holding them responsible.[15] Many newspaper editors used this tone of mocking theological language to ridicule the Cornwall school and missionaries in general. This is especially clear through the consistent italicizing of religious terminology to ensure the sarcasm reached the reader. This rancor from newspapers makes sense given that many Christian leaders viewed education as the sole factor holding back Indigenous peoples from mixing and marrying freely with whites, as well as maintaining their ancestral homelands. Other newspapers wrote critically of a report issued a half-decade earlier that had sought to encourage such interracial marriages by then Secretary of War William H. Crawford. The Connecticut Herald wrote, “Mr. Crawford’s plan for civilizing the Indians, by intermarrying with the whites and amalgamating their blood with ours appears to be going into practical operation in this state.”[16] It is also worth noting that this was not the first time a New England woman had married a native man, nor even the first such marriage in Cornwall.^[17] In the 1760s, a Pequot man had married a local Euro-American woman without any great, violent reaction. Historian Ann McGrath explains how Harriet may have responded to these gendered attacks.
Harriett knew that “civilized” women had to restrain their passions. A virtuous white woman needed to suppress desires of the flesh. At stake was white women’s fidelity to their own “race” and, further, to the highest ideals of the republic. The love of “a savage” — heathen or Christian — represented woman’s descent. Any such association symbolized a possible move against the republic itself, a defilement, a pollution, and defection. Gendered respectability was raced. As the “prime exemplars and symbols” of nineteenth- century Protestantism, women had been “elevated” from being “slaves” to having the status of intellectual and moral beings.[18]

The intertwined questions of race and gender in the conflict over this marriage are inescapable. It is almost immediately clear that the particular problem was an “Indian” man marrying a white woman. As both Ridge and Boudinot pointed out, white men married native women with a striking consistency, which made the practice almost blasé. There had been no conflict over any of these marriages.

Attitudes toward Interracial Marriage

Before the ABCFM mission school was started and long before Elias Boudinot came to Cornwall—in 1816, William H. Crawford, United States Secretary of War, issued a report on trade with Native Americans. It is important to note that throughout the nineteenth century, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was under the auspices of the War Department, setting an intrinsic state of conflict with Native Americans. Crawford was a native Virginian, but had moved to Georgia in search of good fortune, and had found it, as white settlers often did.^[19] A rising political star, many saw him as the natural successor to James Madison for the presidency. At the time of the report’s issuance, Crawford was working to hold Andrew Jackson in check: he was able to delay the war of elimination Jackson hoped to pursue against the Creek and Seminole.[20] Crawford expanded trade, and promoted honest, hard-working men instead of political appointees. His report to Congress on the state of trade with the Indians in May of 1806 largely reads like every other report on the matter he made as Secretary of War; however, the report’s concluding paragraph proved incredibly incendiary to the developing notion of whiteness in the young nation. Crawford wrote that:

These views are substantially founded upon the conviction that it is the true policy and earnest desire of the government to draw it [sic] Savage neighbors within the pale of civilization. If I am mistaken in this point—if the primary object of the government is to extinguish the Indian title and settle their lands as rapidly as possible, then Commerce with them ought to be entirely abandoned to individual enterprise, and without regulation. The result would be continual warfare attended by the extermination or expulsion of the aboriginal inhabitants of the country to more distant and less hospitable regions. The correctness of this policy cannot for a moment be admitted. The utter extinction of the Indian race must be abhorrent to the feelings of an enlightened and benevolent nation. The idea is directly opposed to every act of the government from the Declaration of Independence to the present day. If the system already devised does not produced all the effects which were expected from it new experiments ought to be made when every effort to introduce among them ideas of separate property, as well in things real as personal, shall fail, let Inter marriages between them and the whites be encouraged by the government. This cannot fail to preserve the race, with the modifications necessary to the enjoyment of civil Liberty and social happiness. It is believed that the principles of humanity in this instance are in harmonious concert with the true interest of the nation. It will redound more to the national honor to incorporate, by a Humane and benevolent policy, the natives of our forests in the Great American family of Freemen, then to receive with open arms the fugitives of the old world, whether their flight has been the effect of their crimes or their virtues.^[21]

In Crawford’s reports, we read an abiding suspicion about the United States’ motives in trading with Native Americans. He seems profoundly aware of the unspoken “say one thing, but do another” policy.^[22] This report served as the impetus for a national conversation on the question of intermarriage between whites and Natives. While Crawford is more sympathetic than the Jacksonians, it is important to note that he still is working on behalf of the settler state and assumes that there will be a destruction of the Indigenous population either through cultural assimilation (i.e. making them “white”) or outright genocide. He believed the former to be a good and not a lesser evil. Crawford’s position then is not dissimilar from the white moderate during abolition who worked to stop the spread of slavery while ignoring the true evil of the institution.

Responses were published almost immediately in several Washington newspapers, and over time reprinted in newspapers farther abroad from the capital. One such set of seven editorials was written by an author calling himself Americanus. This figure has been widely identified with Judge Thomas Cooper, then serving on the bench in Pennsylvania, but who would soon take up professorships first at the University of Pennsylvania and then as president of the fledgling University of South Carolina. Cooper could almost have been Benjamin Franklin’s evil twin. He was a judge, a scientist, a university professor and president, economist, political philosopher, and activist. Born in England, he had spent time in France during the revolution there and had been imprisoned in the United States under the Alien and Sedition Act for writing against President John Adams. In 1816 though, he was a judge in Pennsylvania. Through a local newspaper, no doubt, he came in contact with the report written by Crawford arguing for intermarriage. He was livid. His seven essays in response were widely circulated and were later reprinted during Crawford’s campaign for the presidency in 1824.[23]

The Americanus essays were addressed to President Madison to “present his excellency with the dangers of those close to him,” namely how William Crawford’s support for intermarriage with Native Americans was both anti-immigrant and would lead to the destruction of all that the Republic stood for.[24] One particularly noteworthy line of evidence which Cooper marshalled was that the children of such marriages were irrational and hotheaded. As evidence of this, he pointed to congressman John Randolph of Roanoke. Randolph was a larger-than-life figure despite his short stature, who due to a childhood illness never went through puberty. Until his death, he retained an unusually high voice. He also claimed to be descended from Pocahontas.[25] It was for this claim that Cooper excoriated him. The loud-mouthed unreasonableness and sickliness of the Virginian showed what the children of interracial marriage would become. Cooper went so far as to argue that “You can no more convert an Indian into a civilized man, than you can convert a negro into a white man.”[26] The United States agent among the Cherokee (and intriguingly for our story, a native of Connecticut), Return J. Meigs, wrote that Cooper’s essays were “a tissue of vulgarity, rudeness, cruelty, and injustice.” Nor was Meigs the only pen to rise in defense of Crawford. The Virginia Argus asked if the “present varieties of the human race have originally sprung from the same parent-stock, what so great absurdity is there in the intermarrying scheme of Mr. Crawford?”[27] By all accounts unbeknownst to either Crawford or Cooper, the conflict over the Ridge-Northrup and Boudinot-Gold marriages saw the ideological conflict between Cooper and Crawford play out in reality.

It was amidst the conflict over the Ridge-Northrup marriage in mid-1824 that Elias first approached Colonel and Mrs. Gold about marrying their daughter. They were harshly opposed to the match. No doubt, this in part was a reaction to watching the firestorm over the marriage of Elias’s cousin. Despite Col. Gold’s earlier support of the Ridge-Northrup marriage, he was apparently not ready for such a union in his own house. Harriet Ruggles Gold was the youngest of fourteen children. Her father had been a colonel of the militia during the War of 1812 and was a deacon of the church. Her family was in good standing in the community. She had desired to be a missionary from a young age, no doubt spurred on by many stories of young women from New England like Ann Judson, who would die in Burma just two years later in 1824, and who had traveled to exoticized locales for the sake of “the heathen.” In fact, part of the original argument she made for marrying Elias was that, “I have been praying that God would open a door for me to be a missionary, and this is the way.” Despite this, she was accused of “wrecking God’s work.” She wrote, “I have seen the time when I could close my eyes upon every earthly object and look up to God as my only supporter, my only hope — when I could say with emotion I never felt before, to my heavenly Father, ‘other refuge have I none, so I helpless hang on thee.’”[28] Harriet and Elias had struck up correspondence as soon as he left Cornwall, and as early as the summer of 1823, she felt that “she made up her mind to marry him, should he propose it, & she did not doubt but that he would.”[29]

If the Ridge-Northrup marriage had lit a torch, then the Boudinot-Gold engagement lit a fuse. Newspapers as far away as Baltimore and Boston published opinions concerning the marriage. Demos points out that there appears to be a distinct difference between classes in their views. Working class whites saw interracial marriage as an affront that could not be afforded; while middle-class and upper-class writers and editors seem to have viewed the marriage more positively. Potentially, this was because those who hoped to social climb were afraid that having an Indian in the family would prevent such upward mobility. This also mirrors the mudsill theory that has been discussed at length in theorizations of why non-slave owning whites supported the Confederacy so vehemently three decades later. Elias began receiving letters from parties not connected to the marriage in any relational way, including one from Boston, that hotbed of abolitionism, which was simply a drawing of a gallows. He was told directly that if he returned to Connecticut, he would be killed.

Harriet’s parents refused to give Boudinot permission to marry their youngest daughter. Soon after this refusal, Harriet became ill to the point of death. The entire family appears to have feared for her life, and in the midst of this sickness, her parents relented—no doubt fearing their daughter might die angry with them. Instead, she recovered and began making plans to marry Elias Boudinot. What changed the parents’ minds? Was it merely the sickness? Jeremiah Evarts was one of Col. Gold’s oldest friends and compatriots. It seems that his return to Connecticut surely helped the case of Elias and Harriet. Although he had been on a tour of the ABCFM missions among the five nations when Elias proposed, he had sent several letters supporting the couple from the south.[30] Attempting to explain their parents’ change in position, one sister wrote to Herman Vaill that they feared to “be found fighting against God.”[31]

However, if a marriage was to take place, it required informing the rest of her large family. She first told her brother Stephen. Having locked one door to a parlor, she handed him a letter, slipped out the other door, and locked it from the outside. Stephen’s acerbic shrieks rang through the large house. He wrote to his brother-in-law Herman Vaill in bold, large pen-strokes, “The dye [sic] is cast. Harriet is gone.” Determined to break up the engagement if he could, Stephen led the village youth in their violent protest of Harriet’s proposed marriage.[32] Most of Harriet’s older siblings were married by the time of her engagement, and the majority of the correspondence on which this portion of the essay is based comes from inter-familial dialogue on the question. Often there was dissonance between the husband and wife writing in a single letter. All of Harriet’s sisters supported her choice, while most of their husbands disagreed. One sister wrote confidentially to another that “Harriet never appeared more interesting than she does at present.”[33] From the letters which have survived, the foremost of these brothers-in-law appears to be Herman Vaill, the husband of Flora Gold. His pivotal role and position of supposed authority no doubt came from the fact that he had been an assistant teacher in the Cornwall School. Ralph Gabriel notes a carved poem he discovered on a pew in the Cornwall church about Vaill, which reads, “The hissing goose has far more sense//Than Vaill with all his eloquence.”[34] He used a veneer of care for the school as cover to question the percipience of the marriage. In addition to the impropriety, Vaill further argued that Harriet’s actions would “annihilate the institution” of the Foreign Mission School at Cornwall. Ironically, in an earlier letter on the question of her marriage, her brother-in-law had written Harriet, “You see I do not urge you to ‘Forbear’ — choose who you please, white, or black or red.”[35] Harriet described in detail for her sister and brother-in-law the raucous gathering that her engagement engendered. The so-called “sober and promising” youth of the town caroused around fires and then began to burn effigies of Harriet and her “Indian” fiancé.^[36] As the conflict raged, Harriet wrote one of her sisters decrying the “great division of feeling among many but especially in our family. It appears that a house divided against itself could not stand.”[37] She continued, “My heart truly sung [sic] with anguish at the dreadful scene.”[38] As the furor over Elias’s impending nuptials grew, Major Ridge approached the leading ABCFM missionary among the Cherokees to ask if there was anything against interracial marriage in the Bible. The man, William Chamberlin, said there was not, and that both he and President Monroe favored such marriages. The furor from Connecticut in fact caused many Cherokee to begin questioning the motives of mission activity. As William McLoughlin has written, “Worst of all, the trustees of the school…not only condemned the marriages, but after they took place against their wishes, voted to close the mission school forever lest any more dark-skinned men try to marry their white-skinned women.”

Amidst this crisis, Jeremiah Evarts fretted over the state of Boudinot’s soul. Reports had reached him that Boudinot was displaying erratic and (by the missionaries’ standards) regressive behavior, including playing stickball in the nude and returning to indigenous styles of dress. David Brown, a young Cherokee clergyman and translator had begun studying at Cornwall just as Boudinot left and went on to Andover Seminary as Elias had originally planned. He wrote to his friend that “We are necessarily led to inquire, whether our friends in new England have always acted from love to us & desire to do us good.” Evarts argued with anyone who would listen that Elias’s behavior showed the cost of not treating Native Americans with the dignity they deserved as fellow believers in Christ.[39] Not unlike Harriet, he believed that after conversion to Christianity, there should be no differentiation between races. It is unclear if this belief was endemic to his Edwardsian flavor of Evangelicalism or mere personal eccentricity. It is also possible he picked up positive views of interracial marriage from Crawford and the furious conflict over his report nearly a decade previously.

The Marriage

Herman Vaill proved correct on at least one point: the foreign mission school did close as a result of the marriage. As mentioned previously, the school would close the next year despite the board of trustees issuing a letter in which they used the strongest possible language to condemn the marriage.^[40] This letter was written by the trustees without consulting their superiors at the ABCFM in Boston. Undoubtedly, had Evarts had a word in the process, such a letter would not have been written. In fact, it is easy to assume that a series of essays written through a missionary newspaper in defense of the marriages was written by Evarts. The author, publishing in the evangelical Western Recorder, used the pen name Crawford in an homage to Crawford report, and this is similar to how Evarts would later write essays against removal under the pseudonym William Penn. Regardless of their author, the Crawford essays spoke powerfully to the Christian and liberal case that interracial marriage was a good both for the church and the United States. The essayist inquires whether the individual was “bound to act in accordance with the public will if that will is wrong?” This position held across the five essays written in defense of the Gold-Boudinot marriage, and can be found in Evarts’ letters and later essays in his fight against the Indian Removal Bill.[41]

On March 28, 1826 the marriage was performed in the Gold home in Cornwall. Besides family, it seems that only Evarts and the minister were present. The newly minted Boudinots did not return directly to the Cherokee homeland. Rather, they first traveled to Boston and then on a tour of eastern cities, which ended in Charleston. Late the previous year, the national council of the Cherokee had appointed him to raise funds among the whites for the creation of a national newspaper, with eight percent of those funds raised to be paid directly to him.

[1] Letter to Herman Vaill, 1 September 1825 Herman Landon Vaill Collection (MS 519). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library. Emphasis in the original.

[2] American State Papers: Indian Affairs 2:27

[3] John Demos, The Heathen School p 176

[4] Ibid.

[5] John Demos, The Heathen School, p 176-77; Boudinot was also entrusted with writing a letter to a Swiss Baron to show both his piety and ensure ongoing funding for the school. Ralph Henry Gabriel, Elias Boudinot, p 53-54

[6] John Demos, The Heathen School, p 32

[7] John Demos, The Heathen School, 24-25

[8] (Chang 2016) p 80-82

[9] John A. Andrews From Revivals to Removal, p5-6, 9, 11, 13, etc.

[10] Ibid. It is also noteworthy that Morse in his 1822 Report on Indian Affairs was a strong supporter of intermarriage with Native Americans following education. He was also a supporter of the ABCFM school from his influential academic post.

[11] Teresa Gaul, To Marry an Indian, pp 3-4, 13-14

[12] John Demos, The Heathen School, p 149

[13] Ralph Henry Gabriel, Elias Boudinot, pp 60-61

[14] John Demos, The Heathen School p 156

[15] Teresa Gaul, To Marry an Indian p 8

[16] Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation, (New York City: Basic Books. 2016)

[17] This is also in Demos, but I’m struggling to find the citation and forgot to write down the pagination in my notes.

[18] (McGrath 2015) p 47

[19] Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart, p 145

[20] Ibid ff. Crawford went so far as to renegotiate predatory treaties Jackson made with the Cherokee. This allowed over 2 million acres of land to be returned to the Cherokee.

[21] American State Papers: Indian Affairs 2:27

[22] Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us p 146

[23] Cooper would go on to be an avid supporter of and apologist for slavery and states’ rights in the South until his death in 1839 only two months after Elias Boudinot.

[24] Ibid. p 147

[25] For more on the history of American leaders claiming Native ancestry for attempted political gain, see Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2004.) And Deloria, Philip Joseph. Playing Indian. (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2007.)

[26] Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart p 147

[27] Ibid p 146

[28] Teresa Gaul, To Marry an Indian p 13-14

[29] John Demos, The Heathen School p 177

[30] John A. Andrew III, From Revivals to Removal p 135

[31] Mary to Rev. Hermann Vaill, July 19, 1825, Box 1, ms519, Vaill Collection; Gaul, To

Marry an Indian, 105

[32] John Demos, The Heathen School p 179

[33] Ibid. p 185

[34] Ralph Henry Gabriel, Elias Boudinot p 52

[35] (McGrath 2015) p 37

[36] Teresa Gaul, To Marry an Indian p 14-15

[37] John Demos, The Heathen School p 184

[38] Ann McGrath, Illicit Love p 39 Later, McGrath also posits a salacious possibility for Vaill’s irascibility. “Prior to their marriage, Elias Boudinot had long corresponded with

Hermann’s wife, Flora. However far their friendship went, Flora had felt obliged to formally inform Elias of her plans to marry Reverend Hermann Vaill. Afterward, the erudite Elias continued to correspond with Flora. Perhaps Hermann realized that his own wife could have married an Indian. Whatever his motives, Hermann tried to justify his opposition to Harriett’s marriage.” P 49

[39] (Gaul, To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriet Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters 1823-1839 2005) p 21

[40] Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart p 15

[41] Nicholas Guyatt, Bind Us Apart, p 156 Emphasis in the original.