The Long Arm of the Phoenix in Nineteenth-Century Political Reprinting

The Cherokee Phoenix, the first indigenous-produced newspaper in the United States, adopted pro-assimilation rhetoric to argue against westward removal of indigenous people. The newspaper engaged nineteenth-century print networks, spreading its anti-removal argument to a wider and potentially more influential audience through reprinting. Examining the Phoenix in relation to national print networks and reprint culture reveals the purposeful use of pro-assimilation rhetoric by editor-in-chief Elias Boudinot in a network that crafted Anglo-American perceptions of indigenous peoples. This article considers the different editorial choices made by Northern and Southern periodicals when reprinting from the Phoenix, showing how political and economic contexts encouraged Southern periodicals, which were geographically closer to the Cherokee nation, to portray the Cherokee as “savage” others. For Southern periodicals, Cherokee expulsion to the frontier was necessary for the expansion and preservation of white America, despite the efforts on the part of the Phoenix to make the case otherwise.