The People of the Standing Stone: The Oneida Nation from Revolution through the Era of Removal

6: The Nation in Fragments: Oneida Removal, 1815– 1836

129 The story of the removal of Indians from the Southern states is wellknown , since it involved relatively large tribes and exacerbated the sectional tensions that eventually set off the Civil War. There was, however, considerable irony in Northerners’ loud denunciations of Southern removal, because they had pioneered the enterprise. When the Treaty of Butte des Morts, involving the Menominee and Ojibwe nations, was before the U.S. Senate during the winter of 1828–29, language supporting the emigration of the Iroquois to Michigan Territory was inserted at the behest of land speculators from New York, recently dubbed the “Empire State.” Those with a direct hand in Oneida removal included the Michigan territorial governor Lewis Cass, a New Englander who went on to become Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war. Cass’s experience with the Iroquois helped frame his arguments for removal and informed his later activities. The postwar years witnessed another upsurge in white immigration to central New York and pressure on the Oneidas to sell. In February 1814, twenty-six “chiefs and warriors” of the Christian Party warned the legislature that a delegation was en route to Albany. Among the signers was John Skenandoah, James Bread (briefly an influential chief before his untimely death later that year), and Peter Bread. In particular, they asked the government “not to pay any attention to the Petition of Angle DeFerier who has been in the habit of taking down Indians for the Express Purpose of cheating them out of their Land [because] as soon as the said Deferier gets our land he treats us with all the cruelty in his Power.” A statement of support by “the wives and widows of the chiefs” accompanied the document. In June 1815, 6 The Nation in Fragments Oneida Removal, 1815–1836 130 Chapter 6 however, New York abandoned its policy against treaty making in Albany and consummated the deal. As the military threat dissipated, so did lawmakers ’ scruples; in the treaty, De Ferrière was even granted another fifty roadside acres. The Christian Party relinquished twelve hundred acres in four tracts, mostly along the turnpike. The one dollar an acre they received did not reflect even a tenth of the land’s appraised value, let alone the symbolic value of the treaty’s greatest prize, most of the remainder of Kanonwalohale. Indeed, the state thought the location at the confluence of Oneida and Skanado Creeks so propitious that it called in the surveyor John Randel Jr., who also laid out the grid of Manhattan Island, to divide “Oneida Castleton” into town lots. Digging In By the summer of 1817, construction of the Erie Canal was under way. The location of the groundbreaking ceremony was none other than the town of Rome, on the Oneida Carrying Place. The Oneidas’ blessing had become their curse. For centuries they had capitalized on the strategic significance of their territory, but this now only hastened efforts to dispossess them. Even if the Oneidas had already lost the lands through which the canal was being carved, the proximity of their remaining territory to “the great ditch” (and hence to vast new markets) put a premium on all reservation land. As one surveyor noted, the land “owned by the Indians which will soon become State property will be trebled in value.” The demographic tide had turned against the Oneidas long before, but in the Canal Era they were truly swamped on the reservation itself. The population of the state had more than doubled since the beginning of the century, and non-Indians spilled onto the reservation with impunity. In 1816 the Oneida population was 1,031 and rose by about 100 over the next decade; by contrast, the combined non-Indian population of Oneida and Madison Counties rose from 70,000 to more than 95,000 between 1814 and 1825. The increase in overall population further inflated land values and added yet more luster to the usual glowing descriptions of Oneida land. A man traveling to Utica (to catch the canal boat Oneida Chief) described it as “a country so luxuriant as to require little labour to obtain all the necessaries of life.” According to the Albany publisher Thurlow Weed, “none more fertile were to be found in the State.” Less glowing were the descriptions of relations between Indians and whites in the neighborhood. In 1819, a downstate legislator, Abraham Har- ing...