An interracial blot from Cornwall's past

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Notwithstanding the furor that caused the Mission School to close, the newlyweds set off for New Echota, Georgia, the then-capital of the Cherokee nation, where they would make their home. Boudinot worked closely with Chief Sequoyah to record a Cherokee alphabet. In 1828 he established the Cherokee Phoenix, a newspaper written in both English and Cherokee. The Golds were able to visit the growing Boudinot family and the Boudinots reciprocated.

But in one of the darker chapters of American history, a fever in Georgia for gold thought to be on Cherokee land resulted in a drive to compel the so-called civilized tribes to move to Oklahoma territory. To his discredit, President Andrew Jackson backed this squeezeplay and refused to enforce a Supreme Court decision terming it illegal. Boudinot, who at first had defended Cherokee rights, came to believe that only by accepting the move could the nation stay together. He resigned from the Phoenix.

After 10 years of happy marriage, Harriett Gold Boudinot died in 1835. Elias Boudinot remained active in Cherokee politics, arguing for the move to Oklahoma. He signed the Treaty of New Echota on behalf of the Cherokee nation and moved West. But his action was repudiated by a group of young protesters who stabbed him to death in 1839.

He thus became a martyr to freedom of the press, even before Elijah Parrish Lovejoy. The hardships of the forced migration are well recounted by John Ehle in "Trail of Tears." A better description of the actions of the Jackson administration would be "Trail of Shame."

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My partner and I became interested in these events some years ago when we visited in our van-camper the Cherokee theme park outside the capital in Talequah, Okla. The mountainous countryside bears a striking resemblance to northwest Connecticut. Noticing a monument listing Harriett Gold’s birthplace as "Cornwall, Conn.," we inquired and bought a copy of Ehle’s comprehensive book.

The Cherokees appear to have retained their ethnicity as a homogeneous group in Oklahoma. Their capital building, like many early county courthouses, has a lot of architectural and literary history and their political campaigns appear to an outsider to be as lively as elsewhere in the country. They put on an impressive summer pageant, "Trail of Tears." In their treaty relationship with the federal government, the tribes moved from the Southeast seem to have fared as well as or better than most other tribes, no doubt because some of them are sitting on oil land.

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As for the racial feeling in Cornwall in the 1820s, it very likely was no worse — and no better — than elsewhere in Connecticut during those years. Very few Indians remained in this area, and there was little or no experience in dealing with them. Tales of the early massacres at Deerfield (Massachusetts) and elsewhere survived and no doubt kept some early settlers on the alert, but there weren’t enough Schaghticokes or Mohegans left to worry about. Although there had been a few personal slaves in the 18th century, these presumably were almost all gone by the 1800s.

What the experience of Cornwall in the 1820s teaches is that ignorance and fear of something different have not changed very much over 180 years. Yet racial attitudes do seem to be modifying, probably in response to civil rights laws as well as to more awareness of the behavior of different races and peoples as brought into the living room by television. Service in the armed forces, during which members of different races become dependent upon one another, is one of the most effective antidotes for racial prejudice. It is hard to think that skin color matters when someone of a different ethnic background has just saved your life.