| The Cherokees considered themselves apart from others and above them. This sense of isolation and superiority may have extended back for thousands of years prior to the Columbian encounter. The Cherokees, in effect, considered themselves to constitute a distinctive civilization, and used the term Aniyuwiya, or "The Real People," to refer to their mythic, accomplished past. The prehistoric Mississippian mounds of North America, and the legends they inspired, also informed Cherokee self-perception. By the time of European contact, the size, organization, and political and legal traditions of the Cherokees set them apart from their neighbors. These distinctive traits led the Cherokees to identify with the European colonists and seek to become even more like them. Thus, Cherokee assimilation was not the drastic transformation that many historians have suggested.;Thomas Jefferson and his "Indian Civilization Campaign" recognized Cherokee accomplishments in acculturation. As the Cherokees remade their nation into a mirror of the US republic in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, however, Cherokee leaders began to disagree about the future of Cherokee civilization. The nation's most visible achievement, the Cherokee syllabary, became the contested symbol of political rivals. Nativist-purist, separatist-parallel, and assimilationist factions threatened the Cherokee nation internally even as the state of Georgia and the Jackson presidency threatened the Cherokees with removal.;The forced resettlement of the Cherokees brought the proponents of the three different viewpoints together into a national dialogue. From this mixture of ideas, and the ultimate triumph of one, came the 1839 Cherokee National Constitution. This compact reflected and restored the long-lasting Cherokee consensus surrounding Jefferson's civilization campaign. The document embodied the aspects of Cherokee civilization that predated contact, that shifted with trade, that grew under Jefferson, and that survived removal. The focus of this dissertation is on this story from the days of sixteenth-century townships through the ratification of the 1839 constitution, during which the intellectual leaders of the Cherokee nation followed a pattern of assimilation consistent with the unchanging Cherokee emphasis on, and changing Cherokee definition of, civilization. |
