Jefferson's Confidential Letter to Congress

Bibliography
Image Credits

Video One

Video Two

Video Overview

Historian Leah Glaser analyzes a letter to the U.S. Congress from Thomas Jefferson requesting funding for the Lewis and Clark expedition. In this letter, Jefferson explains his rationale and his vision for the future of the country. Glaser models several historical thinking skills, including:

  • (1) close reading of the letter to explore Jefferson’s language and thinking about American Indians and the future of the United States;
  • (2) attention to key source information, such as the date of the letter and the audience; and
  • (3) placing the letter within a larger context, using it to explore Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian nation, relations with American Indians, westward expansion, and political strategy in the early 19th century.
Video Clip Name
Leah1.mov
Leah2.mov
Video Clip Title
Reading the Document
Teaching Strategies
Video Clip Duration
6:10
3:15
Transcript Text

This is called "Jefferson's Confidential Letter to Congress," and it certainly is more than it seems. It's often put with the collection of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery materials. And essentially it's the letter where he asks for money from Congress, for getting money for the Corps of Discovery. And he asked for $2,500, but it's not till the very end. And what's interesting about it and the reason I like it and I teach with it, is because it's clearly not about the money. He's trying to tell Congress a much bigger story, and you really get a large idea in this one little letter of his whole theory of where the country should go and expansion and his philosophy of expansion and Indian policy and where Congress fits into it.

At the beginning you get no indication that he's going to be asking for money and what it's for or anything like that. But I think the most important phrase here is that he ends with "the public good" because that's going to be a theme throughout the letter.

Then he says, "The Indian tribes residing within the limits of the United States have, for a considerable time, been growing more and more uneasy at the constant diminution of the territory they occupy, although affected by their own voluntary sales, and the policy has long been gaining strength with them of refusing absolutely all further sale on any conditions, insomuch at this time, it hazards their friendship and excites dangerous jealousies in their minds to make any overture for the purchase of the smallest portions of their land. Very few tribes only are not yet obstinately in these dispositions."

So basically he's saying that, you know, we've been purchasing land from these Indian tribes, and all of a sudden they're not very happy about it anymore and they won't do it anymore, so we're going to have to figure something else out.

"First, to encourage them to abandon hunting, to apply to the raising stock, to agriculture and domestic manufacture, and thereby prove to themselves that less land and labor will maintain them in this, better than in their former mode of living. The extensive forests necessary in the hunting life will then become useless, and they will see advantage in exchanging them for the means of improving their farms, and of increasing their domestic comforts."

This is my favorite part of this letter, because it's basically trying to ask the Indians to do what he wants everybody to do: to be yeoman farmers. And a yeoman farmer is Jefferson's dream of the agrarian nation. The self-reliant, independent farmer who lives off his own land, and the idea that everybody will have their own land and nobody, you know, will be dependent on anybody else, and we will all be equal.

And basically he's saying we need to convince the Indians of this, too, and once they just farm they won't need any of that hunting land, and we can then easily take it from them. It won't be this big struggle. And, so this is basically a policy of assimilation. "We need them to be like us, and then they won't need all that land anymore.'

And then secondly, "To multiply trading houses among them, and place within their reach those things which will contribute more to their domestic comfort than the possession of extensive, but uncultivated, wilds. Experience and reflection will develop to them the wisdom of exchanging what they can spare and we want, for what we can spare and they want. In leading them to agriculture, to manufactures, and to civilization, in bringing together their and our settlements, and in preparing them ultimately to participate in the benefit of our governments, I trust and believe we are acting in their greatest good."

So again, we make them like our stuff, we trade stuff with them. They become sort of part of our economic system, and they become more like us, and we won't have necessarily all this conflict.

And then finally gets to that last paragraph. "While the extension of the public commerce among the Indian tribes may deprive of that source of profit such of our citizens as are engaged in it, it might be worthy the attention of Congress, in their care of individual as well as in the general interest, to the point in another direction, the enterprise of these citizens as profitably for themselves and more usefully for the public."

This again he's talking about that greater good. Yeah, there's people making money, individuals making money, but this is the bigger picture.

"It is, however, understood, that the country on that river is inhabited by numerous tribes, who furnish great supplies of furs and peltry to the trade of another nation, carried on in a high latitude through an infinite number of portages and lakes, shut up by ice through a long season. The commerce on that line could bear no competition with that of the Missouri, traversing a moderate climate, offering no competition to the best accounts, a continued navigation from its source, and possibly, with a single portage from the Western Ocean, and finding to the Atlantic a choice of channels through the Illinois or Wabash, the lakes of the Hudson, through the Ohio, the Susquehanna, or the Potomac or James rivers, and through the Tennessee and Savannah rivers."

That one line is a little sneak in here of a very important concept, which people argue was the principal reason for the Lewis and Clark expedition, and that was the Northwest Passage, all those rivers he's talking about. This theory that he has, sitting in Virginia, that there's an all-water route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And so while we're doing this stuff with the trading houses, you know, we might just be able to find this all-water route to the Pacific.

I guess you tend to hear about the Louisiana Purchase. He's surprised, and just happens, "Oh, I wasn't thinking that at all." But you see with the date of this letter in January of 1803, that he was thinking about this area a lot before the opportunity presented itself and might have already heard rumors that France wanted to dump this land. Spain had been caring for it for a while. France was now not able to deal with all that territory. And certainly, he was not perhaps anticipating the whole block of it, but he certainly had his eye on it.

Well, we talk a lot about Jefferson's theory of the agrarian nation beforehand. I talk a lot about the yeoman farmer and the values of property and the whole—John Locke's vision of life, liberty, and property, not the pursuit of happiness, but that idea of property, even though it's dropped from the Declaration of Independence, still maintains, you know, great power and investment in his mind.

And so we talk a lot, especially when we talk about the West, of that idea of the agrarian nation. This vision that this is America's garden, and it's going—this is how we're going to be different from Europe. This is how we're going to get away from the original sin of slavery. We're not going to depend on anybody.

I give a little background about Washington's civilization program and the role that Indians play in the Constitution, then I sort of give them this and it pulls it all together a little bit, Jefferson ties it all together. And then the next day we talk about Lewis and Clark, basically, and they read his instructions. We don't pick apart every sentence necessarily, but I sort of just ask them to get into groups and outline the argument. Outline how he gets from the beginning to asking for money. What is his argument and what is he asking them to do? Why is he putting this in terms of commerce, and what does that have to do with Indians? Where do Lewis and Clark, you know, come in in all of this? How does he convince Congress that it's in their interest to fund this expedition?

Sometimes I have them read the original and sometimes I give them both, because if they really try—Jefferson has pretty good handwriting, and so they can get most of it. You know, the limitations are it's a little wordy in areas. And it is a complex argument, but that's kind of the point of the document. That's why I like it, because he makes a very simple request very complicated.

I think there's a lot of different documents as I said that would be a lot simpler, like the list given to the Indians. But, that gets specifically to the Lewis and Clark expedition. And what I think is a bonus about this is it's the precursor to the Lewis and Clark expedition, and it gives the plan in the beginning, that it wasn't all just haphazard, and that even though plans didn't always go well, over and over, the United States really did stick to Jefferson's vision as best it could. Just kept insisting the West was this place for an agrarian nation, and we're going to make it so, until [our nature] comes back and says, "No, that's not—this is not like the East. This is a different place." Even great men like Jefferson perhaps misunderstood it, but this misunderstanding is important to understand, because it had ramifications.

Cherokee Law of Blood

Bibliography
Image Credits

Video Two

  • Photo, "Reconstructed Cherokee Council House," May 2004, J. Stephen Conn, Flickr.

Video Three

  • Library of Congress
  • North Carolina Museum of History
  • Tennessee History for Kids
  • Tennessee State Library and Archives
  • Western History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library
Video Overview

Historian Malinda Lowery analyzes an 1833 record from the Cherokee Nation's Supreme Court to untangle a complicated story of identity, legal authority, slavery, and the Cherokee Law of Blood. Lowery models several historical thinking skills, including:

  • (1) close reading of the court document to piece together the story from the names and individuals mentioned;
  • (2) drawing on prior knowledge of life in the early 19th-century, cultural contact, and the Cherokee Nation; and
  • (3) placing the court case within a larger context of racial identity, slavery, and relations between American Indians and the U.S. government.
Video Clip Name
Malinda1.mov
Malinda2.mov
Malinda3.mov
Video Clip Title
Reading the Document
Understanding the Document
Teaching Strategies
Video Clip Duration
4:25
4:07
3:12
Transcript Text

The source comes from the Cherokee Nation's Supreme Court Records. In 1833, a lady named Molly Hightower claimed that a woman named Chickaua, who is the primary person mentioned in the document, that Chickaua and her sons belonged to Molly Hightower. And this claim was based on a transaction between another man named Sam Dent, to Molly Hightower's father. Sam Dent had been married to a Cherokee wife some time prior to the Revolutionary War, and he actually beat and killed his Cherokee wife. According to the Cherokee Law of Blood, the Deer clan sought revenge on Sam Dent for the death of their family member, because his wife had been a Deer clan member. And instead of subjecting himself to Deer clan punishment, he purchased a slave named Molly, who then became Chickaua, our main character in this document, to replace his dead wife. So, he gifted the Deer clan with the slave that he had purchased as a way of meeting his obligation for killing his wife.

The Deer clan adopted the slave named Molly, gave her the name Chickaua and, as the document says, she has by herself and descendants, been ever since recognized by said Nation, the Cherokee Nation or clan, the Deer clan, as a Cherokee. That's what allowed her sons to then also be members of the Deer clan and full-fledged members of the Cherokee Nation.

So, then later on, in 1833, Molly Hightower comes into the picture and says that Sam Dent sold Chickaua to her father, and that she actually owns Chickaua and Chickaua's descendants, Chickaua's sons. As the document says, "Her father was also an Indian trader who lived many years near the descendants of Chickaua and who never advanced or set up any claim to Chickaua and her son, Cunestuta," who is also called Isaac Tucker in the document. And this document is interesting, because it has a number of different names. You have English names, you have Cherokee names, you have a variety of different identities that are represented in the one document, in addition to this interesting transaction over slave property.

The Deer clan objected to Molly Hightower's claim, and decided to petition the Cherokee Supreme Court to prevent the return of Chickaua and her son, Cunestuta, to slavery. The Deer clan petitions them to, "Resist this oppression and illegal wrong attempted to be practiced on our brother and sister by the Hightower, Molly Hightower, in carrying into slavery two of whom have ever been and considered Native Cherokee." So, what that particular statement represents is an affirmation by the Deer clan that Molly is their kin, that Chickaua, Molly-slash-Chickaua, is their kin and belongs to them. It's really an affirmation of the adoption process and how seriously the Cherokees took their Law of Blood to bring in someone who had been an outsider to their community, and adopting them, making them full-fledged family members and not wanting them to return to the condition of slavery.

Ultimately, the document indicates that the Supreme Court sided with the Deer clan, saying that since Chickaua's adoption she has, quote, "continued in the Nation and enjoyed the liberty of freedom and that her two sons, Edward and Isaac Tucker, were born at the beloved town called Echota on the Tennessee River"—that was one of the main towns of the Cherokee Nation, what they call their beloved town—"and has ever been free and resided in the Nation."

Well, it's a very rich document on a number of levels. The primary thing that strikes me about it is the confusion over names. When you read it the first time, you're not sure who's who and who's talking about who. There's two Mollys. There's sort of what I think of as the first Molly, who was bought by Sam Dent, the trader, and then given to the Cherokee Deer clan. Her name then becomes Chickaua, and that's how she's referred to throughout the rest of the document. The next Molly is Molly Hightower, she who claims that her father actually owns Chickaua and Chickaua's descendants.

But there's—the fact that Chickaua obtains her name after her adoption into the Cherokee Nation, also means that her personal name is a marker of affiliation with a state, with a nation and a state, the Cherokee state. So, it's a great example of how names can mean many different layers of identity.

Another thing that we see in the document is how racial identity is shifting. We think of slaves as being of African descent, and we don't know, of course, that Molly, who became Chickaua, was not of African descent. In fact, we presume that she was. So, her identity shifts from being a black slave to an Indian free person, although obviously she herself does not change. It reminds us of how racial identity is constructed, how it has a history by itself that's worth examination.

Clan membership in Cherokee society, in many southeastern Native societies, was matrilineal, so you were only affiliated with the group through your mother's line. It's that matrilineal line that affirms everything about Cherokee identity and also Cherokee law.

This Law of Blood was based on the idea that clan members could avenge the deaths or other incidents happening to their kin, and women often made the decisions about how those deaths were to be avenged. And it was a way of making sure that people in Cherokee society lived in harmony with one another, because it was very clear what the consequences would be if you committed such a violent act.

Just because Chickaua escaped re-enslavement here doesn't mean that she was forever secure, because 1833 was a very critical time in the history of Indians in the southeast and well, indeed the whole nation. What we now know of as the old South, the sort of cotton culture of the antebellum South, would not have been possible without Indian removal, and the race relations, the intensity of black/white relations that developed prior to the Civil War, would have been very different had Indians remained in the southeast. This case is coming at a critical time, not just for the Cherokee Nation, but for questions of racial formation in the United States.

You don't understand very much about Cherokee removal from this particular source, but when you look at the date that Molly Hightower makes this claim in 1833 (October 18, 1833, is when the Supreme Court ruled on it), that date by itself triggers for the historian, a whole set of associations around the tensions of Cherokee removal, and the kinds of decisions that Congress was making, that President Andrew Jackson was making, that the Cherokee principal Chief John Ross, and the Cherokee General Council were making, around these issues of removal.

Because it is a fairly complex document, I introduced it to the students simply by asking them to identify the different names and to do a little genealogy of who the players are and how they're related to one another. So, on the one side they have Molly Hightower, they have Molly Hightower's father. On the other side, they have Sam Dent. They have his Cherokee wife. They have his purchase of Molly, the slave. Molly the slave then becomes a Cherokee.

The idea of tribes and nations that we operate with today when we talk about Native Americans, didn't always exist in its current form. What we see in this document is a world in which family, clan membership, kinship affiliation, was kind of the dominant logic of the society, and to understand that dominant logic you have to understand the names, and you have to understand the relationships. So, it's sort of a window into not only the time period, but also a method of doing history that speaks to the power of history itself, how it helps us understand another society that's different from our own.

I think students, they ask, they assume that because Sam Dent was a white man that he would have felt no responsibility to the Deer clan, that he would have felt no sense of loyalty or allegiance to the Cherokee Nation. But, I think what they need to understand is that the reality at this time was very different. Sam Dent made his living off of trading with Cherokee people, and under—most English traders understood that in order to trade with an Indian Nation, you had to have a kinship affiliation with that Nation. So, that's probably why Sam Dent married a Cherokee, was that his marriage to that woman enabled him, in fact, to make a living.

And one of the things that we feel we understand about American society is that whether right or wrong, European Americans have held the balance of power firmly in their hands over time, and this document is an example of a time period in which European Americans were not holding the balance of power. In fact, Cherokees at this time and place, certainly the time and place in which Sam Dent made these decisions, were holding the balance of power. This document reminds us how the Cherokee Supreme Court was alive and well. It was doing its job and acting on behalf of the Cherokee Nation, without regard to the United States and to the property laws of the United States that might have legitimized Sam Dent's sale to Molly Hightower's father.

Thomas Jefferson Papers

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This collection presents digitized images of approximately 27,000 documents, the largest collection of original Jefferson documents in the world. Includes correspondence, commonplace books, financial account books, and manuscript volumes--approximately 83,000 images. It is organized chronologically and is searchable by keyword. Regrettably, the documents are presented as page images--no transcribed text is available. Reading the handwriting online in this way is slow and difficult.

Virginia Historical Society

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Annotation

Since 1831, the Virginia Historical Society has been collecting materials documenting the lives of Virginians. This website provides information for researchers and the broader public interested in visiting the Society's headquarters in Richmond, including a collections catalog, finding guides to specific collections, and information about physical exhibitions. The website also includes significant digital holdings. While only five percent of the collection has been digitized, this represents more than 5,000 items, grouped into 14 digital collections. These collections include maps, drawings, paintings, postcards, prints and engravings, 19th century photography, as well as topical collections on African Americans, the Civil War, the Retreat Hospital in Richmond, Virginia's manufacturing of arms, the 1852 Virginia General Assembly Composite Portrait, the Reynolds Metal Company (forthcoming), the Garden Club of Virginia (forthcoming), and selections from the Society's ongoing exhibition, The Story of Virginia. The entire collections catalog is keyword searchable, and includes an option to limit the search to digitized materials.

National Park Service, Teaching with Historic Places

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This useful site offers properties listed in the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places as teaching tools for history, social studies, geography, or civics classes. It contains more than 75 "classroom ready" lesson plans that include maps, primary source readings, photographs and other images, discussion questions, activities, and projects.

The lesson plans can be browsed by location, theme, and time period, and all are based on sites listed in the National Register. The lesson plans are also arranged by featured topics for popular classroom subjects like Native Americans, women, the Civil War, and maritime history. For example, there are lesson plans for teaching Civil War and civilian memory using the Battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, and a plan for teaching about maritime history using the Fort Hancock site along the New York coast.

The plans cover all time periods in American history, but the site is particularly strong from the Civil War through the Civil Rights movement. An author's packet shows teachers how to devise new lesson plans using National Park Service properties. A "Professional Development" section offers a list of upcoming workshops and presentations as well as a bibliography of more than 150 National Park Service and other publications on teaching history with historic sites. Though the lesson plans are geared toward middle school students, they are easily adaptable to high school or college survey courses. This site is ideal for teachers looking for creative ways to bring historic sites into the classroom.

Through Our Parent's Eyes: Tucson's Diverse Community

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The ethnically diverse history of Tucson, Arizona is celebrated here in sections on the Hispanic, Native American, African American, Chinese, and Jewish heritage of the area. A 1000-word essay on the Hispanic history of Tucson is complemented by the four histories, from two to 100 pages, of local families. An exhibit of traditional arts in the Mexican American community includes photographs of houses, piñatas, and ten video clips of low-rider cars. Sources on Native Americans include 12 oral histories (300-600 words), about food and culture. The history of African Americans in the Tucson area from the 16th to the 19th century is recounted in an 1,800-word essay. A collection of 22 biographies (120-800 words) and summarized oral histories offer more personal details of African American life in Tucson. The collection of material about Chinese Americans in Tucson includes four biographies (600-1,200 words) and seven video clips of interviews with a Chinese American woman who grew up in Tucson in the 1940s. The journey made by one Jewish family from Russia in the 19th century to Tucson in the 20th is recounted in a 4,700-word illustrated essay. The site will be useful for research in ethnicity and the history of the west.

Photographer to the World-The Detroit Publishing Company

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Based on an exhibit of the same name, this website provides a look at the Detroit Publishing Company (DPC) photographs of the Western United States from 1895 to 1924. The site is arranged for easy browsing into nine sections: DPC History, "How did they do it?," Cityscapes, Everyday Life, Foreign Views, Getting Around, Michigan Views, Nature, and Workplace; and each section contains 24 to 38 photographs. The first section covers the early years of the company and provides information about DPC photographers and the creation and distribution of pictures. The everyday life photos include images of cowboys shooting craps, children in Chinatown, and an African American Emancipation Day celebration in Richmond, VA. The foreign views section consists of snapshots taken in Mexico, Venezuela, the Bahamas, and Switzerland. Roughly 40 photographs focus on the state of Michigan. The nature images, the most popular of the company's photographs, are majestic and many of them fed the growing tourist industry. The section of workplace images rounds out this site and includes harvest scenes, loggers in Michigan, smelters, oyster pickers in Louisiana, and cotton gin workers. For those interested in the history of photography, this easily navigable site is a valuable resource.

Spain, The United States, and The American Frontier: Historias Paralelas

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This collection of primary and secondary sources explores the history of Spanish expansion into North America from Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas; across the modern-day American West; and north to Alaska. There are more than 200 primary sources, including numerous texts, 118 maps, manuscripts, and first-hand accounts, all written between 1492 and 1898. Some of the highlights include La Florida del Inca, an account of the Hernando de Soto expedition through Florida and the southeastern part of North America, along with the Notes of a Military Reconnaissance from Fort Leavenworth to San Diego, published in 1848 as a special report to the United States Congress. All documents are available in English and many of the documents are available in Spanish, as well. The collection is searchable by keyword and title and can be browsed. These documents are valuable for understanding Spanish-North American interaction.

When They Were Young: A Photographic Retrospective of Childhood

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These 66 photographs capture the diverse experiences of children from many different parts of the world from the 1840s to the mid-20th century. The collection includes early 19th-century daguerreotypes, turn of the century studio portraits, and 20th-century prints and stereographs of young people. The portraits of children include those born into privilege, such as Tad Lincoln, son of the President Abraham Lincoln, and a young Theodore Roosevelt, as well as children of tenant farmers in Florida, California, and Texas during the Great Depression. There are also images of children from around the world, including children in Paris, Puerto Rico, Greece, and the Virgin Islands. There are poignant photographs of Cheyenne and Apache children from the Pacific Northwest, Mexican girls in Texas, and African American boys in Harlem.

The collection includes photographs culled from the American Red Cross Collection and the W.E. B. Du Bois Collection, in addition to pictures of African Americans in Washington D.C. by renowned photographer Gordon Parks. Four short descriptions (50 words) by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles and information about his book, produced in conjunction with the exhibit, When They Were Young, accompany the collection.

The Pilgrims in American Culture: Thanksgiving

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Documenting the colonial experience of settlers in Plimoth, MA, this site contains several brief articles on Puritanism, traditional thanking for harvest, the Wampanoag, the formation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, Thanksgiving menu regionalism and commonality, and primary source quotations. A major focus of the site is New England Thanksgiving. A somewhat longer article focuses on the menu of the original Thanksgiving. Explore the online activity about What really happened at the First Thanksgiving? that invites you to be the historian and explore multiple perspectives.

A virtual tour of the Plimoth Plantation, which requires a free browser plug-in, allows visitors to observe the grounds as well as historical re-enactors and interpreters. Although the site has relatively few primary sources, the exhibit is useful as an introduction to New England studies.