Sign up to receive email notices of recent acquisitions.

[Indian Territory,] 4 February 1857. 1 p. manuscript pay voucher in ink, signed by Ross, on lined sheet of blue paper, 5.75” x 7.625”. CONDITION: Very good, slight loss at center, not affecting text.

A document signed by John Ross, reflecting his duties and educational legacy as Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation.

This payment voucher, dated February 4th, 1857, is signed by John Ross and addressed to his brother Lewis in his capacity as the Cherokee National Treasurer. It orders a disbursement of $61.91 of treasury funds to Martha Candy “for services as Teacher for the session just closed.” Candy had graduated just two years earlier from the Cherokee National Seminary, an institution founded in the wake of Ross’s 1839 act to establish “a system of general education by schools” within the Cherokee Nation (Starr, p. 225). Candy married fellow seminary graduate and future Cherokee Principal Chief Joel Bryan Mayes, and died in 1860.

John Ross (Cooweescoowe, 1790–1866) was the longest-serving Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Dedicated to tribal sovereignty and staunchly opposed to removal, Ross led the Cherokee from 1828 to 1862, through the fraught and deadly Trail of Tears and the factionalism that surrounded it, the rebuilding of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory, and the Civil War. The son of a Cherokee mother and a Scottish father, Ross was given a bicultural and bilingual education, and just a year after being appointed a US Indian agent at the age of twenty, entered the War of 1812 under General Andrew Jackson. Ross’s political engagement blossomed after his military service, and in 1816 his fluency in English enabled him to become a central negotiator in a delegation trip to Washington, D.C. Twelve years after this first major foray into politics—and a year after the deaths of his mentors, Principal Chiefs Pathkiller and Charles Hicks—he was elected Principal Chief himself. Faced with the threat of removal by the U.S. Government, Ross led the anti-removal majority faction known as the National Party. After the minority “Ridge Party” signed the Treaty of New Echota in 1935, Ross stringently but unsuccessfully argued its illegitimacy and was forced to lead the Cherokee out of their ancestral homelands to present-day northeastern Oklahoma, losing his wife, Quatie Brown Henley, on the Trail of Tears. In 1845 he married a Quaker woman from Delaware, Mary Bryan Stapler (1825–1865), with whom he had his sixth and seventh children, Annie and John. During the Civil War, numerous factors, including renewed factionalism within the Cherokee Nation and the Federal Government’s abandonment of Indian Territory (a treaty violation) came together to force Ross’s hand in signing a treaty with the Confederacy, but he fairly soon managed to negotiate agreements with the Union, resulting in many Cherokee soldiers defecting to the Union Indian Home Guard. Ross died while negotiating a treaty in Washington, D.C.

REFERENCES: Starr, Emmet. History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folk Lore (Oklahoma City, 1921), p. 225, 353; Moulton, Gary E. “Ross, John (1790–1866)” at the Oklahoma Historical Society’s Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture online; “Martha Jane (Candy) Mayes (1836 - 1860)” at WikiTree online.

Item #10126

On Hold

Price: $750.00