By Larry Felton Johnson

In 1825, Cobb County did not yet exist. Cobb was part of the Cherokee Nation, the land north and west of the Chattahoochee River. The Creek had occupied the lands to the south and east of the river, and the land lotteries that divided that land for white American settlers had already begun.

But the process that led to the forced removal of the Cherokee in the infamous Trail of Tears was already well underway, too.

The Digital Library of Georgia (DLG) published a copy of an 1823 letter from the two U.S. treaty commissioners to the Cherokee Nation. The letter itself is hand-written and is slow reading, but the DLG summarizes it as follows:

This document is a letter or talk delivered to the General Council of the Cherokee Nation, by U.S. treaty commissioners Duncan G. Campbell and James Meriwether, and dated October 21, 1823. The commissioners patronizingly explain the relationship between the United States government and the Cherokee people and attempt to rationalize the continued efforts to acquire Cherokee lands. They insist that it is unfair that the Cherokees possess more land than they can physically occupy and thereby attempt to justify the intrusions of overzealous frontier settlers.

Two hundred years ago today, in the December 21, 1825 issue of the Georgia Messenger, a newspaper operating out of Macon, there was a long article by Campbell and Meriwether arguing against negotiation and accommodation with the Creek and Cherokee who were living on the land.

The article itself is written in ponderous 19th-Century legalese, and is mostly intended to justify the the authors’ conduct in the forced removal of the Creeks (you can slog through the article by following the previous link).

But this quote from the article sums up the position of the two commissioners regarding the removal of both the Creek and the Cherokee:

Besides, we had been taught ourselves, and had so taught the Indians in our conferences with them, that their existence as a nation in community within the limits of Georgia or any other state was incompatible with our system, and must yield to it. Above all, the admitted obligation of such a law was totally destructive of the sovereign right of Georgia to the territory occupied by the Indians within her limits; and the especial object of our mission to the Creek nation was “peaceably and on reasonable terms” to reduce that right to possession.

To this end we were instructed to “attend particularly to the feelings and wishes of the State of Georgia in any treaty that might be made with the Creek nation.” We well knew what those “wishes and feelings” were—they were identified with our own, and we acted alike from inclination and from duty.

The removal after that was fast and furious.

According to the New Georgia Encyclopedia:

Between 1827 and 1831 the Georgia legislature extended the state’s jurisdiction over Cherokee territory and set in motion a process to seize the Cherokee land, divide it into parcels, and offer the parcels in a lottery to white Georgians. The discovery of gold on Cherokee territory in 1829 further fueled the desire of Georgians to possess their land.

This process was streamlined in 1830 with the passage of the Indian Removal Act, which gave broad powers to then-President Andrew Jackson to force the removal of Indian nations by coercive treaties, force and bribes.

In 1831, Cherokee County was formed from the Cherokee Nation’s lands. In 1832 Cherokee County was broken into eight counties, including Cobb County.

In 1838 the forced removal of the Cherokee was completed with the Trail of Tears.

About Georgia Historic Newspapers

Georgia Historic Newspapers is a part of the GALILEO project and is housed at the University of Georgia. It’s an amazing resource for anyone with an interest in the history of Georgia and its regions.

According to the “About” page on its website:

The Georgia Historic Newspapers Archive is a project of the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), a part of Georgia’s Virtual Library GALILEO and is based at the University of Georgia Libraries. Since 2007, the DLG has partnered with universities, archives, public libraries, historical societies, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions to digitize historical newspapers from around the state. The archive is free and open for public use and includes over two million Georgia newspaper pages between 1763 and 2021.

Newspaper titles are regularly digitized and added to the archive. If you are interested in including a particular title, you can visit our participation page. A majority of the newspapers on this site were digitized from the microfilm produced by the Georgia Newspaper Project (GNP). For more information about the microfilm available through the GNP, please visit their website.

To read more articles the Courier wrote with help from the Georgia Historic Newspapers database, please follow this link.