Elias Boudinot

Who Was Elias Boudinot?

Elias Boudinot — born Buck Watie, a Cherokee citizen of the Cherokee Nation — was the founder and first editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first Native American newspaper in the United States, and one of the most significant Native American writers and public intellectuals of the early nineteenth century. Born in the Cherokee Nation in what is now Georgia, he was educated at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, where he converted to Christianity and adopted the name of his patron, the New Jersey statesman Elias Boudinot.

His 1826 address “An Address to the Whites,” delivered in churches in Philadelphia and other cities to raise money for the Cherokee Phoenix, is one of the most eloquent statements of Cherokee cultural achievement and political rights in the period before removal. The Cherokee Phoenix, which he edited from 1828 to 1832, published in both English and the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah, and served as the primary vehicle for Cherokee political communication during the crisis that led to the Trail of Tears.

Boudinot’s decision to sign the Treaty of New Echota in 1835 — the treaty that ceded Cherokee lands and authorized removal — was regarded by most Cherokees as treason, and he was assassinated in 1839 by Cherokees who considered the treaty a betrayal. His case raises, in the starkest possible terms, the question of how a person acts faithfully under conditions of impossible choice.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• An Address to the Whites — 1826 — speech
• Cherokee Phoenix — 1828–1832 — newspaper, as editor
• Poor Sarah — 1833 — translated tract
• Letters and Other Papers — collected correspondence