Harriet R. Gold Boudinot
Encyclopedia
Harriet Ruggles Gold Boudinot (1805–1836) was the wife of the Cherokee
leader Elias Boudinot
(Buck Watie), the editor of the Cherokee Nation
newspaper The Cherokee Phoenix
. Harriett was the youngest daughter of Colonel Benjamin and Eleanor Gold; theirs was a prominent Congregationalist family in Cornwall, Connecticut
.
The announcement of the Gold-Boudinot engagement, about a year after another interracial marriage in Cornwall, caused scandal and protest in the town. Both Cherokee men were from the elite of their nation and had been students at the Foreign Mission School
in Cornwall. Boudinot and Gold were married on March 28, 1826 at the Gold home. They moved to Boudinot’s home of New Echota
in present-day Georgia, where they had six children before Harriett’s death in 1836.
.
Colonel Benjamin Gold, Harriet’s father, was a representative to the General Assembly and routinely traveled to Hartford or New Haven on government affairs. He was a deacon in the local ministry and had helped found the Foreign Mission School
. Harriet’s brother Ruggles Gold, also a Yale graduate, played a role in the school’s founding as well. The family was closely connected with its missionary interests; Harriett's older sisters, Mary and Flora, had married an agent and the assistant principal of the school, respectively.
Elias Boudinot, of Cherokee and European ancestry, enrolled in the Foreign Mission School in 1818. Two years later he was baptized in the Christian faith. He had studied at a Moravian
mission school in New Echota. Elias and other students were frequent guests at the Gold home. Harriett, as well as her brothers and sisters, engaged in correspondence with several of the Cherokee students, even after they had departed from Cornwall. She and her brother Franklin both wrote to Boudinot. Catherine, a young Cherokee girl, exchanged letters with Harriett and her sister Flora.
, also a student of the Foreign Mission School, married Sarah Bird Northup, a young local woman, which provoked scandal and racist comments. An outspoken critic of the marriage was Isaiah Bruce, the editor of a Litchfield paper, the American Eagle. He wrote that the match was “the fruit of the missionary spirit and caused by the conduct of the clergymen at that place and its vicinity who are agents of the school,” adding that it was an “affliction, mortification, and disgrace of the relatives of the young woman…who has thus made herself a squaw
, and connected her race to a race of Indians.” Bruce mocked the white men of Cornwall, saying they were “cast into the shade by their colored and tawny rivals.” He continued to write against the union, provoking the Golds and seven other families to publish their own response in the Connecticut Journal in August 1824. Benjamin Gold was especially outraged, by Bruce's attacks.
The Reverend Joseph Harvey of Goshen, Connecticut
, an influential agent of the Foreign Mission School, met with Harriett. He said that if she decided not to marry Elias, the whole matter could be kept secret. If she continued with the marriage, he would publish banns against the Golds, a public disgrace. She responded that her life calling was as a missionary
and to best accomplish this, she would marry Boudinot. The agents of the Foreign Mission School issued banns on the family.
As her family, and the town of Cornwall, dealt with the news, her family thought Harriet was at risk. She had written to her older brother, Stephen, with whom she was especially close, about her engagement. He wrote in a letter of his own: “the die is cast, Harriet is gone, we have reason to fear.” While in hiding at a neighbor's, Harriett saw Stephen led a mob in burning effigies of her and Boudinot. He also threatened Boudinot's life.
The church choir mourned Harriet as if she were dead, by wearing black sashes on their arms; and communion was postponed. Gold became isolated from the Cornwall community, while numerous family members wrote to her trying to change her decision. She said, “We have vowed, and our vows are heard in heaven; color is nothing to me; his soul is as white as mine; he is a Christian, and ever since I embraced religion I have been praying that God would open a door for me to be a missionary, and this is the way.” Harriet and Elias were married in the Gold household by a minister from Goshen on March 28, 1826.
and Franklin Brinsmade. All but one married and had families marry.
When looking back on six years of marriage, Harriett wrote to her sister Flora:
The Boudinot family was well liked by the Cherokee community, and the Boudinots were visited by Northern friends as well. While her husband was active in the Cherokee community and in the struggle to gain Cherokee rights, Harriett was rearing several children born close together. In her letters home, she often expressed her concerns for Indian welfare in political terms; this contrasts with the religious arguments she had used to persuade her family to accept her engagement. Her letters demonstrated her deep sympathy with the Cherokee people, of whom she felt a part.
Traditionally, Cherokee clan affiliations and hereditary tribal chiefs were matrilineal; that is, children belonged to their mother's clan and chiefs were selected by that clan. The mother's brothers were the role models for male children, not the father. With the coming of Europeans, an increasing number of Cherokee women took white spouses. Generally, the white man, usually a fur trader, would live with his wife in Cherokee Nation after their marriage; these were strategic marriages for both the Cherokee and Europeans, to strengthen trade alliances. The children were considered Cherokee and members of the mother's clan. They grew up within the Cherokee culture. The matrilineal structure meant that children of Cherokee fathers and white mothers, a rarity anyway, had no social or political place in the Nation.
In 1825, the year before Boudinot and Gold married, the Cherokee Nation passed a law that children born to Cherokee fathers and white mothers were “entitled to all the immunities and privileges enjoyed by citizens descending from the Cherokee race, by the mother’s side.” In her book, To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters 1823-1839, Theresa Strouth Gaul wrote that the law was inspired by Ridge's marriage and Boudinot’s engagement, as they were prominent Cherokee and it protected their children. At the time, European Americans generally opposed marriages between white women and non-European men; they were less concerned about the actions or marriages of white men to non-European women. Those who affiliated with Native American women were generally traders operating in frontier areas. Cherokee nationals had differing opinions on interracial marriage as well; by some it was considered a beneficial way of strengthening alliances with the European Americans, and others thought it meant a cultural loss.
Harriett’s marriage took place about a decade before Boudinot and others of the Treaty Party signed the Treaty of New Echota
in 1835 with the U.S. Government. Signatories included John Ridge. It was opposed by a majority of the Nation and the Principal Chief John Ross
. In the treaty, the Cherokee leaders agreed to move off their land in Cherokee Nation (Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina) and relocate in Indian Territory. When most of the people refused to migrate, the U.S. Army removed them forcibly in what is called “The Trail of Tears.” If she had lived, Harriet would have moved with Boudinot to Indian Territory. He was assassinated there in 1839 by opponents of the 1835 Treaty, as they considered it a capital crime to alienate their traditional lands. Their children were raised by the Cherokee.
Tennessee Press, 1983.
Cherokee
The Cherokee are a Native American people historically settled in the Southeastern United States . Linguistically, they are part of the Iroquoian language family...
leader Elias Boudinot
Elias Boudinot (Cherokee)
Elias Boudinot , was a member of an important Cherokee family in present-day Georgia. They believed that rapid acculturation was critical to Cherokee survival. In 1828 Boudinot became the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, which was published in Cherokee and English...
(Buck Watie), the editor of the Cherokee Nation
Cherokee Nation
The Cherokee Nation is the largest of three Cherokee federally recognized tribes in the United States. It was established in the 20th century, and includes people descended from members of the old Cherokee Nation who relocated voluntarily from the Southeast to Indian Territory and Cherokees who...
newspaper The Cherokee Phoenix
Cherokee Phoenix
The Cherokee Phoenix was the first newspaper published by Native Americans in the United States and the first published in a Native American language. The first issue was published in English and Cherokee on February 21, 1828, in New Echota, capital of the Cherokee Nation . The paper continued...
. Harriett was the youngest daughter of Colonel Benjamin and Eleanor Gold; theirs was a prominent Congregationalist family in Cornwall, Connecticut
Cornwall, Connecticut
Cornwall is a town in Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 1,434 at the 2000 census.In 1939 poet Mark Van Doren wrote "The Hills of Little Cornwall", a short poem in which the beauties of the countryside were portrayed as seductive:The town was also home to the Foreign...
.
The announcement of the Gold-Boudinot engagement, about a year after another interracial marriage in Cornwall, caused scandal and protest in the town. Both Cherokee men were from the elite of their nation and had been students at the Foreign Mission School
Foreign Mission School
The Foreign Mission School was an educational institution which existed between 1817 and 1826 in Cornwall, Connecticut. It was established by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to bring Christianity and Western culture to non-caucasian people by educating missionaries of...
in Cornwall. Boudinot and Gold were married on March 28, 1826 at the Gold home. They moved to Boudinot’s home of New Echota
New Echota
New Echota was the capital of the Cherokee Nation prior to their forced removal in the 1830s. New Echota is 3.68 miles north of present-day Calhoun, Georgia, and south of Resaca, Georgia. The site is a state park and an historic site....
in present-day Georgia, where they had six children before Harriett’s death in 1836.
Early life and education
Harriet was born June 1, 1805, or June 10, 1805, the youngest of fourteen children born to Benjamin and Eleanor Gold, part of an affluent and politically connected family in Cornwall. Her grandfather was Hezekiah Gold, a Congregationalist minister of the First Church of Cornwall. He graduated from YaleYALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
.
Colonel Benjamin Gold, Harriet’s father, was a representative to the General Assembly and routinely traveled to Hartford or New Haven on government affairs. He was a deacon in the local ministry and had helped found the Foreign Mission School
Foreign Mission School
The Foreign Mission School was an educational institution which existed between 1817 and 1826 in Cornwall, Connecticut. It was established by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to bring Christianity and Western culture to non-caucasian people by educating missionaries of...
. Harriet’s brother Ruggles Gold, also a Yale graduate, played a role in the school’s founding as well. The family was closely connected with its missionary interests; Harriett's older sisters, Mary and Flora, had married an agent and the assistant principal of the school, respectively.
Elias Boudinot, of Cherokee and European ancestry, enrolled in the Foreign Mission School in 1818. Two years later he was baptized in the Christian faith. He had studied at a Moravian
Moravian
Moravian refers to:* a person or thing from Moravia * Moravians * Moravian language, disputed language or dialect of the Czech language* a member or adherent of the Moravian Church...
mission school in New Echota. Elias and other students were frequent guests at the Gold home. Harriett, as well as her brothers and sisters, engaged in correspondence with several of the Cherokee students, even after they had departed from Cornwall. She and her brother Franklin both wrote to Boudinot. Catherine, a young Cherokee girl, exchanged letters with Harriett and her sister Flora.
Marriage and family
In 1822, Boudinot became ill and unable to complete his schooling; he returned to the Cherokee Nation. He and Harriett began a correspondence; it added to their courtship and their love for one another grew.Ridge-Northrup marriage
Boudinot's cousin John RidgeJohn Ridge
John Ridge, born Skah-tle-loh-skee , was from a prominent family of the Cherokee Nation, then located in present-day Georgia. He married Sarah Bird Northup, of a New England family, whom he had met while studying at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut...
, also a student of the Foreign Mission School, married Sarah Bird Northup, a young local woman, which provoked scandal and racist comments. An outspoken critic of the marriage was Isaiah Bruce, the editor of a Litchfield paper, the American Eagle. He wrote that the match was “the fruit of the missionary spirit and caused by the conduct of the clergymen at that place and its vicinity who are agents of the school,” adding that it was an “affliction, mortification, and disgrace of the relatives of the young woman…who has thus made herself a squaw
Squaw
Squaw is an English language loan-word, used as a noun or adjective, whose present meaning is an indigenous woman of North America. It is derived from the eastern Algonquian morpheme meaning 'woman' that appears in numerous Algonquian languages variously spelled squa, skwa, esqua, sqeh, skwe, que,...
, and connected her race to a race of Indians.” Bruce mocked the white men of Cornwall, saying they were “cast into the shade by their colored and tawny rivals.” He continued to write against the union, provoking the Golds and seven other families to publish their own response in the Connecticut Journal in August 1824. Benjamin Gold was especially outraged, by Bruce's attacks.
Boudinot-Gold marriage
Less than a year later, in the fall of 1824, Harriet asked for her father’s permission to marry Boudinot. She was nineteen years old. She did not want to continue her correspondence with Elias without the promise of marriage in their future. Her parents tried to talk Harriett out of her desire for marriage, and she grew ill, “hovering between life and death.” Her cousin Dr. Samuel Gold felt the outlook was bleak. Her many f brothers and sisters watched in despair as Harriett grew weaker, unaware of what was causing her illness. Benjamin Gold finally reconsidered the decision he had made a few weeks earlier in a letter to Elias. Her sister Mary, describes her parents’ reasoning; “that they might be found against God—and some time during H’s sickness they told her they should oppose her no longer, she must do what she through best.” Gold wrote to Elias with his decision, but Harriet’s troubles were not over.The Reverend Joseph Harvey of Goshen, Connecticut
Goshen, Connecticut
Goshen is a town in Litchfield County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 2,697 at the 2000 census.Each July, the Connecticut Agricultural Fair is held in town. It is also home to the Goshen players.-Geography:...
, an influential agent of the Foreign Mission School, met with Harriett. He said that if she decided not to marry Elias, the whole matter could be kept secret. If she continued with the marriage, he would publish banns against the Golds, a public disgrace. She responded that her life calling was as a missionary
Missionary
A missionary is a member of a religious group sent into an area to do evangelism or ministries of service, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care and economic development. The word "mission" originates from 1598 when the Jesuits sent members abroad, derived from the Latin...
and to best accomplish this, she would marry Boudinot. The agents of the Foreign Mission School issued banns on the family.
As her family, and the town of Cornwall, dealt with the news, her family thought Harriet was at risk. She had written to her older brother, Stephen, with whom she was especially close, about her engagement. He wrote in a letter of his own: “the die is cast, Harriet is gone, we have reason to fear.” While in hiding at a neighbor's, Harriett saw Stephen led a mob in burning effigies of her and Boudinot. He also threatened Boudinot's life.
The church choir mourned Harriet as if she were dead, by wearing black sashes on their arms; and communion was postponed. Gold became isolated from the Cornwall community, while numerous family members wrote to her trying to change her decision. She said, “We have vowed, and our vows are heard in heaven; color is nothing to me; his soul is as white as mine; he is a Christian, and ever since I embraced religion I have been praying that God would open a door for me to be a missionary, and this is the way.” Harriet and Elias were married in the Gold household by a minister from Goshen on March 28, 1826.
Life in New Echota
Shortly after their wedding, the Boudinots moved to his house in New Echota. It was a seven room, two-storied house, with glass windows, signs of refinement admired by their visitors. The Cherokee gave Harriet the name Kalahdee. The Boudinots had six children: Eleanor Susan, Mary Harriett, William Penn, Sarah Parkhill, Elias CorneliusElias Cornelius Boudinot
Elias Cornelius Boudinot was a delegate to the Arkansas secession convention, a colonel in the Confederate States Army, and a territorial representative in the Confederate Congress.-Life:...
and Franklin Brinsmade. All but one married and had families marry.
When looking back on six years of marriage, Harriett wrote to her sister Flora:
“I look back to [my wedding] day with pleasure, and with gratitude. Yes I am thankful. I remember the trails I had to encounter—the thorny path I had to tread, the bitter cup I had to drink—but a consciousness of doing right—a kind and affectionate devoted husband, together with many other blessings have made amends for all. Truly I have, ere this, entered upon the ‘sober realities of married life',—and if tears have been shed for me on that account—I can now pronounce them useless tears.”
The Boudinot family was well liked by the Cherokee community, and the Boudinots were visited by Northern friends as well. While her husband was active in the Cherokee community and in the struggle to gain Cherokee rights, Harriett was rearing several children born close together. In her letters home, she often expressed her concerns for Indian welfare in political terms; this contrasts with the religious arguments she had used to persuade her family to accept her engagement. Her letters demonstrated her deep sympathy with the Cherokee people, of whom she felt a part.
Legacy
Harriett died August 15, 1836. The New York Observer wrote about her several months later, and published a copy of a letter written by Boudinot to her parents. She died from an illness of several weeks. Some sources say it was due to complications from childbirth, as her seventh child was stillborn in May 1836. During her long illness, Harriett suffered but continued to share her beliefs with her children. Elias recorded her words: “It has been my sole wish and prayed to God…that you may become christians, and be useful in the world, and finally be happy in the world to come.”Traditionally, Cherokee clan affiliations and hereditary tribal chiefs were matrilineal; that is, children belonged to their mother's clan and chiefs were selected by that clan. The mother's brothers were the role models for male children, not the father. With the coming of Europeans, an increasing number of Cherokee women took white spouses. Generally, the white man, usually a fur trader, would live with his wife in Cherokee Nation after their marriage; these were strategic marriages for both the Cherokee and Europeans, to strengthen trade alliances. The children were considered Cherokee and members of the mother's clan. They grew up within the Cherokee culture. The matrilineal structure meant that children of Cherokee fathers and white mothers, a rarity anyway, had no social or political place in the Nation.
In 1825, the year before Boudinot and Gold married, the Cherokee Nation passed a law that children born to Cherokee fathers and white mothers were “entitled to all the immunities and privileges enjoyed by citizens descending from the Cherokee race, by the mother’s side.” In her book, To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters 1823-1839, Theresa Strouth Gaul wrote that the law was inspired by Ridge's marriage and Boudinot’s engagement, as they were prominent Cherokee and it protected their children. At the time, European Americans generally opposed marriages between white women and non-European men; they were less concerned about the actions or marriages of white men to non-European women. Those who affiliated with Native American women were generally traders operating in frontier areas. Cherokee nationals had differing opinions on interracial marriage as well; by some it was considered a beneficial way of strengthening alliances with the European Americans, and others thought it meant a cultural loss.
Harriett’s marriage took place about a decade before Boudinot and others of the Treaty Party signed the Treaty of New Echota
Treaty of New Echota
The Treaty of New Echota was a treaty signed on December 29, 1835, in New Echota, Georgia by officials of the United States government and representatives of a minority Cherokee political faction, known as the Treaty Party...
in 1835 with the U.S. Government. Signatories included John Ridge. It was opposed by a majority of the Nation and the Principal Chief John Ross
John Ross (Cherokee chief)
John Ross , also known as Guwisguwi , was Principal Chief of the Cherokee Native American Nation from 1828–1866...
. In the treaty, the Cherokee leaders agreed to move off their land in Cherokee Nation (Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina) and relocate in Indian Territory. When most of the people refused to migrate, the U.S. Army removed them forcibly in what is called “The Trail of Tears.” If she had lived, Harriet would have moved with Boudinot to Indian Territory. He was assassinated there in 1839 by opponents of the 1835 Treaty, as they considered it a capital crime to alienate their traditional lands. Their children were raised by the Cherokee.
Sources
- Austen, Barbara. “Marrying Red: Indian/White Relations and the Case of Elias Boudinot and Harriet Gold,” Connecticut History 45 (Fall 2006): 256-260.
- “The Death of Harriet Gold Boudinot,” Journal of Cherokee Studies 4.2 (1979): 102-106.
- Gabriel, Ralph Henry. Elias Boudinot Cherokee and His America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941.
- Gaul, Theresa Strouth, Ed. To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
- Parins, James W. John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works. Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1991.
- Perdue, Theda. Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot. Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1983.
- Starr, Edward C. A History of Cornwall, Connecticut: A Typical New England Town. New Haven: Tuttle, Morehouse, and Taylor, 1926.
- Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 1986.
- Yarbough, Fay. “Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws,” Journal of Social History 38 (2004): 385-406.