Harriet R. Gold Boudinot

Harriet Ruggles Gold Boudinot

Harriet Ruggles Gold Boudinot (1805–1836) was the American of English descent 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.

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 Yale.

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.

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 Ridge, 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.

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 Boudinot without the promise of marriage in their future. As her parents tried to talk Harriett out of marriage, she grew ill, “hovering between life and death.” Her cousin Dr. Samuel Gold felt the outlook was bleak. Her brothers and sisters watched as Harriett grew weaker, unaware of what was causing her illness. Benjamin Gold finally reconsidered his decision. 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 of his change of heart, but difficulties remained.

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 persisted in the marriage, he would publish banns against her family, a public disgrace. She said that her life calling was as a missionary and it could best be accomplished by marrying Boudinot. The agents of the Foreign Mission School issued banns against the Golds.

As her family, and the town of Cornwall, dealt with the news, her family thought Harriet was at risk. She was especially close to her older brother Stephen. Learning of her decision to proceed, he wrote: “the die is cast, Harriet is gone, we have reason to fear.” While in hiding at a neighbor's, Harriett was distressed to see Stephen lead 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 at the church was postponed during the turmoil. Gold became isolated from the townspeople, and letters from numerous family members tried to change her mind. She wrote of her decision,

“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 married Boudinot in the Gold home on March 28, 1826; a minister from Goshen officiated.

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 Cornelius 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 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.

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.