(Formerly, they had no official place in the matrilineal tribe, as children belong to their mother's clan and people, and the white women were outsiders.)

Boudinot, with numerous other leading Cherokee, particularly those who had been educated outside the tribe, believed that removal was inevitable in the face of the numbers of United States settlers encroaching on their lands.

Cession of communal lands was adamantly opposed by John Ross, the Principal Chief, and the full-blood members of tribe, who comprised the majority.

The following year, the tribe was forced to cede most of its lands in the Southeast, and remove to west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory in the late 1830s.

All were of mixed race and had some European-American education; the tribal chiefs had worked to prepare these young men to deal with the United States and its representatives.

Gallegina's Christian education began in 1808, at the age of 6, when Boudinot studied at the local Moravian missionary school.

Around this time, Cherokee leaders were petitioning the government for aid to educate their children, as they wanted to learn aspects of white civilization.

[2] Elias Cornelius, an agent from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), came to the community and served to support local education and recruit older students to study in the North.

While studying in Connecticut, Boudinot met Harriet Ruggles Gold, the daughter of a prominent local family who supported the Foreign Mission School.

[3] In the Cherokee matrilineal kinship culture, children traditionally belonged to the mother's clan and took their status from her people.

[3] Historian Theresa Strouth Gaul wrote that the law was inspired by Ridge's marriage and Boudinot's engagement; as the young men were elite Cherokee, it protected the status of their future children.

[5] Local hostility to the marriage, the second between a Cherokee student and a white woman, forced the closing of the Foreign Mission School.

They had six surviving children: Eleanor Susan; Mary Harriett; William Penn; Sarah Parkhill, Elias Cornelius; and Franklin Brinsmade.

[11] After his return to New Echota, in 1828 Boudinot was selected by the General Council of the Cherokee as editor for a newspaper, the first to be published by a Native American nation.

The journalist Ann Lackey Landini believes that Boudinot emphasized English in the newspaper because the Cherokee Nation intended it to be a means to explain their people to European Americans and prove they had an admirable civilization.

Between 1828 and 1832, Boudinot wrote numerous editorials arguing against removal, as proposed by Georgia and supported by President Andrew Jackson.

Jackson supported removal of the Cherokee and other Southeastern peoples from their eastern homelands to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi in order to make land available for European-American development.

Boudinot's articles recounted the elements of Cherokee assimilation (conversion to Christianity, an increasingly Western-educated population, and a turn toward lives as herdsmen and farmers, etc.)

In this context, Boudinot began advocating for his people to secure the best possible terms with the US by making a binding treaty of removal, as he believed it was inevitable.

[17] The Cherokee Phoenix office regularly received correspondence from about 100 other newspapers, published far and wide, because it was so respected throughout the United States and Europe.

[6] The Indian removal policy was a result of the discovery of gold in Cherokee territory, the growth of the cotton industry, and the relentless European-American desire for land in the Southeast.

While the majority of the Cherokee led by Chief John Ross opposed the act, Boudinot began to believe that Indian Removal was inevitable.

However, in a letter to John Ross, he indicated that he could no longer serve because he was unable to print what he believed to be true about the dangers to the people from continuing to oppose removal.

Although this was opposed by the majority of the delegation and lacked the signature of the Principal Chief John Ross, the US Senate ratified the treaty.

Afterward, faced with open enmity among the Cherokee, many of the signatories and their families migrated to Indian Territory, where they located with the "Old Settlers", who had gone there in the 1820s.

After that, he joined a group that included John Ridge and traveled to the Western Cherokee Nation, it was established by "Old Settlers" in the northeast quarter of what is today Oklahoma.

The "Old Settlers" and John Ross' supporters failed to agree on unification following the Nation's removal to Indian Territory.

Some Ross supporters met secretly to plan assassinations of Treaty Party leaders over the hardships of the Removal and to eliminate them as political rivals in a way which would intimidate the Old Settlers into submission.

Stand Watie and his supporters, the majority of the Nation, sided with the Confederacy (he served as an officer in their army, along with other Cherokee.)