Toward this end, the missionaries of the Christian churches proved quite effective. The missionaries and government agents, believing that a stable plantation society promoted both a self-sustaining church and orderly civil government, introduced white agricultural practices to the Indians by giving plows, livestock, and gristmills to the men and cloth and spinning tools to the women. For some of the Cherokee who had been raised on colonial plantations of their white parents and introduced to European agricultural methods through this practice, the transition was not difficult. With the establishment of the first model farms and missions among the Five Civilized Tribes of the Southeastern United States, a key tool used in this civilization process was the implementation of African slaves as laborers in the building and operation of the model farms and missions. The missionaries, however, saw the issue of slavery as a political one and not a question to which they were bound to respond to religiously.
All accounts agree, however, that it was introduced by white men.
163 Many of the members of the finest of Cherokee families, such as the Ridges, the Boudinots, and the Waties, were educated in the missions and some of the better scholars were sent to boarding school in Cornwall, Connecticut. 164 Farms grew into plantations and buildings grew into towns. As the program of civilization pursued its goals, slavery spread among the nations of the Southeast. Individuals who held positions of power and land began to grow wealthy and to buy black slaves to extend their fields and tend to their livestock. 165 Progressive natives who spoke English began to adopt the social and cultural patterns of the missionaries and white farmers who surrounded them.