Cherokee

CHEROKEE. The Cherokee Indians were one the largest and most powerful Indian nations in eighteenth-century eastern North America. They inhabited a strategically important region in the southern part of the Appalachian Mountains, within the boundaries of the modern states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. During the American Revolution, most of the Cherokee initially fought against the United States.

The Cherokee inhabited the southern Appalachian Mountains since before the period of European contact. The Cherokee entered into sustained interaction with the British in the late seventeenth century, after the founding of the colony of South Carolina in the 1670s. The Cherokees' political relations with the British were formalized in 1730, with the intervention of adventurer Sir Alexander Cuming, who anointed chief Moitoi of Tellico (a region in present-day Tennessee) as the "Emperor of the Cherokees." While Cherokee politics had no institution of emperor, Cuming did escort a number of Cherokee leaders, including a respected warrior named Attakullakulla, to London. From this point forward, the bulk of the Cherokees' commercial and diplomatic interactions would be conducted with the British, through South Carolina. Relations between the British and the Cherokee were generally cordial, although a brief Anglo-Cherokee War (1759–1761) arose during the Seven Years War after Cherokee warriors returning from service against the French killed some Virginia farmers' livestock. Tensions between the settlers and the Cherokees erupted into a full-scale conflict. After Cherokee warriors captured the British post of Fort Loudon, British regulars invaded the Cherokee country. Order was reestablished in large part due to the diplomacy of Attakullakulla.

After the Seven Years War, Cherokee-British relations were shepherded by the British Indian Superintendent for the Southern Department, John Stuart. In 1763, at Augusta, Stuart brought representatives of all of the southeastern tribes together to reestablish commercial and diplomatic relations. The South Carolinian settlers' desire for land cessions from the Cherokee increased during the 1760s and 1770s. Cherokee leaders Oconostota and Attakullakulla supported land sales to British settlers, but with the outbreak of the American Revolution, they turned away from the colonists and supported the British side. John Stuart cautioned the Cherokees against openly challenging the American Revolutionaries, and older leaders like Attakullakulla agreed. However, tensions between frontier white settlers and the eastern Cherokees continued to increase. Younger Cherokee men, led by Attakullakulla's son, Dragging Canoe, seized on the opportunity offered by the Revolution to defend their lands, and joined with the Shawnee in attacks on American settlements that had been erected inside traditional Cherokee lands. In retaliation for these attacks, expeditions from all of the southern states—Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia—invaded the Cherokee country in the summer of 1776. The Americans destroyed many Cherokee towns, and large numbers of Cherokees became refugees, fleeing to the western side of the Appalachians and into the Creek nation. After the Cherokee homelands had been devastated, the older chiefs made peace agreements with each of the American states in early 1777. The price of peace was, as always, land.

The remainder of the American Revolution saw the Cherokees divided. The peacemaking faction remained neutral, while other Cherokees hoped for more robust British support. With his trade connections to Britain largely cut, there was little material aid that agent John Stuart could provide the Cherokees. By the end of the Revolutionary War, the Cherokee were dealing with the Americans. Under the leadership of Old Tassel, and with the advice of war-woman Nancy Ward, in November 1785 the Cherokee signed the Treaty of Hopewell with commissioners who had been appointed by the Continental Congress. This was the Cherokees' first treaty with the new United States. The Treaty of Hopewell established a boundary line between the Cherokees and Anglo-American settlers that was a compromise of sorts—it confirmed the large land cession the Cherokee had made in 1776–1777, but it did not give white land speculators and settlers everything they wanted. The treaty did acknowledge American victory in the Revolution and American sovereignty over eastern North America, and it commited the Cherokee to exclusive trading relations with the American government. Of course, Hopewell was not the last word in Cherokee-American relations. Pressure by American settlers and land speculators would continue into the early 1830s when, in the aftermath of the Cherokee Nation's landmark Supreme Court cases and the (what most consider) fraudulent Treaty of New Echota (1835) forced on the Cherokee by the Andrew Jackson administration, the Cherokee were forcibly removed to Oklahoma.

SEE ALSO Indians in the Colonial Wars and the American Revolution; Stuart, John.?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Calloway, Colin G. The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Columbia Guide to the American Indians of the Southeast. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Prucha, Francis Paul. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.