Cherokee War (1759–61).The Cherokee War consisted of three campaigns from South Carolina against the Cherokees Indian nations. Colonial ambitions, backcountry misunderstandings that caused killings on both sides, and the undertow of French and Indian War hostilities to the north, all tangled, leading South Carolina to act against its neighbor and trading partner in the southern Appalachian Mountains. The first campaign saw colonial regiments march resistantly under an arrogant royal governor, only to be turned back by an outbreak of smallpox. The second and third, in 1760 and 1761, saw British regulars lead resentful militiamen. The Cherokees successfully rebuffed attack in 1760; this was followed by an equivocal concession in 1761. Meanwhile, the Cherokees fought sporadic engagements against other native peoples on their western and northern mountain flanks. The campaigns left deep scars and provoked anxieties with the young generation of both colonists and Cherokees alike.

The Cherokee War, on the colonial side, was a revolt against the idea of the Cherokees as the “key” to westward expansion, and a response to Carolinians' own weak place within the empire. For the Cherokees, the scorched‐earth campaigns and disease besieged their economy, destabilized conventional intertribal politics, and split their towns. The “Indian War” of 1775, led by South Carolina, ended over a decade of trouble between the Cherokee War and the Revolutionary War. The Cherokee War and its decade marked the removal of the Cherokees from the pivot of regional geopolitics, and the beginning of a revolutionary era of change for both peoples.

Bibliography

Tom Hatley , The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution, 1993.

Tom Hatley