By BARBARA R. DUNCAN
Cherokee people today serve in the United States military, pay taxes, vote, and have American citizenship as well as tribal membership. But during the American Revolution, Cherokees had differing opinions about whether to support Great Britain, their long-time trading partner and ally, or to support the rebellious colonies, whose settlers often trespassed and illegally claimed Cherokee land. Two factions, led by a father and son, had opposing views.
Attakullakulla, Adagalvgalv, was a diplomat who had met with King George II, as well as a war leader. Small in stature, slim, cheerful, and a well-spoken orator, he was known to whites as “The Little Carpenter” because of his ability to build treaties and make deals. Despite his oath of loyalty to Great Britain, he wanted peace with the American colonists. So did his niece, Nanyehi, Nancy Ward. But Attakullakulla’s son, Dragging Canoe, Tsiyu Gansini, disagreed. He was a fierce war leader from Mialoquo, tall, broad, muscular, and scarred by the smallpox he survived as a child.
Their disagreement began at the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, in April 1775 (present -day Elizabethton, Tennessee). Attakullakulla and Oconostota Ogan-asdoda, the Great War Leader of Chota were in favor of selling 27,050 square miles, more than seventeen million acres, about one third of the Cherokee lands at the time, to Richard Henderson-a white land speculator, for a wagon load of trade goods and ten thousand pounds. Dragging Canoe spoke eloquently against the deal.
“He began by telling of the ancient flourishing state of his people, mentioned the encroachments of the white men, from time to time, upon various nations of Indians who left their homes and the tombs of their ancestors to satisfy the insatiable desire of the white man for more land. Whole nations had melted away in their presence like balls of snow before the sun, leaving scarcely a name, except as imperfectly recorded by their destroyers.”
“Where now are our grandfathers, the Delawares?” Dragging Canoe asked, then went on.
We had hoped that the white men would not be willing to travel beyond the mountains, so far from the ocean, on which their commerce was carried on, and their connections maintained with the nations of Europe. But now that hope has gone hope had vanished; they have passed the mountains, and settled upon the Cherokee lands. They wish to have that usurpation sanctioned by treaty. When that is gained, the same encroaching spirit will lead them upon other lands of the Cherokees. New cessions will be asked. Finally the whole country which the Cherokees and their fathers have so long occupied will be demanded, and the remnant of the Ani-Yvwiya, The Real People, once so great and formidable, will be compelled to seek refuge in some distant wilderness. There they will be permitted to stay only a short while until they again behold the advancing banners of the same greedy host. Not being able to point out any further retreat for the miserable Cherokees, the extinction of the whole race will be proclaimed. Should we not therefore run all risks and incur all consequences, rather than submit?
Dragging Canoe, warriors, and others walked out of the meeting. The Cherokees did not achieve consensus, which was necessary to make the treaty binding.
Adagalvgalv, Oganasdoda, and Sawanugi-Kolanv, all signed the treaty “on behalf of the nation.” The Cherokees had chosen as their interpreter, Joseph Vann, son of a white trader and Cherokee woman. As the leaders were about to sign, Vann made sure they understood the terms written in English. “Take care what you are about…It is what you will to sign, but clear me of it, and do not blame me afterward.”
The treaty was signed, but Dragging Canoe and many Cherokees believed it illegal. So did King George III, and the Governors of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. George Washington found it suspicious. Henderson and his party immediately left Sycamore Shoals and went to the woods. Daniel Boone and “axe men” were waiting there, and they immediately began enlarging Cherokee trails to accommodate wagons on the way to the Cumberland Gap.
In the Cherokee Overhills, whites had settled illegally on Cherokee land. This treaty legalized their claims. By the spring of 1776, about 100 white men and their families had already settled along the Holston, Nolichucky, and Watauga Rivers. Cherokees had rented them the land in 1772, but then the white men sold it to other settlers, who believed they had a legitimate claim. In addition, Henderson, wanted to sell land from the treaty. He began advertising cheap land to settlers who would travel beyond the Cumberland Gap (now Kentucky and central Tennessee), even though the Royal Proclamation of 1763 said that no white settlement would be allowed beyond the Blue Ridge.
Because of this Proclamation, and the stability of British trade, many Cherokees and other tribes allied with the British during the American Revolution. Cherokee warriors fought alongside British troops at the siege of Charleston and at the Battle of Augusta. Cherokee war parties also harrassed settlers living illegally in the back country, west of the Appalachians; and they protected their towns when American forces invaded the Cherokee homeland in the summer and fall of 1776.
In the Overhills, Dragging Canoe gathered more than a thousand warriors: Cherokee, Shawnee, Creek, and others, along with white men loyal to Great Britain. By the spring of 1776 they had moved to Chickamauga Creek, Ooltewah Creek, and the Tennessee River (near present-day Chattanooga) and were harrassing back-country settlers. Cherokees in the Lower and Middle Towns also defended their homes, and all acted together to defend the Cherokee homeland and sovereignty, fighting until 1794.
The Cherokees valued their freedom. Every person and every town made decisions for themselves and respected others. They fought for their freedom in the Revolution, although this put them on the opposite side of the American colonists, who believed they were fighting for their own freedom from Great Britain.
James Adair, an Irish trader, lived with the Cherokees, and in 1775 published this about their “intense love of liberty.”
… Every warrior holds his honor, and his love of country, in so high esteem, that he prefers it to life, and will suffer the most exquisite tortures rather than renounce it…The equality among the Indians, and the just rewards they always confer on merit, are the great and leading [motives]—the only motives that warm their hearts with a strong and permanent love to their country. Governed by the plain and honest law of nature, their whole constitution breathes nothing but liberty.
Sources
Adair, James, ed. Kathleen Braund. History of the American Indians. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.)
Brown, John P. Old Frontiers: the story of the Cherokee Indians from earliest times to the state of their removal to the West, 1838 (Kingsport, Tennessee: Southern Publishers, 1938.)
Haywood, John. The Civil and Political History of the State of Tennessee From Its Early Settlement Up to the Year 1796, including the Boundaries of the State. Nashville: Barbee and Smith, 1891:58-59. Reprint of 1823 edition. https://ia800302.us.archive.org/15/items/civilpoliticalhi00hayw/civilpoliticalhi00hayw.pdf
Myer, S.E., Indian Trails of the Southeast. Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1928.)
Ramsey, J.G. M. The Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Phuiladephia: Lippincott, 1860.
Robertson, James, “Deposition of James Robertson.” Calendar of Virginia State Papers I, p. 285.
Royce, Charles, ‘Map of the Territory of the Cherokee Nation,” 1884. Library of Congress.
