Like the pioneers, the Cherokees cherished liberty above all else and distrusted government. Both left religion to the family and refused to institute any orthodox system of belief. Even the forms of humor were often parallel; the Cherokee could be as sarcastic as the pioneer and used irony to correct behavior. As one historian put it: “The coward was praised for his valor; the liar for his veracity; and the thief for his honesty.” But through the ironies of history, the Scotch-Irish-English-German pioneers of the highlands, who were similar to the Cherokees in a multitude of ways and quite different from the lowland aristocrats, became the Indians’ worst enemy.
Their conflict was, in a sense, inevitable. The countries of England and France and their representatives in America both battled and befriended the Cherokees during the 18th century. Their main concern lay in their own rivalry, not in any deep-founded argument with the Indians. As they expanded the American frontier and immersed themselves in the process of building a country, the colonists inevitably encroached upon the Cherokee Nation.
Smithsonian Institution
In 1730, Sir Alexander Cuming took seven Cherokee leaders to England in an attempt to build up good relations with the tribe. Among the group was the youth Ukwaneequa (right), who was to become the great Cherokee chief Attakullakulla.
In 1730, in a burst of freewheeling diplomacy, the British sent a flamboyant and remarkable representative, Sir Alexander Cuming, into remote Cherokee country on a mission of goodwill. After meeting with the Indians on their own terms and terrain, Cuming arranged a massive public relations campaign and escorted Attakullakulla and six other Cherokee leaders to London, where they were showered with gifts and presented at court to King George II. The Cherokees allied themselves with Britain, but this did not discourage the French from trying to win their allegiance. When the English in 1743 captured a persuasive visionary named Christian Priber who sought to transform the Cherokee Nation into a socialist utopia, they suspected him of being a French agent and took him to prison in Frederica, Georgia. He was left to die in the fort.
The British soldiers were not as friendly as British diplomats. During the French and Indian War of the late 1750s and the early 1760s, when England battled France for supremacy in the New World, English soldiers treated the Cherokees with disdain and violence. The Cherokees returned the atrocities in kind. The frontier blazed with death and destruction; each side accumulated its own collection of horrors endured and meted out. Although Cherokee chiefs sued for peace, Gov. William Henry Lyttleton of South Carolina declared war on them in 1759. The Carolinas offered 25 English pounds for every Indian scalp. A year later the Cherokees, under the command of Oconostota, captured Fort Loudoun at the fork of the Tellico and Little Tennessee rivers. But in June of 1761, Capt. James Grant and some 2,600 men destroyed the Nation’s Middle Towns, burning 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of corn, beans, and peas, and forcing 5,000 Cherokees into the forests for the winter.
After the English defeated the French in 1763, the British government moved to appease the Indians and consolidate its control of the continent. A British proclamation forbade all white settlement beyond the Appalachian divide. But the proclamation was soon to be broken. Pioneers such as Daniel Boone and James Robertson successfully led their own and neighbors’ families through Appalachian gaps and river valleys until a trickle of explorers became a flood of homesteaders. During the next decade, settlers poured across the mountains into Kentucky and northeastern Tennessee.
While England was regaining the friendship of the Cherokees, the American colonists were alienating both the Indians and the British. In the late 1760s a group of North Carolinians calling themselves Regulators opposed taxation, land rents, and extensive land grants to selected individuals, and caused unrest throughout the Piedmont. In 1771, at Alamance, an estimated 2,000 Regulators were defeated by the troops of British Gov. William Tryon. Thousands of anti-royalist North Carolinians fled westward as a result of this battle. Alexander Cameron, an English representative living in the Overhill Towns, wrote in 1766 that the pioneer occupation of Cherokee lands amounted to an infestation by villains and horse thieves that was “enough to create disturbances among the most Civilized Nations.”
The protest spirit of the Regulators spread to the New England colonies during the early 1770s. By 1776, when the American Revolution began, the Cherokees had understandably but unfortunately chosen to take the British side. Britain issued guns to all Indians and offered rewards for American scalps, yet this was not enough to secure the over-mountain territory for the English crown. Within a year, American forces were fighting for the frontier, and in a coordinated pincer movement, Col. Samuel Jack with 200 Georgians, Gen. Griffith Rutherford with 2,400 North Carolinians, Col. Andrew Williamson with 1,800 South Carolinians, and Col. William Christian with 2,000 Virginians demolished more than 50 Cherokee towns. Two treaties resulted from this campaign; more than 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of Indian land, including northeastern Tennessee, much of South Carolina, and all lands east of the Blue Ridge, were ceded to the United States.