The Cherokee Before the American Revolution

The Cherokee Nation has roots in this country that extend thousands of years into the past.  However, as with most Native tribes, what we may have learned in school about their origins, or even the name or names with which they refer to themselves, may be very different from either the history or even the name(s) they would have claimed for themselves.   According to the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokees refer to themselves as “Aniyvwiya” meaning the “Real People” or the “Anigaduwagi” or the Kituwah people.  Other Native American tribes such as the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Huron, Catawba and Iroquois describe them differently:  Choctaw and Chickasaw knew them as Chilukki, the dog people; Huron knew them as Entarironnen, the mountain people; Catawba referred to them as Matera or Manteran, meaning coming out of the ground; and Iroquois called them Oyatageroneon, Oyaudah, or Uwatayoronon, the cave people.

When European settlers arrived, they too had their own description of the Cherokee people.  The Spanish referred to them as Chalaque.  The French description is similar to the Choctaw and Chickasaw descriptions, referring to them as Nation du Chien (Nation of dogs). The term “Cherokee” is an English word that is translated Tsalagi or Anitsalagi in the Cherokee language. 

The “Real People” first encountered the “New Comers” in the 1540 Spanish Expedition of Hernando de Soto.  Following that expedition, the Cherokee began to experience significant depopulation due largely to disease.  In fact, by  the time of Sequoyah’s birth in the 1760s the population of the Cherokee had decreased dramatically from approximately 35,000 at the end of the seventeenth century, to around 7,000 – a decline due in large part to wave after wave of European diseases against which the Native Americans had no immunity.  Throughout Native America, disease was the most deadly weapon of the Europeans.  To learn more about the potent effects of European diseases, read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

In 1673, English settlers came to Echota, in present-day East Tennessee, a capital town of the Cherokees wanting to establish trade relations.  European goods of brass kettles, textiles, scissors and knives, guns and ammunition, metal hatchets and hoes and trinkets were exchanged for native deerskins, beeswax and river cane baskets.  Deerskins were in great demand in England to make leather goods and products.  Gradually, trade negotiations and intermarriage with members of the tribe permitted English settlers to establish themselves in Cherokee villages. 

1766 Map of the Indian Nations From the Collection of the Georgia Historical Society

Peace treaties between the English and Cherokee were developed early as well.  In 1730, the Cherokee made an alliance with the English by pledging their allegiance to the British Crown, King George the Second, and promising to trade with the English only.  Other European settlers were making alliances with other Native American tribes.  The English needed special protection from their greatest rival, the French.

Other negotiations sought Cherokee land.  By that time, Cherokee territory had been firmly established in the Appalachian region of the southeastern United States encompassing territory that included parts of modern North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Georgia.  However, in the years directly leading up to American independence large sections of territory were given up by the Cherokee, reducing their territorial holdings by half through negotiations in nearly ten different treaties between 1721 and 1777.

The Cherokee in the New Republic

Secretary of War Henry Knox From the U.S. Senate Collection

From the earliest days of American independence, relations with Native American tribes had been a primary concern for national security.  One of the most influential individuals in shaping Indian policy by new United States government was Henry Knox, Secretary of War under the Articles of Confederation government as well as for a time under President George Washington.  He believed that “civilizing” or assimilating the tribes would provide the best path to lasting peace. 

His view of civilization meant that Native Americans would become small farmers, giving up hunting (and the vast lands needed to maintain the lifestyle that accompanies it) and developing established, permanent villages.  He felt they should adopt European dress and family life (living in nuclear families), learn to speak English, and convert to Christianity.  Knox’s plans for this transition in tribal life, he felt, would make possible the eventual sale of land to American settlers as the Indians would wish to develop their farms and villages using money gained through the sale of now unnecessary hunting lands.  Knox was likely very optimistic about future relations with the Cherokee as they had been a primarily agricultural society for hundreds of years before Europeans ever came to North America.

Christian missionaries also participated in the “civilizing” of the Cherokee.  These included a number of Moravian missionaries who worked in towns and villages throughout North Georgia – including New Echota.  Missionaries taught reading, writing, arithmetic, housekeeping, personal grooming, table etiquette and other topics deemed necessary for civilization.  They discouraged them from any “heathen” activities such as the violent ball games so much a part of Cherokee culture.  As was to be expected, the Cherokee generally accepted ideas they considered helpful and rejected those that seemed useless.

In fact it was one of these “compromises” that helped establish the first Cherokee newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix.  The missionaries, as well as the Cherokee saw the creation of the Cherokee syllabary as a gift and, by 1825, much of the Bible and numerous hymns had been translated into Cherokee.

Wishing to use their newly developed written language to further their own cultural and political goals, the Cherokee of New Echota were willing to let the missionaries purchase the type and press for the newspaper and to print scripture in the paper alongside other items of tribal news.

Though early agreements with the United States, like the Treaty of Hopewell in 1785, seemed to provide protection to the Cherokee against further encroachment into their land, it soon became apparent that the new “American” settlers were no more willing to halt their territorial expansion than the “English” settlers before them.  Deep and lasting divisions emerged within the Cherokee leadership and among the tribe itself about how to respond to the ongoing efforts of the new settlers.  Some advocated for negotiation and assimilation.  Others fought diplomacy at every turn.  The most strident in their opposition to further negotiations with the Americans were the Chickamaugas, a group of Cherokee mainly from modern northeastern Alabama who fought all negotiation with the Americans until the mid-1790s.

These divisions within the Cherokee Nation continued throughout the lifetime of Sequoyah and even beyond.  By the early 1800s, the Cherokee had continued to lose land in the east, causing many (including Sequoyah and his family) to relocate to reserved and (temporarily) undisputed lands further west.  Distance could only intensify these internal divisions as two separate nations – east and west – began to develop within the Cherokee.
 

Vocabulary

Treaties

Negotiations

Articles of Confederation (American and Cherokee)

Assimilating or Assimilation

Nuclear Families