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The whites came from Virginia with nearly 2,000 men. They destroyed the Cherokee towns. Outgunned and outmanned, the Cherokees faced a brutal decision.
The older tribal heads, having seen enough war, wanted peace, even at the cost of land. Perhaps it would work. Perhaps the whites would leave them alone for a while. Only the young wanted to fight, and they rallied around a vigorous and defiant war chief. The war chief, they believed, saw the future more clearly than the old men — or perhaps the old just didn’t want to see it.
The whites, on the other hand, knew what they wanted and had the means to get it. William Christian’s Cherokee campaign of 1776 was more than just a rearguard action to secure the Patriot rear while George Washington fought the British. Acting on orders from Gov. Patrick Henry, Christian sought land for white settlement as well as peace with the Cherokees. The treaty he signed, or imposed, on the Cherokees “led directly to the birth of Southwest Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky,” said Walt Bailey, a scholar and historian who lives in Dublin, Va.
For the Cherokees, it was another ominous step toward the Trail of Tears.
When Europeans first encountered the Cherokees, the Iroquoian-speaking tribe lived or hunted in parts of modern Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama.
At first the Europeans were perceived as trading partners, according to Nadia Dean, author of “A Demand For Blood: The Cherokee War of 1776.” But by the late 18th century the Cherokees and other tribes had lost a tremendous amount of land, leading to repeated violence from both sides. The Indians, British traders and British officials —but not the Colonists — wanted a clear boundary. One was created with the Proclamation Line of 1763 along the Eastern Continental Divide. It lasted not much longer than a line in the sand, washed away by the land hunger of axe- and hoe-wielding Scots-Irish frontiersmen and powder-wigged real estate speculators back East.
“It was a nightmare for the Indians, an utter nightmare of being invaded by this foreign force,” said Dean, a North Carolina resident who married an Eastern Band Cherokee. “They were besieged on every side.”
For more on the Proclamation of 1763, see our previous story. We also feature the proclamation in Chapter 1 of our new visual history on the American Revolution that’s aimed at young readers, “Virginians Like Us.” Find it here.
In March 1775, a handful of whites, without government approval, met with some Cherokee leaders at Sycamore Shoals in East Tennessee. They intended to establish an independent republic in what is now Kentucky and northeastern Tennessee, in blatant violation of the Proclamation Line. The Cherokee elders, desperate for provisions, signed the deal. A warrior named Dragging Canoe, six feet tall and muscular, angrily objected. The whites, he said, would never stop asking for land cessions, and the Cherokees would be reduced to a remnant.
“Tribal cultures understood that you should be compelled by your conscience to act in the best interest of the tribe as a whole,” said Dean. “Does that mean there was always harmony? No. When you get to Dragging Canoe’s story, he exercised his conscience… He became controversial because he stood up and said ‘Enough of this,’ and he split from the tribe. But he was still acting according to what he felt was the good of the whole.”
The onset of war between one group of whites (the Colonists) and another group (the British) put the Cherokees in the middle, with no way to predict the victor.
John Stuart was British superintendent of Indian affairs for the Southern department. Stuart “envisioned the creation of a kind of Loyalist state, or more properly a British-Loyalist sphere of influence, on the Southern frontier, co-existing and cooperating closely with the friendly Indian tribes,” wrote Arthur Barnes in a 1969 thesis for William & Mary. Such a state would pose an intolerable threat to the Patriots.
The threat to the Cherokees, on the other hand, came from settlers carving off huge chunks of territory. By late spring of 1776, their patience was gone. “In the preceding seven years, the Cherokee way of life had dramatically eroded,” Dean wrote. “If necessary, the young men were determined to spill blood in order to recover their hunting grounds and thereby regain at least part of their sovereignty.” They sought support from the British and from allied tribes.
The Overhill branch of the tribe was centered in East Tennessee. In June 1776, delegates from the Iroquois Six Nations, Delaware, Nanticoke, Ottawa and Shawnee arrived in the Overhill town of Chota for a conference. They were painted black, the color of war. A British representative in attendance, afraid of tipping fence-sitting settlers into the rebel camp, counseled caution — to no avail. Oconostota, Great Warrior of Chota, officially declared war by July 9. The British acquiesced and offered to supply ammunition.
In fact, war had already started. In late June, a corps of 700 warriors had struck the frontiers of Georgia and the Carolinas. By mid-July, Overhill war parties began attacking frontier settlements in Virginia. A war party came up the Clinch River, burning, killing and scalping. Near Abingdon they killed settler William Creswell and wounded others. Virginia settler Ambrose Fletcher found his wife and two children tomahawked and scalped. Dragging Canoe reportedly took 18 scalps. The traumatized survivors huddled in frontier forts.
On July 20, 1776, Patriot militia, including around 170 men from Virginia, defeated Dragging Canoe at the Battle of Island Flats (modern Kingsport). A Tennessee historic marker calls it “a short, bloody struggle” and “the first battle of the Revolution in the West.” But the Patriot victory did not end the war.
On July 30, Continental Congress authorized a coordinated campaign against the Cherokees by the Southern states. Virginia was already preparing a march against the Overhills, and Gov. Patrick Henry appointed his brother-in-law, Col. William Christian, to lead it.
William Christian was born in Augusta County around 1742. His father, Israel, was the proprietor of a store in Staunton. William Christian studied law under Patrick Henry and married Henry’s sister Annie. The Christians made their home at Dunkard’s Bottom, now submerged by Claytor Lake, an impounded section of the New River in Pulaski County. Christian held various government and military posts before accepting Henry’s commission.
Christian’s orders give the expedition’s purpose as “severely chastising that Cruel and Perfidious Nation which you are to do in the manner most likely to put a stop to future Insults and Ravages and that may redound most to the honour of the American Arms.” Christian gathered around 1,400 militiamen from Southwest and Western Virginia. “May we then go with speed and success to crush our Savage Enemies,” he wrote, “and in a short time be ready to turn our Victorious Arms to meet their more than Savage abettors,” i.e., the British. Thomas Jefferson wrote: “I hope the Cherokees will now be driven beyond the Missisipi … our contest with Britain is too serious and too great to permit any possibility of avocation [i.e., diversion or distraction] from the Indians.”
Christian’s troops headed out from Botetourt County toward Long Island on the Holston River (modern Kingsport, Tenn.). Christian arrived on Sept. 21. His army, augmented by 300 North Carolinians as well as East Tennessee frontiersmen, totaled around 1,800.
As the force advanced toward the Overhill towns, the Cherokees fell back. “They were just really outnumbered,” Bailey said, “and they could not afford to sacrifice Cherokee gunmen, as they called them, in a stand-up fight, and they really didn’t even try to ambush Christian’s force.”
In October, Christian met with Cherokee leaders and demanded that they turn over Dragging Canoe and a British Indian agent. But there was no chance of Dragging Canoe surrendering. Christian started burning Overhill towns, although he spared some he considered less belligerent. The inhabitants had already fled. “The greatest part of them I judge went off in canoes down the Tennessee,” Christian wrote to Henry.
The whites gave the Cherokees an ultimatum: land for peace. Henry suggested a parley near Long Island and appointed Christian, William Preston and Evan Shelby as Virginia commissioners. Henry hoped a treaty would divide the Cherokees and isolate Dragging Canoe.
Before the final negotiations, the Cherokees accepted Christian’s offer of a meeting in Williamsburg with Henry. After weeks of traveling, about 40 tribal members arrived on May 30. They asked the governor to draw a new boundary to stop further encroachments. After the talks, the Cherokees entertained the public with a dance on the green in front of the Governor’s Palace.
In June, the Patriots reconvened with the Cherokees at Long Island to conclude the treaty. “There is frequent communication between Patrick Henry and William Christian directly,” Bailey said. Henry “wants to acquire more land for Virginia. He’s very much in charge of this campaign.”
The Cherokees proposed a boundary line; after hearing Christian’s counterproposal, Old Tassel lamented, “You have asked me for the ground that I walk upon.” In no position to fight, the Cherokees gave in. “We have now settled the boundary between you & your Brothers of Virginia,” Christian said.
Of the two fighting men, William Christian and Dragging Canoe, who died in battle and who died in bed? As compensation for his military service, Virginia awarded Christian 9,000 acres in Kentucky. He settled near Louisville in 1785. On April 9, 1786, during an expedition across the Ohio River, he was killed fighting the Wabash Indians. Dragging Canoe left the Overhills and moved to the vicinity of Chattanooga. He continued to resist the whites until he died, of natural causes, in 1792.
The Cherokee War of 1776 showed that British Indian agents were unable to control their Indian allies in the south, nor could they create a loyalist/Indian refuge on the Southern frontier. Beyond the Revolutionary period, “this led to the birth of Southwest Virginia, East Tennessee — the whole state of Tennessee, really — and Kentucky,” Bailey said. “The Cherokee may not have lived extensively in Southwest Virginia at the time, but they definitely would have stopped settlers if we had not secured effectively title to it” with the Long Island treaty.
The Cherokees, reduced to the remnant that Dragging Canoe had prophesied, hung on in the East until 1838 when Federal troops and state militia began forcing them into stockades. By November, 12 groups of 1,000 apiece were trudging west, including children, the sick and the elderly. “Womens cry and make sad wails,” one survivor recalled. “Many days pass and people die very much.” A missionary doctor who accompanied them estimated that over 4,000 died on the Trail of Tears, nearly a fifth of the Cherokee population. The stunned survivors regrouped in Indian Territory (Oklahoma).
Meanwhile, back in the green and leafy Appalachians, about 1,000 Cherokees managed to avoid the roundups. Their descendents live mainly in North Carolina and are known as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
Sources:
Nadia Dean, “A Demand of Blood: The Cherokee War of 1776,” Valley River Press, 2012.
Arthur G. Barnes, “The Virginia-North Carolina Frontier in 1776: William Preston, William Christian and The Military Expedition Against the Overhill Cherokee Towns,” master’s degree thesis, William & Mary, 1969.
