In 1776, some 1,800 Virginians marched off to a ‘forgotten war’ that wasn’t against the British

In the summer of 1776, young revolutionaries intent on securing their freedom resolved to go to war to protect their lands and their liberty. Patrick Henry was intimately involved in this conflict. So were Thomas Jefferson and John Hancock. The result of that war shaped the nation we now have today.

You may think all that seems familiar and it does, but this may not: The war I’m describing is not the American Revolution but a different war: The Cherokee War of 1776, where the American settlers and indigenous Cherokee battled on what was then the frontier — including parts of Southwest Virginia.

This frontier fighting can be seen either as something separate from the American Revolution, or as a war-within-a-war. The Cherokee were aligned with the British, and the legalities they were fighting over — a 1763 proclamation by King George III that banned settlement west of a certain line through the Appalachians — were some of the same ones that outraged American settlers, just from a different point of view.

This is a war that’s faded from the memory of all but the most devoted historians — and Native Americans, for whom the Cherokee War of 1776 was a consequential, and tragic, experience. The outcome was a victory for the Americans and a catastrophic defeat for the Cherokee that set the stage for the infamous Trail of Tears eviction of the Cherokee from the Southeast a generation later.

While most of the fighting took place outside Virginia, some 1,800 Virginians — mostly from the frontier of Southwest Virginia — marched off westward to that war rather than eastward to fight the British. And when those soldiers constructed a fort in modern-day Tennessee, they named it after Virginia’s governor: Fort Patrick Henry.

This Saturday, the Historic Smithfield estate in Blacksburg — the home of Col. William Preston, a Revolution-era leader in the western part of Virginia — devotes a day to a remembrance of that formative, and forgotten, war, with reenactments, demonstrations and speakers. Historic Smithfield has more information here; below is a primer on the other war of 1776.

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The conflict between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of North American goes back to, well, the Vikings who tried to settle Newfoundland and found the natives inhospitable. Let’s fast forward centuries ahead. In the 1750s, the British colonial push inland from coastal settlements prompted a major war with both Native Americans and the French — what we know today as the French and Indian War. The outcome was a British victory that saw France lose its Quebec province.

The British and their North American Colonists might have disagreed before, but they really disagreed over what the outcome of this war meant. With the indigenous threat reduced, the Colonists saw an opportunity to settle farther inland. The British saw the war as expensive. They wanted two things going forward: to make the Colonists pay for more of their own upkeep, through taxes. They also wanted to hold down security costs, so they forbade settlement in much of the Appalachians as a way to limit (violent) contact with the Native Americans. This was the Proclamation of 1763, and it was intensely unpopular among Colonists, particularly those in Virginia. Both land-speculating gentry (such as Henry, Jefferson and George Washington) and land-poor farmers felt they were entitled to that western territory, whether it was inhabited by Native Americans or not. For more on this, see the story and column we published as part of our Cardinal 250 project about lesser-known parts of Virginia’s role in the run-up to independence.

The short version is that many Colonists simply ignored the king’s proclamation and settled west of the line anyway. Much of Southwest Virginia west of modern-day Montgomery County was off-limits. That land got settled. In 1773, Daniel Boone was leading a group of settlers through the Cumberland Gap into modern-day Kentucky, and more conflicts with the native tribes were breaking out. Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, led a force westward in what became known as Lord Dunmore’s War. (We have Cardinal 250 stories on that, too.) Andrew Lewis of Roanoke County was the leader at the battle but the governor got the war named after him anyway. Regardless, the Virginians’ victory at the Battle of Point Pleasant pushed the Shawnee west of the Ohio River, effectively rendering the king’s proclamation line moot, at least through what we now regard as West Virginia.

In the aftermath of Lord Dunmore’s War, some North Carolina land speculators led by a fellow named Richard Henderson (a buddy of the aforementioned Boone) set their sights on Kentucky as the next big thing. The problem was that the Cherokee still regarded Kentucky as their hunting ground. Just because the Shawnee had lost to Lord Dunmore didn’t mean much to them. In 1775, Henderson, Boone and others met with Cherokee leaders at a site in what is now eastern Tennessee and worked out a land deal they called the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals. The settlers got much of Kentucky; the Cherokee leaders got blankets, knives and gunpowder. 

To call this a “treaty” is to overstate the authority that Henderson and Boone had. They had none. They were just land speculators. The legislatures in Virginia and North Carolina both rejected the “treaty.” It was technically in violation of the king’s often-ignored proclamation — and legislators had often been keen to avoid conflicts with native tribes if they could (which is not to say they were attentive to the concerns of indigenous peoples, they just had other things on their mind).

There was another complication with this “treaty.” The Cherokee elders had agreed, but the Cherokee also had a generational split. The older leaders wanted to avoid yet another war with settlers. The younger ones were more radicalized, to use the modern term. One of those was Dragging Canoe. According to Nadia Dean’s history of the Cherokee War of 1776, “A Demand of Blood,” Dragging Canoe became “the focus of the hard-line resistance.” He is said to have given an impassioned speech, the native equivalent of Patrick Henry’s “give me liberty or give me death” speech. Both had the same result: They swayed their listeners to prepare for war.

The main difference: Henry saw the American Revolution as a defensive war; Dragging Canoe wanted to go on the offensive. And he eventually did.

The British were not exactly unaware of the growing tensions between the Cherokee and the Colonists. They had what Dean calls “agents” who regularly met with the Cherokee and advised them on Colonial happenings. In May 1776, about the same time the Continental Congress was meeting in Philadelphia to prepare for independence, the British governor of Detroit persuaded Cornstalk — the Shawnee chief who had lost to Lord Dunmore two years before — to lead a delegation of various tribes to meet with the Cherokee. The outcome of that summit, in modern-day Tennessee: a decision to go to war.

In late June, the Cherokee began a series of raids on frontier settlements, from South Carolina up to Virginia (near modern-day Gate City). Throughout the summer of 1776, the frontier was aflame. “War parties bludgeoned to death, mutilated and scalped settlers not holed up in overcrowded forts. Cattle and horses were scattered and sheep and hogs shot dead,” Dean wrote in an essay that appears on the Historic Smithfield website. “On the North Carolina frontier, Cherokee warriors mercilessly hacked to death 37 settlers on the Catawba River.” In one famous incident, three teenage girls floating down the Kentucky River on a canoe were captured by a combined squad of Cherokee and Shawnee raiders. One of those girls was the daughter of Daniel Boone. The girls secretly marked the trail as they were marched through the wilderness of what was then still part of Virginia’s westernmost Fincastle County. Three days later, as the captors were making breakfast, shots rang out. “That’s daddy’s gun!” Jemima Boone shouted. She was right. Her father had organized a rescue party that liberated the girls; his response became part of the lore that surrounded Boone and inspired several works of art.

The Colonists weren’t content with simply restoring the status quo. Dean writes: “John Hancock, Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson called for the destruction of the entire Cherokee nation.”

They might have done this anyway, regardless of the war for independence, but now they saw these Cherokee raids as part of British policy. This was a two-front war. Colonial governments from Virginia to Georgia put together a 6,000-man force to go after the Cherokee. The Virginia arm of that was an 1,800-man army under the command of Col. William Christian, the brother-in-law of now-Gov. Patrick Henry and a prominent figure in Southwest Virginia. Here’s how important that expedition against the Cherokee was to the Virginia leadership: Christian resigned his commission in the Continental Army to lead this fight instead.

Before winter set in, the Colonial armies had destroyed more than 50 Cherokee towns in the Carolinas and Tennessee. Christian and his Southwest Virginia men had a hand in some of that. He marched into eastern Tennessee and set up camp in what had been Dragging Canoe’s town, “a gesture of defiance because Dragging Canoe had bred the war,” Dean writes. Christian called his camp Fort Patrick Henry.

His force established in a symbolic place, Christian then demanded to meet with Cherokee leaders. Some agreed, and pledged to stay neutral in the war with the British. Dragging Canoe refused Christian’s summons. Christian’s men then burned Cherokee towns aligned with Dragging Canoe and spared those who pledged fealty to other Cherokee leaders, Dean writes.

With that, the Cherokee War of 1776 was more or less over, but the basic conflict went on for years. Dean writes: “The Cherokee leaders then traveled 500 miles to Williamsburg, Va., to meet Governor Patrick Henry. They agreed to restrain their young warriors and vowed to give up more land, which those warriors had so earnestly fought to defend. Southern rebels, after decimating over 50 Cherokee towns, soon realized that their massive militia campaign had not defeated Dragging Canoe, who continued punishing frontier settlers. Dragging Canoe remained resolved to liberate his land and maintain his alliance with King George. All efforts by posses and militiamen failed to capture or kill Dragging Canoe, who sustained his pan-Indian confederacy for another 15 years.”

Walt Bailey, the visitor experiences coordinator at Historic Smithfield, calls this “a forgotten war.” The definitive history of Virginia has long been considered to be “Virginia: The New Dominion” by Virginius Dabney. That tome contains nary a mention of any of this. Bailey, who grew up in Tennessee near Fort Patrick Henry and studied history, said he was never taught about this conflict, despite all the things it set in motion. The war quieted the frontier — for a while — and helped facilitate Colonial expansion. “It’s a big step toward ‘the Trail of Tears,’” he says, because it was an early attempt to either annihilate the Cherokee or evict them.

It also spawned a famous phrase in American history. Before the war, one of the Cherokee leaders warned the North Carolina land speculators: “You have bought a fair land, but there is a cloud hanging over it; you will find its settlement dark and bloody.” That gave rise to the popular description of Kentucky — then still part of Virginia — as a “dark and bloody land.”

As with many things, we remember that little piece of history but forget who originally coined the phrase: Dragging Canoe.

He was never killed in battle and was never captured. He lived on until 1792 when he died in a most unusual way: His warriors had just returned from a successful raid on some settlements along the Cumberland River near modern-day Nashville. Furthermore, he had just concluded an alliance with two other tribes that promised even more warfare about the encroaching settlers. Dragging Canoe wanted to celebrate, so stayed up all night dancing. Then he dropped dead.

Want more history about Virginia’s role in the American Revolution?

It wasn’t all guys in white wigs in Philadelphia. Much of the American Revolution was conducted by people who haven’t always made the history books, from frontier settlers to enslaved laborers to women and girls. Cardinal has embarked on a multi-year project to tell some on the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the drive for independence. You can find those stories on our Cardinal 250 page. You can also sign up for our monthly Cardinal 250 newsletter:

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