Indian Slave Owners in the Deep South
ANNETTE TELLS TALES Do NOT stop with this headline. In history, we can't just learn a few isolated facts and close our minds. And today is just a start.
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How Long Is This Post? c. 7,500 words. Approx. 35 minutes.
Prologue: A Field Trip to the Old South
In 2014, I learned that the plan for a visiting exchange group of German teens to Atlanta mostly involved them touring sports facilities. Yikes. I stuck my nose in, and arranged a day with them to show them a bit of history.
The highlight of our tour was this: A plantation house that was once the unusually luxurious antebellum mansion of a family of prominent cotton planters, who owned more than a hundred enslaved people. This was a family who once hosted US President Franklin Pierce in their home.
This family, the Vanns, were Cherokee Indians.
I’ll let you take that in. I do realize you are probably in a bit of a tizzy right now. Or maybe you’re sharpening your anti-woke rant. Well, stop it. No matter your politics, I need to trust you to get a grip, and keep reading. Because if you don’t, and just draw your own conclusions on the basis of that little bit of info, then I will have done more harm than good.
Today, I’m writing about a work of history that’s a classic, Dr. Theda Perdue’s Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866, published way back in 1979. Confession: This early American historian had never actually read this before now, which is a bit like an English professor confessing to have never read Hamlet. It happens, though. There’s way more academic history on research library shelves—and more being published every day—than any of us can keep up with. But yeah, okay, I should have read this. I really should have. All I can plead is that when I was in grad school, much of the major work on Indians was just coming out, and, well, I wasn’t all that interested then. Making amends now. Fast as I can.
So, in 2014, having only visited the poorly-named Chief Vann’s House in north Georgia once, I was ill-prepared to take a tour group. Fortunately, I knew that. So I kept my introduction to my guests from near Munich to what facts I knew, which pretty much revolved around this:
It’s a Gone With The Wind-style plantation house that was built by an American Indian. He owned dozens of enslaved African Americans. He allowed German Moravian missionaries to set up shop on his land. This place, I said, is incredible evidence of the emergence of the modern world. It should be a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and celebrated as such. It should not be obscure, and open only a few days a week. But since it's in Georgia, that's what it is.
I told them (cringes all round) that, today, if I visit Germany and tour a concentration camp, I will see an interpretation that is searingly honest. West Germany, at least, had a full and frank discussion of the unspeakable horrors of Nazi Germany.
But that sort of conversation, I said, had never happened in the US. No South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission about slavery and Jim Crow here, I said. Most Americans have no idea, because at school, most were presented with a super-patriotic narrative written by politicians that focused on memorizing Improving Facts, especially battles and presidents.
Since then, I think it’s fair to say that awareness of American history has risen among Americans. I’m only sorry that so much is in the form of pop psychology self-flagellation, simplistic storytelling, and culture-war Tweets. And that so much of what is being peddled by grifters across the political spectrum is, quite frankly, wrong.
Some day, I’ll revisit my 2014 day with the German teens with you. For now, it’s enough to tell you that the teens were surprised, and their teachers were gobsmacked. One teacher kept asking me, incredulously, these were Indians? Native Americans? Like he’d misheard. Or doubted his command of English.
Yes, they were, I said. History—real history— makes it hard to pursue simple “heroes and villains” narratives. And that’s not proper historians’ goal: We want to pursue truth, no matter where it leads. But, even then, I knew it was simply not enough to make this point. Now we know it’s complicated, we have to start to find out how and why it is.
Because otherwise, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. It can be grossly misappropriated. Learning history means approaching knowledge with humility. Understanding that all knowledge is contingent, based on what we can find out, and that it can and does and must change as we learn more. And that’s why I’m writing about this today. Even so, I caution you, this is only a start. I have NO interest in giving credibility to people who want to misuse history for political ends. Buckle up.
But Is It Slavery? Unfree Labor Among Cherokees
When Europeans first encountered Cherokees in what today is the American Southeast, they reported that Cherokees owned “slaves.”
There’s a limit to what a word can communicate. That’s why historians don’t just use dictionaries: We use the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which gives not just the modern meaning of a word, but the history of its meanings, all the ways it was used in the past, with examples. Here’s a good example to explain: Coffeeshop, when I came to America in the early 80s, used to mean diner. Now it means, er, coffee shop.
But “slavery” was the only word Europeans had to describe what they were seeing among the Cherokees.
Misunderstanding also happens when people try to understand another culture with the only frame of reference they have: What they know, their own worldview.
So that’s why Spanish explorers in 1540 were convinced that Cherokees owned slaves, and that “slave” had an agreed-upon meaning. Explorer Hernando Soto was sure he was right about this: Cherokees sometimes gave him slaves to help carry stuff, like all the gold he hoped to find.
Not so fast, bud. A lot of assumptions were going on here. Among them? The Spanish assumed that unfree workers had an important role to play in the Cherokee economy. That the Cherokee economy was just like a European economy, one that pursued profit and wealth. After all, the Spanish enslaved Indians (and later Africans) in their new colonies to dig for gold and silver. How else could they think about unfree labor? Either these people the Spanish borrowed from the Cherokees were slaves, or they weren’t. It had to be one or the other.
Again, wrong. Here’s another example of where such thinking gets you: Some years ago, I stayed at a Sheraton hotel in Peru. The lit sign out front said “Sheraton”, just like in the States. The Sheraton logo was everywhere. The staff wore nametags that said “Sheraton”. And yet . . . It was not a Sheraton in any meaningful sense to someone from the States. It was halfway between a Motel 6 and a particularly seedy mom-and-pop motel, complete with tatty mismatched furniture. And you were advised not to drink the water. It was a Sheraton. Yet it really wasn’t.
(By the way, feel free to stay there now on your Peruvian travels: I see they have completely refurbished the place since I was there.)
What the Spanish witnessed among the Cherokees was unfree labor. But it wasn’t slavery in any meaningful sense at the time. Today, we might call it modern-day slavery. But not in early America.
That’s very, very important. Right now, there are people on the Internets spreading the persistent myth that Englishmen enslaved Irishmen in the Americas. That the Irish “were slaves too”. They weren’t. They were indentured servants, and they were forced labor, used to help ease the labor shortage in the colonies. To be considered slaves at that time, though, they had to be permanently unfree, their kids had to inherit slave status from them, and they had to have no legal rights. They also could not be white. None of these things were true of the Irishmen supposedly enslaved in England’s American colonies.
So, back to the Cherokee “slaves”. What’s up with that?
First, 16th century Cherokees were NOT 16th century European colonizers, with an eye on getting rich. Cherokee society was about equality, and ran on a subsistence economy—in other words, it was about working for what you needed, and little more. So unfree people (atsi nahsa’i, meaning “one who is owned”) and the part they played in Cherokee society, can’t be summed up as “slaves” without misrepresenting them and their role. To know what they were, we have to put them in the context of Cherokee society, economy, and beliefs.
Atsi nahsa’i were obtained through war, and capturing them was a typical part of Cherokee warfare. But getting “slaves” wasn’t why Cherokees originally fought wars. Most Cherokee wars were about revenge: If wrong was done to you and yours, and a peaceful solution couldn’t be worked out, then revenge was necessary and expected. The idea of a battle was to kill as many warriors as it took to match the number of Cherokee warriors killed in previous battles. It was important to kill: If you did capture a warrior, then you usually tortured him to death, often with fire.
Look, people are horrible. Consider this a massive trigger warning for the whole of the Non-Boring History experience. As it happens, I do like people. A lot, in fact. But yes, as a species, we’re kind of nasty.
Do know that early Europeans in America were aghast at Indian torture, conveniently forgetting the racks in the Tower of London, the hideous penalties for treachery in England, and the Spanish Inquisition (nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, sorry, had to say it.) And since it was convenient for Europeans claiming Indian lands to think of Indians as savages, Europeans were happy to call them savages.
What they didn’t consider was that, in Cherokee culture among others, torture and killing of war captives was a duty, not a sadistic indulgence. It was expected, including by those warriors who were condemned. It was just how things were. If you didn’t take revenge? You had no other way to protect yourself from enemies. And that put your group in mortal danger.
This message isn’t just something historians or anthropologists made up: It was reinforced in Cherokee folklore, including by a story about how bears allowed themselves to be killed for their skins, and didn’t take revenge on people. This, the story warned, encouraged people to kill more bears. Don’t be like bears, that was the moral.
And if your revenge raid failed, and you were captured and tortured? That meant that, despite all the purification rituals and fasting you did to prepare for success in battle, you didn’t do it right. You blew it somehow. You deserved to be captured.
Oh, and by the way: Cherokees did not usually torture captives who were women and children, although, before we start romanticizing them, know this: After ritually abstaining from sex for several days after battle, according to custom, warriors did sometimes rape women captives, according to witnesses. Never forget: People are horrible.
Captives were also sometimes held as bargaining chips in diplomacy. They could serve as interpreters, even spies.
If captives were not tortured and killed, or ransomed, then what happened next was usually one of two things:
They were adopted into a Cherokee clan, and became Cherokee, which was usually what happened with women and children, and sometimes with men.
OR
While living with Cherokees, captives lived awkwardly as outsiders, used as forced labor, until they were adopted, or until they died of old age or the other usual reasons people die.
Laing, that sounds like slavery to me . . .
It does, doesn’t it? Look, stay with me here. As I’m fond of saying, the moment we slap a label on something and file it away, we stop trying to understand it. And, thanks to the hard work of Dr. Theda Perdue, I can explain more. Here are some actual examples of captives:
Antoine Bonnefoy, a Frenchman, was captured in 1741 by Cherokees who had no use for his labor. So they sold him. A Cherokee who bought Bonnefoy, in exchange for unspecified merch, took him home with him, and his clan decided to adopt the Frenchman. Bonnefoy was now a Cherokee and thus free, but he hung around with his new clan for a couple of months, wearing Cherokee clothes, and doing Cherokee things. Clearly, this French Cherokee found appeal in his new family’s way of life.
That was true of other European captives, many of whom discovered that being Cherokee was much happier than being, say, English. Twenty English boys taken by Cherokee in the mid-18th century wept when they were told they were going home, and went on hunger strikes when they were back among their colonist families. English colonist Mary Hughes, captured by Cherokees around 1760, refused to be rescued, even after the colonial authorities paid for her ransom. She even married the Cherokee warrior who had murdered her husband, which says it all, really, doesn’t it?
Some European captives were not so lucky: David Menzies, a Scottish doctor, was captured, but learned that the woman who was head of the clan. would decide whether they would adopt him. He was optimistic. She wasn’t impressed. Menzies was tortured but, luckily for him, survived, and he was later released to tell his story. Hope he pointed out that Cherokee women had a lot more power than British ones did, although I kind of doubt he saw this as a good thing.
For atsi nahsa’i , captives who were kept but not adopted, those Indians whom Europeans assumed were slaves, life was less happy.
Membership in a clan, family relationships, were everything to Cherokee identity. Who you married, who your friends and enemies were, your rights, including protection, all depended on your clan membership, your relationships. If you were adopted into a clan, you got all these goodies. If you weren’t? You basically didn’t exist. That was the position of atsi nahsa’i, unadopted but unfree captives of the Cherokee.
If you were atsi nahsa’i, you were owned, not by the clan, but by one person. And he had total power over you. If you didn’t do as you were told? He could kill you. And he would, too. You were a non-person.
So why, exactly, did Cherokee keep atsi nahsa’i around? According to Dr. Perdue, that’s not clear. But one thing distinguishes atsi nahsa’i from early American slaves: They weren’t kept to benefit the Cherokee economy. The indigenous Cherokee economy that existed before European colonies didn’t have a profit motive. Cherokees didn’t need lots of labor.
Hard though this is for us to grasp, as we covet wealth, possessions and the respect they bring, Cherokees weren’t interested in material goods. What use was working hard for a big house, loads of furniture, all the trappings of the European rich? No use, that’s what. Cherokees produced what they needed to live, not as much as they could. Why collect more stuff than you can use? Cherokees in early America made fun of Europeans for that. They thought it was stupid to hoard all that crap. Looking around at my house, I think they might have had a point.
So if an atsi nahsa’i worked hard and produced a bunch of stuff, all that meant was more stuff to sit around collecting dust.
Anyway, most property belonged to the clan, not the individual. If someone lost everything through fire or war, then the Cherokees threw a sort of housewarming shower, where people (not just friends) turned up and just gave the victim what he needed.
It makes even less sense for Cherokees to have collected stuff when I tell you that, each year at harvest time, they held the Green Corn Ceremony. That’s when they burned all their past year’s surplus, everything they had acculumulated but hadn’t used, like all the stored winter foods they hadn’t eaten. Whomp! Up in flames. The owner of an atsi nahsa’i would put the stuff his “slave” had produced on a big old bonfire, and set light to it. Whoosh! All gone.
Europeans were amazed by this. But at least one observer remarked that this sort of thing cut down on quarrels among Cherokees, because they were much less likely to be jealous of each other over stuff. No property or inheritance disputes. No working harder than they had to in order to live. More time for games, songs, art, hanging out. Once again, I pause and think about this. Hmm.
Not even “slaves”, the atsi nahsa’i, were expected to work very hard.
But wait. How did people distinguish themselves in such a system? How did they earn respect, praise and honor, if not through material wealth? Top-notch warriors, hunters, and healers, all had lots of prestige. People were very respectful to them.
But what about political power? That’s another story. You see, mostly Cherokees made decisions by consensus, by coming to an agreement among themselves, by chatting about plans, and deciding together what to do. Owning atsi nahsa’i didn’t mean you could use them as your own private army and grab power. Not the way it worked.
Typically, atsi nahsa’i accompanied their owners in doing whatever: They carried stuff into war, they cleaned deer skins after hunts, and, even though farming was women’s work, they sometimes helped with that, too.
But let me be clear: Unlike people enslaved by whites in the colonial and 19th century South, the atsi nahsa’i weren’t essential to the indigenous (original) Cherokee economy. Making them so would have disrupted the proper order of things, what Dr. Perdue refers to as “cosmic balance”, including the separate roles of the sexes, and order of Cherokee society. It just wasn’t the done thing. Don’t scoff until you think of all the daft things we did before the pandemic that now seem, well, a bit pointless.
Cultures, including ours, are kind of like that.
Why did the Cherokees keep the atsi nahsa’i around then? One clue: The meaning of the term atsi nahsa’i. It wasn’t just applied to people. If a Cherokee offered you an atsi nahsa’i, you might have actually won a free puppy. Or your very own eagle. Or some bloke of your very own. You never knew until you saw what was on offer.
People or animals were atsi nahsa’i because they weren’t adopted. They didn’t belong to a kinship group. They didn’t, technically, exist. And that’s exactly why the Cherokees kept them around. The Cherokees didn’t ignore or attack what they couldn’t label and put in its proper place. They instead paid special attention to exceptions. Because exceptions help us understand what’s typical, what’s normal.
Unlike us, indigenous Cherokees didn’t fear exceptions: They were fascinated by them. Think of them as being like societies that value eccentrics: Yes, old Albert is a bit odd, but then he’s interesting isn’t he? Not that I would want to be Albert, bless him. But it’s nice to know I’m not him. Phew.
So atsi nahsa’i were exceptions to the kinship system, and a sort of cautionary tale: If you weren’t a clan member, you would be like poor old Albert, a bit of an outsider, a weirdo. Having him around, looking all sad and excluded, makes us all appreciate having each other, doesn’t it?
Kinship, clan membership, united Cherokees much more than did language or culture. Cherokees lived in towns, and in almost every town, a Cherokee visitor would find members of his clan to welcome him, even if he was otherwise a stranger to them. These clan members were responsible for the visitor if he did something wrong, or if someone did something wrong to him. If you were adopted, you got all this belonging, too. If you remained atsi nahsa’i, you were a non-person.
But apart from that, and the lack of freedom, being atsi nahsa’i could have been worse. There was always the possibility the clan you lived with might take a shine to you, decide to adopt you, and make you free. Let’s just say that this was very, very unlikely to happen to you if you were enslaved by Europeans.
Trouble is, such distinctions were lost on Europeans who first encountered Cherokees in early America. They thought they knew slaves when they saw them. It was only a matter of time before they popped round and offered to buy “slaves” from the Cherokees to work in their tobacco and rice fields.
If you want to know how we got from atsi nahsa’i to Chief Vann, that’s your first clue.
People for Sale: Cherokees Enter the Slave Trade
The European version of slavery didn’t take over in Cherokee minds overnight. It took time. But when it did, it not only changed the Cherokees’ understanding of unfree labor. It changed their entire economy, and their culture. And it started with European traders.
Cherokees didn’t need war captives to work for them. But they very much wanted the goodies that European traders had on sale, and they found that war captives were the best way to pay for these.
Meanwhile, sugar planters’ sons who moved from Barbados (where land had run out) to South Carolina (where there was lots more land) had quickly figured out that the fast pass to wealth in the 17th century was trading with Indians. Including trading in people.
The Spanish and French traders had already reached the Cherokees long before the English did. Cherokee towns were deep in the interior of South Carolina, far from the coast, where Indians at first supplied all the deerskins English traders could handle. (Georgia, in case you’re wondering, didn’t exist yet. It didn’t even get started until 1732.)
The South Carolina legislature appointed Commissioners of the Indian Trade in the early 1700s, to sell licenses to would-be traders with the Indians. The wannabe trader also had to plunk down a deposit, which he would lose if he was caught extorting his customers (colonial protection rackets, maybe?) or selling guns to Indians who were enemies to South Carolina. He also agreed not to enslave or sell free Indians.
Things did not go to plan. So, within five years, the South Carolina government declared trade with Indians a government racket, er, business, and set up official trading stations at Cherokee towns.
Not that Cherokees actually needed anything that colonial traders were selling: They already had a way of life that was completely adapted to the environment in which they lived. They could feed, clothe, and shelter themselves, no trouble, and have time to enjoy life, unlike early English settlers, or us, for that matter. So why on earth would they buy stuff they didn’t need from European traders?
Traders offered more durable versions of what Cherokees already used: Metal knives, hatchets, and farming hoes, instead of the same tools that the Cherokees made from stone. These imported products weren’t necessary, but they were very handy. An English axe made short work of clearing an area of forest. A metal hoe made short work of gardening. You get the idea.
And switching to imported tools not only saved people time and hassle, it didn’t even change Cherokee culture to substitute one type of tool for another.
Actually, it did. As Cherokees stopped making tools, they gradually lost the skills to do so. They became dependent on traders. Same as us, only for “traders” read “WalMart”, and for “imported goods”, read “imported goods.” It’s amazing how quickly we gave up our independence, our self-reliance, for pretty shiny cheap things. Look, years ago, I asked my students if they could make a candle without consulting a book (YouTube videos hadn’t yet been invented). How would they do it? Most of those who responded would talk about going to the craft store for wax, wicks, etc. They rarely had a clue how candles were even made, much less how to make them from scratch, starting with beeswax and cotton plants. We are dependent on manufactured goods for even our basic needs.
The Cherokee became us. And that’s without me even talking about how guns came to substitute for bows and arrows.
About now, you should be saying “uh oh”.
Europeans who traded with Cherokees soon had the upper hand. When some Cherokee towns stopped working with traders, refusing to bring them deerskins, the South Carolina government threatened to stop selling them goods, including ammunition for the guns they had bought.
And, okay, that brings me to guns. If Cherokees didn’t buy guns, they would fall prey to enemies who did. Find a way out of that dilemma. I can’t. Can you?
The more dependent Cherokees became, the more the prices rose on the stuff they wanted. The more deerskins they had to produce, the more they came into conflict with other Indians, seeking the same deer for the same reasons. They went to war with other Indian peoples more often, and they captured more warriors. Not surprisingly, traders encouraged them to do just that.
That's because captives were another product traders were interested in buying, as demand soared for unfree labor in tobacco fields in Virginia, and rice fields in South Carolina.
English traders’ business with the Cherokees didn’t become big business until the 1720s: By then, the coastal tribes had been decimated in war, and traders began seriously turning to the Cherokees instead, and not only for deerskins.
As crops like tobacco and rice took hold in the South, there was a growing demand for workers. Englishmen, once they heard that life for indentured servants in the American colonies sucked, stayed put.
By the 1720s, despite exploding numbers of Africans being imported as slaves, the demand for workers in British America remained huge. Indians were now becoming not only producers and customers, but products. In 1714, Alexander Long and Eleazar Wiggin, both traders, were convicted of inciting Cherokees to declare war on a Yuchi village, to capture people, and thus pay their debts to the traders for all the stuff they had bought on credit. The Cherokees hesitated to go to war for this reason, but the traders told them the governor had okayed it, which was a lie.
So the Cherokees went to war on a peaceful village, contrary to Cherokee culture, and then paid their debts to the traders in people.
Long and Wiggen lost their trading licenses over this affair. But Long, at least, was back in business three years later. More and more, the South Carolina government was encouraging the enslavement of Indian war captives, not least because members of the government were making a lot of money: Trading in Indian slaves was a fast way to get rich, including —and indeed, especially—for politicians.
Not to mention that war pushed Indians to the West, and freed up land for English settlers, which was politically popular.
More and more, Cherokees participated enthusiastically in raids for slaves. But what became of those they captured and sold to Europeans?
Many enslaved Indians remained in South Carolina, working in the fields. In 1708, just under 10, 000 people lived in South Carolina. Of those, nearly 3,000 were enslaved Africans. And about 1,400 were enslaved Indians.
Many other Indians who were captured and enslaved were sold to New York, New England, and the West Indies. It was much harder for them to run away home from such distant places. Oh, you didn’t know about Indian slaves? Or that people were enslaved in the North, too? Or that Indians cooperated in this? Catch your breath.
Cherokees were also among those enslaved. In 1693, a Cherokee delegation came to Charleston, South Carolina’s capital, to complain that other Indian peoples had been attacking and enslaving Cherokees. This, they said, violated trade regulations, and they demanded the return of their captives. Unfortunately, the governor told them, that ship has sailed. You won’t be seeing your friends again. Better luck next time, eh?
Cherokees were enslaved and sold to the West Indies right up to the American Revolution.
Remember how Cherokees originally went to war only for revenge? And only after negotiations discussing restorative justice failed? Usually, those war parties were small, made up of the immediate kinsmen of those whose deaths they were avenging. They fought the battle, and then went home.
By the 18th century, the goal of Cherokee warfare wasn’t revenge. It was to capture people for the slave trade, to pay for European goods on which they had come to depend for survival. And warriors, who had traditionally been part of the consensus that made decisions, now found themselves with political power.
Europeans had never been able to wrap their heads around the Cherokees’ consensus system of government. Surely, they asked plaintively, somebody must be in charge? They took to picking out some rando as a “chief”, with whom they could deal, and who could be held responsible for whatever the Cherokees did.
Scotsman Sir Alexander Cuming, appointed as ambassador to the Cherokees, in 1730 chose Moytoy to be chief (or as Cuming put it, king) of the Cherokees. From then on, Cherokees were expected to offer up leaders to deal with colonial, and later American, government. Who did Europeans like Cuming choose? Warriors. These were Cherokees who had power thanks to increased warfare, and, thanks to their valuable captives, Europeans regarded them as wealthy. Power and wealth: The two things that led to leadership in Europe were now applied to Cherokees, too.
Trouble is, peacetime leadership had never been the role of warriors in Cherokee culture. Why did warriors take on this role of chief? Basically, they saw how much esteem wealth brought to European traders. Warriors saw how capturing and owning and selling captives—the more, the better— made them powerful, more powerful than their fellow Cherokees. And there was room for them to do this in Cherokee culture. That’s because while tribes owned hunting grounds, and families owned fields and houses, captives belonged to individuals.
Remember the atsi nahsa’i? How an atsi nahsa’i belonged to the warrior who captured him? Exactly.
Individual warriors built wealth and power through obtaining and selling people. Once they were recognized as “chiefs” by colonial governments, they also got bribes and gifts, like rum, blankets, and, of course, guns. I mean, you can see the appeal, can’t you? Having people tell you how wonderful you are. Maybe allowing yourself to sit on your ass and accept people’s adoration a bit more often.
What Cherokees didn’t yet do? They didn’t keep enslaved people in large numbers to work for them. They sold their captives into slavery.
That was about to change. After the Seven Years’ (French and Indian) War ended in 1763, the British no longer needed to get Indians to wage war on each other. And planters in the South found enslaved Africans to be more satisfactory than enslaved Indians. After all, if Africans ran away, where could they go? They could hardly swim across the Atlantic. And if they did run away? Cherokees and other Indians could be persuaded to catch these strangers, and return them to their owners for compensation.
The Rise of Cherokee Racism
Cherokees came to know Africans through slavery. Sometimes, they were enslaved together. But Cherokees also captured runaway Africans.
African captives fetched high prices. So, by the time colonists began fighting for Independence, Cherokees were trading mostly in enslaved Africans, not war captives. Sometimes, Cherokees kidnapped enslaved Africans from one part of South Carolina, and sold them in another. Sometimes they captured enslaved Africans by force. Sometimes, they persuaded enslaved Africans to run away to the Cherokees, only to sell them after they arrived.
British and Cherokee representatives signed a treaty in London in 1730, in which the British promised that if a Cherokee returned an enslaved African to his master, he would get a coat and a gun, absolutely free, later upgraded to a gun and three blankets. Thanks to inflation, capturing a person was already worth the same as thirty-five deerskin. Think about that. You could find and shoot thirty-five deer, or to make the same deal, you could capture and hand over one single stranger. No surprise that the option to capture people was more popular. It was a lot less work for a lot more stuff.
And this arrangement, buying runaway slaves from Indians, also served the colonists’ purposes in another way: They were terrified that Africans and Indians would become allies. They also worried that if they destroyed Indians in the mountains of the western Carolinas, the mountains would instead become refuges for African “maroon” communities, runaway slaves, who could then launch attacks on white settlers.
So it was definitely in colonists’ interests to drive wedges between Africans and Indians, and keep Indians as valued trading partners. In South Carolina's 1715 Yamasee War, colonists even formed a company of black militiamen to attack Indians: They were among the units to invade Cherokee lands, and when that was done, they were charged with helping the Cherokees attack the Creeks.
Yet not all encounters between Africans and Cherokees were hostile. True, white traders were forbidden to take enslaved Africans into Cherokee lands, to prevent them from meeting, and getting friendly with each other. Of course, traders brought along slaves anyway, because who else was going to paddle the canoe and carry all the stuff? When Africans met Cherokees, Dr. Perdue suggests, they probably discovered they had a lot in common.
Meanwhile, Europeans struggled to justify to themselves treating Africans differently from Indians. It was in whites' best interests to see their Indian trading partners as basically "just like them”, even if they needed a bit of civilizing, and to see Africans as permanently, completely, totally different, oh, yes, and therefore only suited to slavery.
This thinking led colonists to argue that even the darkest-skinned Indians should basically be considered white people with a tan. Note that the same logic was never applied to African Americans, even when they were so light-skinned, they were, um, white.
Cherokees who were getting more and more involved in trading with Europeans, and absorbing European ideas about profit and individualism, began to see advantage in buying into the idea that people of African descent were somehow deserving of slavery.
What I’m trying to tell you is that Cherokees began to adopt racism. When Cherokees started their own nation in 1827, black people were excluded from voting or holding office. The Cherokees banned free black people from settling among them except by special permit.
The atsi nahsa’i we first met were considered not fully human because they were war captives who had not been adopted by Cherokees. Now, kinship was less and less important to many Cherokees in defining their identity. Instead, they began to identify with whites, and to see Africans as inherently inferior to them both. Increasingly, skin color, not kinship, was what made you unfree.
But not all Cherokees were on the same page in welcoming such massive changes in Cherokee culture.
Cherokees Do Gone With The Wind
After years of telling my students that grand mansions on which Tara was modeled in Gone With The Wind were not, in fact, found in Georgia before the Civil War (you had to go to South Carolina or Virginia), I was shocked to discover an exception, and even more amazed that it was owned by Cherokees. That’s why I took my visiting German teens to see Chief Vann’s House.
Look, Cherokees didn’t go from deer-hunting to owning big slave-labor camps overnight. And let's be clear: Most Cherokees never became rich slaveowners. But life after Independence changed for all Cherokees.
The new United States was keen for Indians to become respectable Americans. They aimed to “civilize” these “savages”. Instead of clutching our woke pearls and assuming the worst, I do suggest we think about that.
The English long ago had recognized that their own ancestors were tattooed, head-hunting “savages” who had moved on. They believed that all Indians needed was to follow their lead. That’s not racism, which is defined by the belief that some people are inherently and forever unequal because of superficial physical characteristics. In this acknowledgement, the Brits were basically saying, look, we became civilized (modern). You can, too!
George Washington, as President, gave the Cherokees detailed advice on how to become successful farmers, although, to be honest, he himself had never been very good at farming. Most Cherokees, however, appreciated the President's suggestions and encouragement. They recognized that their traditional culture had been badly eroded to the point that they could no longer carry on. Deer were no longer abundant, and some Cherokees, who misrepresented themselves as the People In Charge, had sold off a huge part of Cherokee hunting lands, the entire area between the Kentucky and Tennessee Rivers in 1775. Even being a warrior was no longer possible when there were no more wars.
So Cherokees largely got on board with moving toward modernization in the 19th century: They took to farming, using modern tools and methods. Benjamin Hawkins, appointed by President Washington to oversee the “civilization” of Indians, was pleased to find the Cherokees raring to go as farmers. Hawkins visited one man, The Terrapin, who had already stocked up on hogs and cattle in neatly-fenced enclosures. The Terrapin asked Hawkins when the UPS truck would be arriving with the farm equipment the federal government had promised. Okay, maybe it wasn’t UPS, but the rest of that is true.
Cherokee women were eager to get spinning cotton, as soon as their spinning wheels arrived. It was a whole new day for Cherokees, and they were on it: By the 1820s, Cherokee leader Elias Boudinot reported on the massive success of Cherokee farms.
However, thanks to trade, income inequality was now a thing among Cherokees: Some Cherokees were richer than others. Rich Cherokees began to buy enslaved people to work their land. Many of these upper-class Cherokees were the descendants of Cherokee women and European traders, most of them Scottish.
Scottish Cherokees
I can’t explain it, but my native Scotland, a wee mostly white country even now, has always had fewer problems with racism than anywhere else I have ever lived. I'm not saying there's no racism, mind. I'm saying it's less of an issue than I've ever seen elsewhere.
I remember chatting with a fellow Scot in a pub in Sacramento, California. I wondered aloud whether or my Scottish relatives would accept my fiance, Hoosen Benoti, who is Asian-American. “Look love,” said the Scotsman, “They won’t care if he’s green and has three heids (heads) as long as he isnae (isn’t) Catholic.”
Sure enough, Hoosen and, later, Hoosen, Jr., were welcomed into the extended family. We just didn't mention religion.
By the early 19th century, Cherokee and Creek leaders in the Southeast had names like Alexander McGillivray (Creek), James Vann (Cherokee) and John Ross (Cherokee). They identified with their mothers’ Cherokee clans because this was how Creek and Cherokee culture worked, through the female line. And in Creek and Cherokee culture, maternal uncles, not biological fathers, served as dads.
Yet Scottish dads, whose culture said otherwise, were often actively involved in their Cherokee kids' lives. Those Scottish dads passed on wealth to their sons, as well as knowledge about trade and politics among whites, along with fluency in English, including reading and writing. Add that to their sons' knowledge of Cherokee culture, thanks to their mothers, uncles, and communities, and these lads had a huge advantage in this new world.
Meanwhile, Cherokee women who took white husbands continued to exercise some power, retaining their rights to property—including enslaved people—they brought into marriage, rights that weren’t available to married British women or other women in America at this time. Cherokee leader John Ross explained this to a white man who wanted to recover slaves he had bought from Cherokee James Vaught (another Scottish name) in 1836. In fact, Ross told him, Vaught had had no right to sell these enslaved people. They belonged to Catherine Vaught, his wife. “By the laws of the Cherokee Nation,” wrote Ross, “ the property of husband and wife remain separate and apart and neither of these can sell or dispose of the property of the other.”
Yet Cherokee women did lose: They had traditionally been responsible for producing food by farming. Now, that work passed to Cherokee men, who otherwise had nothing much else to do, given the decline of war and hunting. Among upper-class Cherokees, however, agricultural work passed to enslaved Africans.
We have already seen how some Cherokees became wealthy. Now, these wealthy men became more powerful: The constant efforts of whites to acquire their land and goods meant that stronger, more centralized Cherokee government was needed. The Cherokees created a police force to prevent theft. They set up a Cherokee Supreme Court in 1822. And then, in 1827, they founded the Cherokee Nation, with its capital at New Echota, in Georgia. The men who made all this happen were, on average, four times richer than average Cherokees. They were very concerned with property rights, and especially over their rights to own slaves.
Slavery may not have been quite as harsh under Cherokee masters as under whites, as Perdue suggests. But it was still slavery. By 1835, the richest Cherokee slaveowner, Joseph Vann, held 110 Africans and African Americans in bondage. It’s his house I visited with the German teenagers.
What happened after 1835? In short, things fell apart. Greedy white Georgians, aided by a sympathetic and racist president, Andrew Jackson, forced Cherokees off their lands. Having done what they were asked, assimilated to American ways, didn’t protect them. Wealth did not even protect men like Vann, not even having hosted a US President in his home. The Cherokees sued the State of Georgia, and won. But President Andrew Jackson and the State of Georgia ignored the Supreme Court.
From rich to poor, from the most assimilated to the most traditionalist, Cherokees were forced to move West. The greatest number left at gunpoint, following what became known as the Trail of Tears from New Echota in winter. Many of them were elderly and children. Thousands froze to death on the long journey to faraway Oklahoma. Although other native people already lived there, Oklahoma was designated now as a generic “Indian Territory”. The Cherokees eventually lost there, too, especially after oil was discovered on their land in the early 20th century.
Becoming assimilated had not protected them. Settling on farms and plantations had not protected them. Moving to Oklahoma had not protected them. And huge conflict broke out between traditionalist Cherokees (who tended to be poor, and failed to see how, exactly, modernization had been a good idea) and the progressive Cherokee elite.
But the Cherokees are still here. They are today the largest of American Indian nations. And just recently, the Cherokee Nation dropped the racist parts of their Constitution that took away citizenship from the descendants of Africans their ancestors had enslaved. That’s another amazing story, and you can read about it here.
There’s so very much more to this story, in Dr. Perdue’s book and others. Meanwhile, as I like to say, it’s complicated. I hope this was helpful in making you aware of just how complicated.
Find Out More
Theda Perdue’s book, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866, which I have done my best to interpret in part for you today, is an academic work. But it’s pretty short (145 pages before endnotes) and it’s well written.
You can visit Chief Vann’s House (note the very limited opening times, and that admission to the house is by guided tour only.) I highly recommend it, along with nearby New Echota, the recreated Cherokee capital, which opens most days. Time your visits to see both. If you’re interested in earlier Indian cultures, also check out the Etowah Indian Mounds, forty minutes south of the other sites, a place that was home to thousands of people until 1550 AD, and the devastating arrival of European diseases. All these places aren’t far from the I-75 freeway in North Georgia, between Atlanta and Chattanooga, TN. Tell the park rangers (museum staff) that Non-Boring History sent you, and then tell them about Non-Boring History. And send them my love.
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Totally fascinating history I knew nothing about! Thanks, Annette!
I used to live near the Etowah Indian Mounds. Fascinating place!