Nan-ye-hi warned us in time. At least she warned the white settlers near the Holston River, Tennessee, that the Cherokee, under the leadership of her cousin, war chief Tsi-yugunsini (Dragging Canoe), were about to attack.
It was not that Nan-ye-hi (also known as Nancy Ward) loved the Americans. She just thought that the Cherokee had a better chance if they stayed neutral in the war between the British and the colonists. Many Cherokee agreed, but Dragging Canoe was eager for action, even against the advice of the British agents. They wanted the Cherokee to stand fast against the American rebels but not provoke wider hostilities across the frontier.
But Dragging Canoe decided to “take up the hatchet.”
On July 19, 1776, he led 600 to 700 warriors on the colonial stockades by the Watauga and Holston Rivers, while smaller parties went out to attack colonial farmsteads. The frontier militia, however, held them off. At the Holston River, 13 Cherokee were killed, and the militia suffered only four wounded. The Cherokee attack bore evidence of British involvement, since left to their own judgment the Cherokee would have launched ambushes and raids and targeted women and children as well as men. The Cherokee way of war did peek through when they captured the 18-year-old James Moore and burned him at the stake.
This Cherokee front in the American Revolution soon turned even grimmer. About 40 white settlers were killed in the region, mostly by surprise attacks in which homesteads were burned down. But Dragging Canoe greatly miscalculated. The mayhem brought on a campaign by the colonial militias of North Carolina and South Carolina, which tore through Cherokee territory, burning some 50 towns and destroying provisions.
In 1777, the Cherokee, facing starvation, signed the Treaty of DeWitt’s Corner, in which they ceded much of their land. Dragging Canoe and his supporters rejected the treaty and retreated south to Alabama, where they continued to wage war against the whites until long after the Revolution.
In the history of the American Revolution, the Cherokee uprising of 1776 is but a footnote. No British troops intervened. Its main effect was to radicalize the colonists on the frontier. The rebel cause gained energy and a willingness to organize functional military forces. The Cherokees lost nearly everything.
Nan-ye-hi comes down in history as the Cherokee’s “Beloved Woman” who became a principal figure in diplomatic negotiations with both the British and the Americans. She also protected a white captive taken during the war, Lydia Bean, who taught her how to use a loom and care for dairy cattle, which became mainstays of Cherokee life in the years that followed. The “Beloved Woman” was also among the first Cherokees to acquire black slaves, which likewise became a mainstay of post-bellum Cherokee life.
Military adventures almost always have unpredictable consequences. The British set off this particular avalanche. The Cherokee had long been a belligerent presence on the American frontier, capturing and killing whatever whites they chose but maintaining the violence at a low enough level that it seldom provoked a major response. The colonists meanwhile continually encroached on Cherokee territory. It was easy for the British agents to play on these tensions and to find a figure such as Dragging Canoe whose resentments against the settlers needed but little encouragement to erupt into an onslaught.
While the situation in the Blue Ridge Mountains was coming to a head, Thomas Jefferson was drafting the Declaration of Independence. Among the grievances he listed was the King of England “has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”
Plainly, Jefferson was thinking of the Cherokee.
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