CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE ANGLO- WAR, 1759–1761

John Oliphant

In 1759 the southern British colonies went to war with the mountain- dwelling , over frontier, trade and sovereignty issues exacer- bated by a collision of alien cultures. After a offensive collapsed and Cherokee war parties devastated the out-settlements, it took battalions of regular troops, two further military expeditions and the destruction of about twenty of their towns to bring the nation to a peace conference. Even then the Cherokees lost much less land than South Carolina had wanted, escaped retribution for the deaths of white settlers, and retained a real, if precarious, autonomy. This was partly due to the strength of their mountain fastnesses, partly to their impressive military and diplomatic skills, and very substantially to the willingness of British regular commanders to seek compromises scorned by colonists. While the first southern Superintendent of Indian affairs, Edmond Atkin, was gener- ally ignored or sidelined by all concerned, army officers on the ground could make policy as they wished. The war was not only a significant event in Anglo-Native relations in the south, but marked the beginnings of imperial-colonial friction that would eventually bring revolution.1

The

The Cherokee people inhabited about sixty small towns straddling the great Appalachian range from the Tennessee or Cherokee River to the South Carolina in the east.2 Their highland home and distance from the coast had cushioned them against white expansion from the coast; yet it had great strategic importance in the Anglo-Bourbon contests

1 A much fuller exposition of this argument can be found in John Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier 1756–63 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). 2 Betty Anderson Smith, “The Distribution of Eighteenth Century Cherokee Settlements,” in Duane H. King, ed. The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979) 46–60. 326 john oliphant for North America, linking as it did the Savannah and its tributaries with the Mississippi system to the west. The Cherokees were also numerous in 1756, although smallpox and other imported pathogens had seen to it that at 11,000 people fielding 3,000 warriors, they were only a fraction of their pre-contact strength. The Creeks were only marginally stronger, while the Chickasaws had only 500 gunmen. The Catawbas had at most 300 by the early 1750s, reduced to a mere 50 or so by smallpox in 1758.3 Moreover, though South Carolina had about 25,000 white inhabitants, this numerical advantage was offset by the threat from 39,000 black slaves. She could not look to aid from her neighbours: Virginia and North Carolina had their own slave populations and tiny Georgia was terrified of annihilation by the Creeks and Bourbon powers.4 Thus South Carolina had neither the means nor the motivation to deploy its whole strength against the Cherokees, whose mountain presence prevented the growth of a runaway slave community like the formidable maroons of Jamaica. Under these conditions even 3,000 warriors could seem formidable. The valleys and mountains divided the nation into four or five more or less independent regions, within which individual towns had a great deal of autonomy. The Lower Towns facing the South Carolina frontier were exposed both to white expansion and devastating Creek raids: by 1760 seven out of nine towns west of the Keowee valley had been abandoned.5 The Middle and Valley Towns, deep in the mountains, were far safer. The Overhills on the lower Little Tennessee were vulnerable to Iroquois and raids and close to the French at Fort Toulouse in the Creek coun- try: though well aware of the importance of South Carolina they took care to keep up their relations with Louisiana.6 Nevertheless, there was a kind

3 Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists and Slaves in the South Atlantic Forests 1500–1800 (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 82; James Adair, The History of the American Indians, Particularly Those Nations adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, Georgia, South, and North Carolina, and Virginia… (London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, 1775), 227; Fred Gearing, Priests and Warriors: Social Structures for Cherokee Politics in the Eighteenth Century (American Anthropological Association, vol. 64, no.5, pt. 2, October 1962, Memoir 93), 113n; Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 17–23. 4 R.C. Simmons, The American Colonies From Settlement to Independence (London: Longman, 1976), 177. 5 Wayne E. Lee, “Fortify, Fight, or Flee: Tuscarora and Cherokee Defensive Warfare and Military Culture Adaptation,” The Journal of Military History 68, no. 3 (July 2004): 751–56. 6 P.M. Hamer, “Anglo-French rivalry in the Cherokee Country 1754–1757,” North Carolina Historical Review 11, no.3 (July 1925): 303–22; Governor Lyttelton to the South Carolina assembly, 5 April 1757, enclosing Kelérec to Ministre de la Marine, 13 December 1756 and the articles of peace between Louisiana and a Cherokee faction, William Henry Lyttelton