In my last post, I framed East Tennessee in the eighteenth century as a borderland, while this was certainly the case it was also and perhaps more importantly, a homeland. Long before European settlers crossed the Appalachian Mountains, the region formed part of a vibrant Indigenous world shaped by diplomacy, trade, and political authority. East Tennessee was inhabited and used as hunting grounds for numerous indigenous groups such as the Yuchi, the Muscogee Creek and the Swanee. But among the most powerful of these nations by the 18th century were the Cherokee, whose towns and alliances stretched across the southern Appalachians.
During this time, Cherokee leaders navigated an increasingly complex political landscape. They traded with British merchants, negotiated with colonial officials sometimes English, sometimes French and sometimes Spanish, all the while maintaining relations with neighboring Native nations. Sometimes these relations broke down, often as a result European colonial interference such as the Cherokee-Yuchi War of 1714 when two English fur traders from South Carolina, Eleazer Wiggan and Alexander Long, tricked the Middle Town and Valley Cherokee into attacking the Yuchi at Chestowee (near the near the mouth of the Hiwassee River in present-day Bradley County). Though this battle did mark the Cherokee’s emergence as the preeminent regional power of the Southeast, it also virtually wiped out the Yuchi who absconded East Tennessee and settled among the Muscogee.
Beyond diplomatic relations, European contact also brought profound changes within Cherokee society itself. Traditionally, the Cherokee organized their communities around matrilineal and matrilocal systems, in which clan identity, inheritance, and social standing passed through the mother’s line and households were centered around extended female kin networks. Women held significant authority within the domestic and agricultural spheres, while political leadership often balanced male diplomacy and warfare with the stabilizing influence of clan structures.
The expansion of the eighteenth-century deerskin trade with British merchants, however, began to reshape these dynamics. As Cherokee hunters increasingly supplied buckskins to European markets, men became more directly tied to trade networks that connected Appalachian towns to colonial economies. This created new social and political pressures as well as access to material goods which altered patterns of authority and wealth within Cherokee communities, particularly concerning diplomacy. Though these changes did not erase traditional structures, but they did create tensions within Cherokee society and forced Cherokee diplomacy to be more strategic, pragmatic and remarkably sophisticated, all aimed at preserving their autonomy.
The American Revolution profoundly destabilized all these social relations. For many Cherokee leaders, the conflict between Britain and its colonies appeared less as a struggle for liberty than as a contest between rival imperial powers. Violence followed quickly. By the mid-1770s, war had spread across the southern backcountry. Patriot militias from Virginia and the Carolinas launched retaliatory expeditions designed to destroy Cherokee towns and food supplies. These campaigns marked the beginning of a prolonged cycle of violence across the southern Appalachians that lasted largely through the whole revolution and in some cases afterwards. John Sevier, who would later become Tennessee’s first governor, participated in some of these militia expeditions against the Cherokee in the Overhill region along the Little Tennessee River. For the frontier settlers, such actions were framed as defensive measures meant to secure order and security. For the Cherokee, these actions represented devastating incursions into their homeland during a war whose causes lay largely beyond the mountains.
The Revolution in East Tennessee therefore unfolded not only as a struggle between Patriots and Loyalists, but also as a conflict deeply entwined with Native sovereignty and survival. Understanding this history reminds us that the Revolutionary era in Appalachia was never a simple story of colonial resistance. It was a moment of profound upheaval for Indigenous nations whose lands, political systems, and futures were directly affected by the expanding American republic.
