Planting the Corn and Hunting the British: The Treaty of the Long Island of the Holston and the American Revolution

Treaty borders are often porous lines. In British America, the Parliamentary-established Proclamation Line of 1763 supposedly served as an invisible border barring white settlers from making their homes across the Appalachian Mountains in an effort to stop frontier warfare between settlers and Native Americans. Unfortunately for British lawmakers in London, few settlers recognized the line as the barrier it was meant to be. By the time of the Revolutionary War, John Sevier and his fellow Wataugan squatters forged an illegal land treaty with the Cherokees. The Treaty of Sycamore Shoals in 1775 allowed them to settle along parts of the Holston River just over the present-day Blue Ridge Mountains. Doubly unfortunate for the Cherokees, the British settlers who disregarded the Proclamation Line of 1763 also paid little attention to the lines established by the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, resulting in several bloody skirmishes between native and newcomer.

Though they lived across the mountains, the Wataugans were by no means cut off from the rest of British America; neither were the Cherokees, on whose lands they eventually settled. North Carolina owned the land as part of its territory, and so whatever problems the settlers and the Cherokees encountered, the North Carolinia government received news of developments. Conversely, as Patrick Ferguson’s misguided 1780 letter to the Overmountain Men indicated, frontier settlers and the Cherokees had contact with the world beyond the mountains. Prior to 1780, both groups cared more about local skirmishes than global issues. In 1780, however, the British brought the Revolutionary War to the backcountry with the threat of alliances with the Cherokees. Through the Treaty of the Long Island of the Holston in July 1777, Virginia and North Carolina negotiated peace terms with the Cherokees in order to strengthen these alliances before the British forged an agreement with the Cherokees. Seen through the perspectives of white Indian commissioners and Cherokee leaders, this treaty assembled a group of colonial administrators and Cherokee headmen to create an armistice based on boundary lines and nonviolent negotiation. The treaty also introduced the Cherokees to the Revolutionary War through a new alliance with the Americans against the British as a means of securing protected land in the face of white settlers.

In August 1777, North Carolina Indian Commissioners William Sharpe and Waightstill Avery sent their journal of the proceedings at the Treaty of the Long Island of the Holston to Governor Richard Caswell. Through this journal, they recorded letters, speeches, and other thoughts on the negotiations. They intended the journal to reflect accurately the words and actions taken by the treaty’s negotiators, both Cherokees and white settlers. Almost 150 years later, North Carolina historian Archibald Henderson located the journal in the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh and
published the original content in its entirety, accompanied by a contextual introduction on the basic narrative of the treaty. While Sharpe and Avery’s report was surely biased and likely left out bits of information, it remains one of the few primary accounts of the negotiations and the treaty.

Because Sharpe and Avery compiled the journal for North Carolina’s government, few letters from Virginia’s side made it into the report. However, documents in the Official Letters of the Governors of the State of Virginia (1928)
support and overlap with the details of the treaty found in Sharpe and Avery’s account. For this reason, Sharpe and Avery’s account was treated as a relatively accurate reflection of the treaty’s proceedings, at least from the white American perspective.

The historiography on the Treaty of the Long Island of the Holston is sparse. In recent years, new studies have discussed eighteenth century Anglo-Cherokee relations, but few historians have closely examined the negotiations
of the Treaty of the Long Island of the Holston. Samuel Williams, a historian of early East Tennessee history and first executive director of the East Tennessee Historical Society, wrote several books with references to early British colonial-Cherokee relations, examining these dealings from a white perspective. He referred to the 1777 treaty, but only as it pertained to prevailing developments in the Tennessee Valley at the time.

Since the 1960s, historians have looked more closely at Cherokee movements during the Revolutionary War, focusing predominantly on struggles with Anglo settlers. Thomas Connolly in his 1964 article on frontier interactions with the Cherokees argued for a renewed look at the Cherokees as fundamentally important to revolutionary movements in the late eighteenth century. The 1990s brought an influx of research on the Cherokees, centering their research on Cherokee cultural and social history. Historians introduced the Cherokees as an active player in historical events,
while others supported the traditional view of the Cherokees as marginal players in the American Revolution. In Dividing Paths (1995), Thomas Hatley examined the Cherokees in the French and Indian War. He showed how North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia erected barriers towards the Cherokees, terminating friendly relations and launching an era of illegal squatters in Cherokee territory and broken treaties. Colin Calloway’s American Revolution in Indian Country (1995) examined Anglo-native interactions throughout the colonies. However, his short chapter on Chota included limited analysis of the nuanced relationship between states and Cherokee leaders, with only one small reference to treaty making between the two groups. More recently, Tyler Boulware, Paul Kelton, and Kristofer Ray looked at the Cherokees as an indigenous population with agency in an increasingly Anglicized world, showing how the Cherokees carefully navigated the colonial world for the survival and maintenance of their culture and identity. Drawing on and contributing to recent scholarship, this article analyzes the importance of Anglo-Cherokee relations during the 1777 Treaty of the Long Island of the Holston, and how that treaty affected the American Revolution and the role the Cherokees played in it.