by H. W. Brands
The Cherokees helped the British against the French, but they also helped themselves against the British. They allowed the British to build a fort—Fort Loudon—in eastern Tennessee, in exchange for more weapons, but when the British reneged on their end of the bargain and then insulted several members of the tribe, the Cherokees attacked the fort, killed many of its defenders, and drove off the rest.
The assault triggered a war between the British and the Cherokees, which outlasted the French and Indian War. The British drove deep into Cherokee territory, against the Cherokee villages. The destruction the British wreaked caused even some of their own soldiers to wince. Lieutenant Francis Marion (soon to become famous for his exploits against the British) recorded:
We proceeded, by Colonel Grant’s orders, to burn the Indian cabins. Some of the men seemed to enjoy this cruel work, laughing heartily at the curling flames, but to me it appeared a shocking sight. Poor creatures, thought I, we surely need not grudge you such miserable habitations. But when we came, according to orders, to cut down the fields of corn, I could scarcely refrain from tears. Who, without grief, could see the stately stalks with broad green leaves and tasseled shocks, the staff of life, sink under our swords with all their precious load, to wither and rot untasted in their mourning fields?
I saw everywhere around, the footsteps of the little Indian children, where they had lately played under the shade of their rustling corn. When we are gone, thought I, they will return, and peeping through the weeds with tearful eyes, will mark the ghastly ruin where they had so often played. “Who did this?” they will ask their mothers. And the reply will be, “The white people did it—the Christians did it!”
The campaign achieved its brutal objective. Though killing few Indians directly, it drove thousands of Cherokee women and children into the mountains, where they faced starvation during the coming winter. The Cherokee warriors sued for peace, deciding the British made better allies than enemies.
The Cherokees remained allies of Britain as troubles developed between the British and the Americans. And as the troubles escalated into war and the British became enemies of the Americans, so did the Cherokees. They were joined in their enmity by several other tribes who considered the nearby Americans more threatening than the distant British. In May 1776 a grand war council convened at Chota, a Cherokee town on the Little Tennessee River. War chiefs of the Cherokees, Delawares, Ottawas, Mohawks, and other tribes listened to Cornstalk, the most powerful warrior of the Shawnees, describe his own tribe’s affliction in terms they all felt equally.
In a few years the Shawnees, from being a great nation, have been reduced to a handful. They once possessed land almost to the seashore, but now have hardly enough ground to stand upon. The lands where the Shawnees have but lately hunted are covered with forts and armed men. When a fort appears, you may depend upon it that there will soon be towns and settlements of white men. It is plain that the white people intend to extirpate the Indians. It is better for the red men to die like warriors than to diminish away by inches. The cause of the red men is just, and I hope that the Great Spirit who governs everything will favor us.
Cornstalk offered encouragement to those who would join him. “Now is the time to begin. No time should be lost. If we fight like men, we may hope to enlarge our bounds.” He offered warning to those who held back. “If any nation shall refuse to join us now, we shall hereafter consider them the common enemy of all red men. When affairs with the white people are settled, we shall then fall upon such nations and destroy them.”
All looked to Dragging Canoe, the war chief of the Cherokees. For a generation the Shawnees and Cherokees had been bitter enemies, with each tribe raiding and murdering the other at every opportunity. But when Cornstalk brought out a large and elaborate war belt and poured vermilion over it, to represent the blood of the settlers, and offered it to Dragging Canoe, the Cherokee leader accepted the present and sealed the alliance.
John Sevier had much in common with the Cherokees, starting with his talent for war. Till Jackson stole his mantle, Sevier was widely acclaimed as the greatest Indian fighter in the American West. More than thirty times he mounted campaigns against the Cherokees and their neighbors, and every time he came home the victor.
The Seviers had originated in France, where the family name was Xavier. John’s grandfather was a Huguenot—a French Protestant—who fled to London to escape religious persecution. John’s father found London too English for his tastes, and his own father too French, and so he emigrated to America, far from both. He took a wife in Maryland and carried her to Virginia, where John was born in 1745. The boy grew up quickly, assisting in a store his father established for trade with the Indians and himself taking a wife at the age of sixteen. John became a trader on his own and wandered west across the mountains in pursuit of the Indians’ business. In 1773 he guided his family to the Holston River on the western slope of the Smokies and constructed a trading post there.
From trading in tools, weapons, and provisions to trading in land was a small step but one fraught with the largest consequences. Sevier headed a group of speculators who signed a 1775 treaty with several Cherokee leaders entailing the transfer of a substantial tract on the Watauga and Holston rivers to the whites in exchange for two thousand pounds sterling. The sale split the Cherokee nation, with Dragging Canoe denouncing his father, Little Carpenter, for signing away the Cherokee birthright. To Sevier and the other whites he declared, “You have bought a fair land, but there is a cloud hanging over it. You will find its settlement dark and bloody.”
The outbreak of the American Revolution gave Dragging Canoe and the other Cherokee irredentists an opportunity to make good on his threat. The tribes of the Chota alliance envisioned pinning the settlers between themselves on the west and the British on the east, with the result being the interlopers’ destruction. For a time the alliance did wreak terror and mayhem on the American settlements. But Sevier discovered his gift for war and his fellow frontiersmen a stubbornness born of desperation, and they clung fiercely to their outposts. In July 1776, at the moment the Continental Congress was approving independence for the United States, Sevier joined the defense of Fort Watauga against Indian attackers. At the height of the siege the defenders watched in astonishment as a previously captured white girl broke away from the Indian lines, raced toward the fort, scaled the wall, and leaped down inside. The quick-thinking Sevier aided the last phase of her escape, catching the plucky lass as she plummeted toward the ground. He was impressed by her courage, and she by his strength; some years later, after the death of Sevier’s first wife, they married.
The settlers soon shifted from defense to attack. Sevier led a series of campaigns against the Cherokees, burning their villages, fields, and livestock and killing as many of their warriors as he could. Midway through the so-called Chota Expedition, Sevier and his fellow commander, Arthur Campbell of Virginia, delivered an ultimatum to those Cherokees still in the field: “You know you began the war by listening to the bad counsels of the King of England and the falsehoods told you by his agents. We are now satisfied with what is done, as it may convince your nation that we can distress you much at any time when you are so foolish as to engage in war against us. If you desire peace . . . we, out of pity to your women and children, are disposed to treat with you on that subject.” Sevier and Campbell told the Cherokees to dispatch six of their head men to receive the terms of peace. “If we receive no answer . . . we will then be compelled to send another strong force into your country that will be prepared to remain in it, to take possession of it as a conquered country, without making you any compensation for it.”
Some of the Cherokees did sue for peace, but others remained at war, prompting Sevier to launch an offensive that became legendary along the Smokies. He hurled his force of one hundred and fifty men against the Cherokees’ thousand, tracking them over the steepest summits, through the narrowest canyons, and into the remotest recesses of the mountains. With fire and
sword he broke the back of the Indian resistance and became a hero in the process.
Meanwhile he found time to lead his mountaineer militia against the British and their Tory allies. As part of Cornwallis’s Carolina offensive, Major Patrick Ferguson prepared to cross the divide into the region of the western waters. He issued a warning that if the rebels of that district didn’t lay down their weapons at once he would seek them out and destroy them. Sevier and Colonel Isaac Shelby decided not to await Ferguson’s approach but to take the battle to him. Joining forces with William Campbell, they crossed the Smokies and then the Blue Ridge, adding to their numbers as they went. In early October 1780 they caught Ferguson at King’s Mountain, a flattened ridgetop where the British had dug in. If the mountaineers had attacked with bayonet, as the British expected, they would have been cut to ribbons. But they lacked bayonets and any desire to use them, relying instead on their rifles. Firing alternately from opposite sides of the plateau, they raked the British and Tory forces unmercifully. The slaughter took a bit more than an hour. Some 230 were killed (including Ferguson) and some 700 taken prisoner. After the battle several captured Tories were hanged for particularly heinous crimes. The rebels lost 28 killed and about 60 wounded.
King’s Mountain was one of the great rebel victories in the Revolutionary War. Theodore Roosevelt, writing a century later, made it the centerpiece of his six-volume paean to the courage and fortitude of the American frontiersmen, The Winning of the West. “At a crisis in the great struggle for liberty, at one of the darkest hours for the patriot cause,” Roosevelt wrote, “it was given to a band of western men to come to the relief of their brethren of the seaboard and to strike a telling and decisive blow for all America. When the three southern provinces lay crushed and helpless at the feet of Cornwallis, the Holston backwoodsmen suddenly gathered to assail the triumphant conqueror. Crossing the mountains that divided them from the beaten and despairing people of the tidewater region, they killed the ablest lieutenant of the British commander, and at a single stroke undid all that he had done.”
John Sevier, as the leader of the Holston men, covered himself in glory that day and on the strength of his military reputation became the leading figure of the western district. He headed those westerners who founded the state of Franklin, and he served as its first (and only) governor. As governor he was arrested by the authorities of North Carolina, on charges of treason against that state. This simply made him more popular west of the mountains. “Had the destroying angel passed through the land and destroyed the first born in every section; had the chiefs and warriors of the whole Cherokee nation fallen upon and butchered the defenseless settlers, the feelings of retaliation and revenge would not have been more deeply awakened in their bosoms,” wrote one of those westerners, more literary than most. “They had suffered with him; they had fought under him; with them he had shared the dangers and privations of a frontier life and a savage warfare; and they were not the spirits to remain inactive when their friend was in danger.” Springing to action, Sevier’s fellows rallied to his aid and by dire threat compelled his release. After Franklin’s government folded, Sevier’s neighbors elected him to the North Carolina senate. Upon North Carolina’s ratification of the federal Constitution, he was elected to the new Congress as the first member from west of the mountains. He served only several months, though, till North Carolina (again) ceded its western territory to the United States, depriving Sevier of his congressional district.
Yet he soon received an appointment from President Washington as brigadier general of the Tennessee militia. He was active in the politics of the Southwest Territory and took a leading part in the territorial legislature. He continued to speculate in land and formed a business and political alliance with James Blount. The alliance paid off when, upon the admission of Tennessee to the Union, Blount went to the Senate and Sevier was elected governor.
It was as governor of Tennessee that Sevier crossed swords with Andrew Jackson. Appropriately, perhaps, the issue was swords: the swords of command in the Tennessee militia. In the autumn of 1796, as the officers of the militia prepared to choose their local commanders, Sevier strove to ensure the victory of a friend and political ally in the Mero District. His method was the premature commissioning of some recently elected junior officers thought to favor his candidate.
Or at least Jackson considered the commissioning premature. And when he discovered what was afoot, he tried to stop it. He was at the Mero election in Nashville when Sevier crony Joel Lewis read a letter from Sevier defending the commissioning. Jackson professed to be stunned. “Viewing, sir, with horror,” he wrote Sevier, “a private letter from the executive of the state, produced to influence the officers to do that which, in my opinion, was an unconstitutional act, and which would establish a precedent dangerous to the rights of the people, I proceeded to reply to Mr. Lewis with some warmth.”
Perhaps Jackson was genuinely horrified by what he considered the dangerous unconstitutionality of Sevier’s action. But there was more to the dispute. Jackson had his eye on the militia command for himself, and he recognized that a victory for Sevier in the district elections would make his own campaign harder at the state level. It is unclear whether Sevier knew of Jackson’s intent to make the race for major general, but he would have been blind not to see Jackson’s ambition and naive not to guess that Jackson could be a dangerous rival. Sevier was neither blind nor naive, and he attempted to cut Jackson’s legs from under him. To friends he wrote that Jackson’s objections at Nashville were “the scurrilous expressions of a poor pitiful petty fogging lawyer,” which ought to be “treated with contempt.” Apparently this language circulated fairly widely, for Jackson heard what Sevier’s supporters were saying, and he even managed to acquire a copy of Sevier’s letter.
Jackson may or may not have been surprised at Sevier’s campaign of sabotage, but he certainly was angry. He wrote the governor demanding to know why he had been attacked behind the veil of confidence (imperfect though it proved to be). “Why those private letters? . . . Why not (if you thought I had injured you), a letter directly to me, calling upon me for an explanation?” Jackson said he had thought he and Sevier were friends, as they had communicated cordially when Jackson was in Congress. To learn that the governor had been slandering him behind his back came as a shock. “This conduct requires an explanation and the injury done my private character and feelings requires redress.”
These were fighting words, or so Jackson intended them. He had been held up to ridicule by the most powerful man in Tennessee, and neither his self-esteem nor his ambition could let the slight pass. That Sevier was also the most popular man in Tennessee, the ever-victorious Indian fighter, didn’t deter Jackson from calling him out. If anything, it made Sevier a more tempting target.
But Sevier refused to fight Jackson. He had nothing to gain from a duel with the younger, less distinguished man and much to lose, including his life. So far Jackson’s demand for satisfaction was a private matter, but even if it became public Sevier’s reputation for courage would allow him to shrug it off. The governor couldn’t be dueling every hothead who took offense at something he said or did. “The voice of calumny has more than once been busied in trying to effect my political destruction,” he wrote Jackson. He went on to try to calm Jackson down. There had been a misunderstanding, he said. Jackson’s words had been misrepresented. “I have had too many attacks upon my own character to be desirous of attacking that of any other citizen. Rest assured then, sir, any observations I made in the letters you have quoted were not bottomed on malice; they were the language of a man who thought himself highly injured, and if it betrayed a little imprudence, I will here add that like yourself, when passion agitates my breast I cannot view things in the calm light of mild philosophy.”
Jackson accepted Sevier’s explanation—for the time being. “Facts may be misstated, and it is not improbable they were,” he replied. Yet tension persisted. “I feel the sweetness and necessity of prot
ecting my feelings and reputation whenever they are maliciously injured, as sensibly as yourself or any other person.” Perhaps Jackson intended this as a warning. Perhaps he was simply sharing his philosophy of life. Either way, it was something Sevier should keep in mind.
Jackson and Sevier maintained civil relations during the Senate term that commenced in the autumn of 1797. A principal issue for Tennesseans was control of the public lands in the state. The federal government contended that those public lands belonged to the United States, not to Tennessee. And in the interest of peace between whites and Indians, it sought to enforce with some rigor the treaties that preserved Indian lands to the Indians. The Tennessee government claimed the lands for itself and its citizens, and it sided with whites who had settled on the Indian lands without full clearance to do so. By favoring the Indians, Sevier said, the federal government encouraged the natives to prey upon the citizens of Tennessee. “It is painful to hear the cries of the people of this state against a partial conduct in favor of a savage tribe that can only be noticed or favoured for their atrocious murders, robberies, and a dissolute wantonness to commit every diabolical crime that could possibly suggest itself to savage imagination,” he wrote Jackson. The situation had gotten so bad, Sevier said, that Tennesseans were looking to Spain for help. “A great number of people are determined to descend the Mississippi. . . . I fear one half our citizens will flock over into another government; indeed they are now doing it daily.” The purpose of the federal government was to assist the states, not harm them; in this it was failing miserably. “Instead of our state in its infancy being encouraged, fostered, and matured, it appears that measures are calculating to check and destroy its happiness, if not its existence.”
