Content area
Full Text
Another Look at the Early Cherokee Republic
Sometime just before the American Revolution, a council met at Chota, the most important of the late-eighteenth-century Cherokee towns located in what is today eastern Tennessee., Sam Dent (sometimes referred to as Samuel Bend or Dend), a white trader married to a Cherokee woman, had brutally beaten his pregnant wife to death.2 Terrified that his murdered wife's clan would exact vengeance according to the Cherokees' "law of blood," Dent took two measures calculated to save his life.3 First of all, he fled to Augusta, Georgia, where he purchased an African American slave named Molly to offer to his wife's family as a replacement for the dead woman. Second, until the matter was resolved, he took refuge in Chota, a town of refuge where, according to Cherokee law, no one could harm him. The council that convened at Chota in the 1770s to discuss the fate of Dent and the slave woman Molly tells us a great deal about kinship and law at the end of the eighteenth century. Even more revealing is Molly's appearance in Cherokee court records sixty years later. Molly's story is instructive on two levels: it demonstrates the remarkable persistence of traditional Cherokee cultural values and it points to a serious weakness in the documentary record on which Cherokee history is based.
The decision of whether or not to accept Molly as a replacement for the dead woman rested with Dent's in-laws, that is, with the clan of his deceased wife. When Dent murdered his wife, according to the document that sketches the events in this case, her relatives "determined to kill the said white man" in accordance with the Cherokee "law of blood." As John Phillip Reid and other scholars have demonstrated, clans and clan vengeance lay at the heart of Cherokee law. The Cherokees had no national law, no police force, and no court system; instead, each clan protected its members by exacting retribution for wrongs committed against them. Because survival of the clan depended on the clan's women - not its men whose children belonged to their mothers' clans - the loss of a woman was at least as serious as the death of a man and demanded swift action. Furthermore,...