Reviewed by Joseph Hall, Bates College | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.1

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Reviewed by Joseph Hall, Bates College | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, 1756-63. By JOHN OLIPHANT. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. xviii, 269. $39.95.)

Reviewed by Joseph Hall, Bates College

For John Oliphant, the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1759–1761 reveals the tattered fringes of empire. In a carefully detailed history of the war and its immediate causes and consequences, he examines the complex relations among Cherokee leaders and their counterparts in South Carolina and the British imperial service. Echoing ideas expressed in works ranging from Jack Sosin's Whitehall in the Wilderness through the more recent Elusive Empires by Eric Hinderaker, Oliphant points out that, while the empire does have clothes, they are not entirely of metropolitan manufacture.¹

The author reaches this conclusion through a detailed examination of the principal men who shaped Anglo-Cherokee relations during the period of the Seven Years' War. The four-decades-old Cherokee-British alliance was already strained when Britain and France opened hostilities in 1754. Carolinian land encroachments during the 1750s, combined with trader abuses and parsimonious gift giving from Charleston, diminished Cherokee affinity for the British. For British colonial officials and backcountry colonists, Cherokee efforts to obtain gifts and trade goods from the French smacked of duplicity. In 1758–1759, South Carolina governor William Henry Lyttelton appears as the principal cause that turned distrust to violence and violence to war. Backed by 1,300 militia and dictating terms that ignored Cherokee conceptions of justice, Lyttelton's heavy hand guaranteed further violence. By February 1760, Cherokee attacks had cleared British colonists from a swath of upcountry territory 100 miles wide. British regular troops arriving in the spring staged a retaliatory invasion, but the Cherokees remained unbowed: when the colonial garrison of Fort Loudon in the Cherokee nation surrendered in August, Cherokees massacred 29 and took the remaining 120 captive. Although a second British invasion in June 1761 laid waste to more than a dozen Cherokee towns, the stalemate remained. Negotiation eventually cleared the path to peace in the later summer and fall of 1761. Oliphant mixes provocative speculation and careful analysis to show how Colonel James Grant and Cherokee peace advocate Attakullakulla crafted a peace that force of arms had failed to secure. The two leaders' mutual respect and Grant's generous terms even encouraged Cherokees to join other Southeastern Indians at a larger peace conference with the British at Augusta, Georgia, in 1763.

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