Droughts, crop blights, and famines cause massive human migrations in every century. So, too, do wars and persecution. In the second half of the eighteenth century persecution and the threat of death caused British loyalists to flee from their homes, their towns, their villages. They sought sanctuary among Indigenous peoples, for Native Americans, like British loyalists, opposed the American rebels who were raiding, marauding, murdering all opponents to their civil war.
Although it is now called the American Revolution it was, in fact, a civil war. British colonists loyal to their original homeland fought British colonists who wanted to break away. As Aviva Chomsky noted: “U.S. historians have de-emphasized the many Americans who supported the British rather than the independence movement at the end of the eighteenth century.”(1)
And for these Americans safety could only be found among like-minded people: the Onondagas, the Senecas, the Mohawks, the Cherokees, the Musogees . Loyalists, runaway slaves and hostile “Indians” flocked to Florida. They organized the Florida Rangers and made guerrilla attacks on south Georgian settlements.(2)
According to Theda Perdue, “During the American Revolution, many Cherokees including Major Ridge allied with the British” to fight the Americans who were invading Cherokee territory and destroying Cherokee towns.(3) This is confirmed by James P. Pate: “[Chickamaugan w]ar parties were sent out in conjunction with loyalist militia in the Carolinas and Georgia. Their towns were opened to loyalist refugees. British agents . . . worked with Dragging Canoe to coordinate attacks and bring in supplies.”(4)
So it is hardly surprising that there was a great deal of intermarriage between British loyalists and Cherokee women after the revolution.(5) Mitchell Sanders, a loyalist from New Hampshire, married into the Nation and was the father of Alexander Sanders and ancestor of Cherokees enrolled today.
While some descendants of loyalists remained in the Nation and were enrolled, others lived in the Nation for a generation or two and then moved on. Many of them became affiliated with other First Nations. Absalom Shirley and Christian Sheley both served in Colonel William Ballantyne’s Regiment of Camden Militia between 1780 and 1782 and married Cherokee women. The surnames Shirley and Shelly appear in the Diné (Navajo) Nation. In 2007 Joe Shirley Jr. was the President of the Nation and Ben Shelly was Vice President. (6)
If you think that one of your ancestors married into the Cherokee Nation at some point, you can contact me at: contact@carla-toney.com. Please put CHEROKEE SEARCH as your subject in your heading.
The above is from Multitribal Indians in Search of No Man’s Land: The American Expansion and the Chickamaugans Between Resistance and Migration by Carla Toney (V & R unipress, 2023) 105-106.
© The right of Carla Toney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
1) Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 24.
2) Clifford Sheats Capps and Eugenia Burney, Colonial Georgia (Thomas Nelson Inc., 1972), 123.
3) Theda Perdue, Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot (University of Georgia Press, 1996) 4.
4) Patrick Henry to Richard Caswell, Williamsburg, January 8, 1779, in James P. Pate, “The Chickamauga: A Forgotten Segment of Cherokee Resistance on the Southern Frontier” (Ph.D. diss., Mississippi State College, 1969) 88. British agents included Alexander Cameron, John McDonald, and Walter Scott. See ibid.
5) Smithers, The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity (Yale University Press, 2015) 41.
6) Toney, Multitribal Indians in Search of No Man’s Land, 300.
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