[June 25th marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Little Big Horn, one of countless fraught moments across the long history of the so-called “Indian Wars.” There are few more frustrating, more tragic, nor more tellingly American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of those conflicts, leading up to a weekend post on Little Big Horn.]
On two ways to contextualize lesser-known but hugely significant Revolutionary-era conflicts.
In this 2026 Anniversaries post on reframing 1776, I wrote about the Cherokee War that began on July 1st, just a few days before the publication of the Declaration of the Independence. I made the case there for the importance of better remembering that conflict as part of our ongoing 250th anniversary commemorations, so would ask you to check out that post if you would, and then come on back for some further Cherokee War analyses.
Welcome back! In that post I parenthetically noted that the Cherokee attacked “(with the support of the British),” but as I’ve researched these Revolutionary-era conflicts further, I would put that more strongly: the Cherokee were allied with pro-British forces, both Redcoats and Loyalist militias, in their battles against pro-Revolutionary settlers across the South. Those Cherokee-British alliances remained in place throughout the Cherokee War conflicts that continued until the end of the Revolution in 1783; and then the Cherokee simply formed a new international alliance, one with the Viceroyalty of New Spain, which helped support further battles until the Cherokee Wars fully concluded with the 1794 Treaty of Tellico Blockhouse. I’ve tried in various ways over the years to make the case for the American Revolution as a truly global conflict, and it’s crucial to see these parallel Revolutionary wars as similarly involving multiple nations, reminding us that in every way Revolutionary America was already deeply interconnected with the world.
At the same time—because history is incredibly complicated and requires the kinds of nuance that our moment overall and our political debates specifically make very challenging indeed—I would also argue that the American Revolution was in many ways a civil war. Those aforementioned Loyalist militias help us make that case, but so, in a distinct and even more complex way, do the Cherokee themselves. Without in any way minimizing the Cherokee’s entirely legitimate case for their status as a sovereign nation, I would note that they also were in the 1770s and have remained ever since part of the United States—and we can see all those layers to the Cherokee community in one of the most inspiring Early Republic texts, the Cherokee Memorials that their leaders produced (using the language of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution among many other arguments) to oppose Jackson’s Indian Removal policies. The Cherokee Wars themselves were an attempt to resist white settler incursions onto indigenous lands, making for a clear and crucial throughline between these “Indian Wars” and the Indian Removal era half-a-century later.
Next conflict tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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