The Cherokees in War and Peace by David Narrett

The Cherokees in War and Peace, 1670-1840

by David Narrett

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2025

History professor David Narrett stresses at the outset of his monumental new book The Cherokees in War and Peace, 1670-1840 that he wants his story to be about more than simply what Europeans did to Indians as victims of colonialism, but it's pretty much unavoidable. Cherokee culture was oral for all the centuries of its existence until Europeans arrived in that culture and began employing the Cherokees, making promises to them, betraying those promises, and conducting depravities and genocidal warfare, so the chronological parameters of Narrett's study necessarily starts in 1670 roughly around First Contact and ends in 1840 with the final defeat of the Cherokees, when 13,000 members of the people were expelled from their homes and put on the so-called Trail of Tears (Nunna-da-ul-tsun-yi, “The Place where They Cried”) in “a prolonged agony of privation and death.” “Like the great majority of Native peoples,” Narrett writes, “the Cherokees posed no threat to white Americans when they were uprooted.”

It's roughly two centuries of history, but Narrett's storytelling instincts are irresistibly drawn to a handful of core characters. Some of these are very well-known, like General Winfield Scott or President Martin Van Buren. But the heart of the book belongs to two much lesser-known figures, the diminutive Cherokee leader (from 1761 to 1775) Attakullakulla, whose “prestige among his people came from his diplomatic skill far more than his exploits in war” (we see him with scalps on his belt, but his real passion is for canny conversation), and “politically astute and occasionally downright Machiavellian” ambitious frontiers man Joseph Martin, who was the foremost American liaison to the Cherokees from 1777 to 1775).

Narrett writes about these two and dozens of other characters with energy and sagacity, and he's generally excellent at grounding everything in the roiling politics of these decades and this blood-soaked horrible saga. It's refreshing, in a dark way, to read such an authoritatively told account of the long history leading up to the Trail of Tears that's featured in so many popular histories of the Cherokee people (all of those popular histories hundreds of other sources feature in the book's 100 pages of End Notes; inexcusably, there is no bibliography). Narrett has written the definitive history of an incremental genocide; it makes grim but important reading.

 Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News