The Cherokee Nation (Cherokee: ) was an autonomous tribal government of the Cherokee people that existed from 1794 to 1907. Often referred to as "The Nation" by its inhabitants, the government was centered first at New Echota in present-day Georgia and, after removal to Indian Territory, at Tahlequah. In 1827 the Nation adopted a written constitution with legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and in 1832 the United States Supreme Court affirmed in Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokee Nation was a "distinct political community" in which state laws had no force.

The Nation encompassed the Cherokee of the southeastern United States; the "Old Settlers" who had relocated voluntarily to Indian Territory beginning around 1820; those forcibly removed along the Trail of Tears in the 1830s; and incorporated peoples including the Natchez, Lenape, and Shawnee. After the American Civil War, in which most Cherokee leaders allied with the Confederacy, a new treaty required the Nation to emancipate its slaves and grant citizenship to Cherokee Freedmen.

The Curtis Act of 1898 extended allotment to the Five Civilized Tribes, and the Five Civilized Tribes Act of April 26, 1906, curtailed the Cherokee tribal government in preparation for Oklahoma statehood on November 16, 1907. The Cherokee people reorganized during the 20th century as the Cherokee Nation, which holds federal recognition as a sovereign tribal government.

History

The Cherokee called themselves the . In their language, this meant "leading" or "principal" people. Before 1794, the Cherokee had no standing national government. Its people were highly decentralized and lived in bands and clans according to a matrilineal kinship system. The people lived in towns located in scattered autonomous tribal areas related by kinship throughout the southern Appalachia region. Various leaders were periodically appointed (by mutual consent of the towns) to represent the towns or bands to French, British and, later, United States authorities as was needed. The Cherokee knew this leader as "First Beloved Man" —or . The English had translated this as "chief".

The chief's function was to serve as focal point for negotiations with the encroaching Europeans. Hanging Maw was recognized as a chief by the United States government, but not by the majority of Cherokee peoples.

At the end of the Cherokee–American wars (1794), Little Turkey was recognized as "Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation" by all the towns. At that time, Cherokee communities were on lands claimed by the states of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and the Overhill area, located in present-day eastern Tennessee.

The break-away Chickamauga band (or Lower Cherokee), led by Dragging Canoe (, c. 1738–1792), established towns along Chickamauga Creek near present-day Chattanooga and later shifted west and southwest into present-day Alabama.

U.S. President George Washington sought to "civilize" the southeastern Native peoples, through programs overseen by U.S. Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins. Facilitated by the destruction of many Cherokee towns during the American Revolutionary War, U.S. land agents encouraged Native Americans to abandon their historic communal-land tenure and settle on isolated subsistence farmsteads. Over-harvesting by the deerskin trade had brought white-tailed deer in the region to the brink of extinction. Americans introduced pig and cattle raising, and these animals replaced deer as the principal sources of meat. The Americans supplied the tribes with spinning wheels and cotton-seed, and men were taught to fence and plow the land. (In the Cherokee traditional division of labor, most cultivation for farming was done by women.) Women were instructed in weaving. Eventually, blacksmiths, gristmills and cotton plantations (along with slave labor) were established.

Succeeding Little Turkey as Principal Chief were Black Fox (1801–1811) and Pathkiller (1811–1827), both former warriors of Dragging Canoe. "The separation", a phrase which the Cherokee used to describe the period after 1776, when the Chickamauga had left other bands that were in close proximity to Anglo-American settlements, officially ended at the Cherokee reunification council of 1809.

Three important veterans of the Cherokee–American wars, James Vann (a successful businessman) and his two protégés, The Ridge (also called or "Major" Ridge) and Charles R. Hicks, made up the younger 'Cherokee Triumvirate.' These leaders advocated acculturation of the people, formal education of the young, and introduction of European-American farming methods. In 1801 they invited Moravian missionaries to their territory from North Carolina to teach Christianity and the 'arts of civilized life.' The Moravian, and later Congregationalist, missionaries also ran boarding schools. A select few students were chosen to be educated at the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions school in Connecticut.

These men continued to be leaders in the nation. Hicks participated in the Red Stick War, a civil war between traditional and progressive Creek factions. This coincided with part of U.S. involvement in the War of 1812 against Great Britain. He was the de facto Principal Chief from 1813 to 1827.

Constitutional governments The Cherokee Nation—East had first created electoral districts in 1817. By 1822, the Cherokee Supreme Court was founded. Lastly, the Cherokee Nation adopted a written constitution in 1827 that created a government with three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. The Principal Chief was elected by the National Council, which was the legislature of the Nation. A similar constitution was adopted by the Cherokee Nation—West in 1833.

In 1832, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokee Nation was a distinct political community in which the laws of Georgia had no force, affirming the nation's sovereignty. Despite the ruling, the state of Georgia and President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the decision, and pressure for Cherokee removal continued.

The Constitution of the reunited Cherokee Nation was ratified at Tahlequah, Oklahoma on September 6, 1839, at the conclusion of "The Removal". The signing is commemorated every Labor Day weekend with the celebration of the Cherokee National Holiday.

Removal

In 1802, the U.S. federal government promised representatives of the state of Georgia to extinguish Native American titles to internal Georgia lands in return for the state's formal cession of its unincorporated western claim (which was made part of the Mississippi Territory). Negotiating with states to give up western claims was part of the unfinished business from the American Revolution and establishing of the United States. European Americans were seeking more land in what became known as the Deep South because of the expansion of cotton plantations. Invention of the cotton gin had made short-staple cotton profitable, and it could be cultivated in the uplands of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

In 1815, the U.S. government established a Cherokee Reservation in the Arkansas district of the Missouri Territory and tried to convince the Cherokee to move there voluntarily. The reservation boundaries extended from north of the Arkansas River to the southern bank of the White River. The Cherokee who moved to this reservation became known as the "Old Settlers" or Western Cherokee.

By additional treaties signed with the U.S., in 1817 (Treaty of the Cherokee Agency, 8 July 1817) and 1819 (Treaty of Washington, 27 February 1819), the Cherokee exchanged remaining communal lands in Georgia (north of the Hiwassee River), Tennessee, and North Carolina for lands in the Arkansas Territory west of the Mississippi River. A majority of the remaining Cherokee resisted these treaties and refused to leave their lands east of the Mississippi. Finally, in 1830, the United States Congress enacted the Indian Removal Act to bolster the treaties and forcibly free up title to the lands desired by the states. At this time, one-third of the remaining Cherokee left voluntarily, especially because the act was being enforced by use of government troops and the Georgia militia. Although The Treaty of New Echota was not approved by the Cherokee National Council nor signed by Principal Chief John Ross, it was amended and ratified in March 1836, and became the legal basis for the forcible removal known as the Trail of Tears.

Most of the settlements were established in the area around the western capital of Tahlontiskee (near present-day Gore, Oklahoma).

American Civil War and Reconstruction

Within the Cherokee Nation, there were advocates for neutrality, a Union alliance, and a Confederate alliance. Two prominent Cherokee, John Ross and Stand Watie were slaveholders and shared some values with Southern plantation owners. Watie thought it best for the Cherokee to side with the Confederacy, while Ross thought it better to remain neutral. This split was due to the Union's and Southern state's involvement of the Trail of Tears, which complicated the nation's political outlook. Within the first year of the war, general consensus in the nation moved towards siding with the Confederacy.

Numerous skirmishes took place in the Trans-Mississippi area, which included the Cherokee Nation–West. There were seven officially recognized battles involving Native American units, who were either allied with the Confederate States of America or loyal to the United States government. 3,000 out of 21,000 citizens served as soldiers in the Confederacy. Among them were William Penn Adair (1830–1880), a Cherokee senator and diplomat who held the rank of Colonel, and Nimrod Jarrett Smith (1837–1893), who later became Principal Chief of the Eastern Band. Stand Watie raided Union positions in the Indian Territory with his 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles Regiment of the Army of Trans-Mississippi well after the Confederacy had abandoned the area, becoming the last Confederate general to surrender on June 23, 1865.

After the war, the United States negotiated new treaties with the Five Civilized Tribes. All Five Tribes acknowledged "in writing that, because of the agreements they had made with the Confederate States during the Civil War, previous treaties made with the United States would no longer be upheld, thus prompting the need for a new treaty and an opportunity for the United States to fulfill its goal of wrenching more land" from their grasp. The new treaty established peace and requiring them to emancipate their slaves and to offer them citizenship and territory within the reservation if the freedmen chose to stay with the tribe, as the U.S. had done for enslaved African Americans. The area was made part of the reconstruction of the former Confederate States overseen by military officers and governors appointed by the federal government.

A 2020 study contrasted the successful distribution of free land to former slaves in the Cherokee Nation with the failure to give former slaves in the Confederacy free land. The study found that even though levels of inequality in 1860 were similar in the Cherokee Nation and the Confederacy, former black slaves prospered in the Cherokee Nation over the next decades. The Cherokee Nation had lower levels of racial inequality where blacks saw higher incomes, higher literacy rates, and greater school attendance.

Dissolution

In 1898, Congress passed the Curtis Act, extending the Dawes Act of 1887 to the Five Civilized Tribes. The act forced dissolution of tribally held lands in favor of individual allotments, terminated the tribal courts, and gave the federal government authority to determine tribal membership. It also granted residents of Indian Territory voting rights in local elections and authorized the federal government to incorporate towns and establish public schools.