The Original
Merciless Indian Savage
Lisa LaRue Baker
(Cherokee Nation)
When Americans celebrate 1776, they often imagine a single struggle for liberty. A romanticized vision of thirteen colonies rising against a distant king. But the summer of 1776 held two wars for freedom which were unfolding at the same time, on the same land, and driven by opposing visions of sovereignty.
While the Continental Congress was drafting the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia, the Cherokee Nation was fighting for its survival in what history calls the Cherokee War of 1776. Unlike the colonies, Cherokee Nation was allied with the British Crown because the British were the only power attempting to restrain colonial land theft.
This alliance, and the war surrounding it, shaped one of the most infamous lines in the Declaration of Independence: ‘Merciless Indian Savages’.
During the weeks Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Indpenendence, June and July of 1776, colonial militias from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia launched coordinated attacks on Cherokee towns. Homes were burned, crops destroyed, and entire communities were displaced. Cherokee war parties led by Dragging Canoe struck back against the frontier settlements.
For decades, the British Crown had intermittently attempted to restrain colonial expansion west of the Appalachians. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 recognized Native land rights on paper, but it went relatively ignored by the settlers.
To the Cherokee, the British represented a diplomatic partner with a potential longstanding trade relationship and possibly the only force capable of restraining southern settlers. However, when the colonies rebelled, the Cherokee saw not a fight for liberty, but a fight for their land, and their alliance with the British made them political and military enemies of the American Revolution.
The phrase ‘Merciless Indian Savages’ did not appear because Thomas Jefferson personally invented it. It appeared because delegates from the southern colonies insisted that the Declaration include a grievance condemning Native resistance , particularly the Cherokee who were currently at war with them in 1776.
Jefferson’s draft was heavily edited by the Committee of Five and the full Congress. Congress removed Jefferson’s entire section condemning the slave trade at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia. Congress removed Jefferson’s entire section condemning the slave trade at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia, and helped shaped grievances to reflect these regional priorities. However, the terms were already in use individually. Governors in the Carolinas and Georgia had issued proclamations calling the Cherokee “savage,” “merciless,” and “incited by the British.”
Justification was needed to legitimize their military campaigns, frame Cheroee resistance as illegitimate, and justify future land seizures, and Jefferson created the language that satisfied their political needs.
Native nations were seen as sovereign nations and political obstacles, not potential citizens. It seems clear that this is why Native peoples were excluded from ‘all me were created equal.
One Cherokee in particular could be considered ‘the original merciless Indian savage’ as referenced in the Declaration. Dragging Canoe’s 1776 campaign was the most feared Native resistance in the South. His warriors were the “inhabitants of our frontiers” the Declaration refers to. He was allied with the British, he was resisting colonial expansion and he embodied the threat southern delegates wanted condemned.
The colonies claimed they were fighting tyranny, and the Cherokee believed they were fighting the tyrants. Both believed they were fighting for freedom, but in the Declaration of Independence, only one was recognized as having that right. The Declaration frames the British king as the oppressor. Likewise for the Cherokee, the threat came from the colonists themselves who were the same people who were now proclaiming universal rights. This is the heart of 1776; the same revolution that was demanding liberty for the colonists was enabling destruction of liberty for Native nations.
The phrase ‘Merciless Indian Savages’ was a deliberate political choice shaped by the war with the Cherokee and the demands of the southern colonies who sought justification for their campaigns of destruction. At the very time the colonies declared their own right to resist oppression, they were denying that same right to the Native nations who stood in the path of their expansion. Dragging Canoe and the Cherokee were not outside the story of 1776. The ‘Cherokee War of 1776’ was central to the fears, decisions, and rhetoric that shaped the Declaration itself.
As the United States marks 250 years of independence, this truth forces a thoughtful and deep reckoning. The founding document of this nation was written in a summer of two revolutions where one was celebrated, and one was condemned. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed equality while excluding the very peoples whose resistance challenged colonial ambitions.
Where does this leave us Natives today? Will this ever be recognized and reconciled? Will you speak up and ask that official documents representing YOU be amended or explained?