The American Indian Quarterly

Sometime just before the American Revolution, a council met at Chota, the most important of the late-eighteenth-century Cherokee towns located in what is today eastern Tennessee. ¹ Sam Dent (sometimes referred to as Samuel Bend or Dend), a white trader married to a Cherokee woman, had brutally beaten his pregnant wife to death. ² Terrified that his murdered wife's clan would exact vengeance according to the Cherokees' "law of blood," Dent took two measures calculated to save his life. ³ First of all, he fled to Augusta, Georgia, where he purchased an African American slave named Molly to offer to his wife's family as a replacement for the dead woman. Second, until the matter was resolved, he took refuge in Chota, a town of refuge where, according to Cherokee law, no one could harm him. The council that convened at Chota in the 1770s to discuss the fate of Dent and the slave woman Molly tells us a great deal about kinship and law at the end of the eighteenth century. Even more revealing is Molly's appearance in Cherokee court records sixty years later. Molly's story is instructive on two levels: it demonstrates the remarkable persistence of traditional Cherokee cultural values and it points to a serious weakness in the documentary record on which Cherokee history is based.

The decision of whether or not to accept Molly as a replacement for the dead woman rested with Dent's in-laws, that is, with the clan of his deceased wife. When Dent murdered his wife, according to the document that sketches the events in this case, her relatives "determined to kill the said white man" in accordance with the Cherokee "law of blood." As John Phillip Reid and other scholars have demonstrated, clans and clan vengeance lay at the heart of Cherokee law. The Cherokees had no national law, no police force, and no court system; instead, each clan protected its members by exacting retribution for wrongs committed against them. Because survival of the clan depended on the clan's women - not its men whose children belonged to their mothers' clans - the loss of a woman was at least as serious as the death of a man and demanded swift action. Furthermore, vengeance was a sacred duty because the [End Page 562] spirit of the dead could not depart the land of the living until its death had been avenged. Vengeance was a religious obligation as well as a social and judicial responsibility. Dent presented Molly to the Deer clan "in the place of the murdered wife." In other words, he hoped to quench "crying blood" by providing a substitute for the dead woman rather than paying with his life. To Dent's great relief, his wife's clan agreed to accept Molly as a member. She was emancipated and adopted into the Deer clan, as Cherokee court records phrased it, "agreeably to the then existing usages & customs of said Nation." Clan membership made Molly a Cherokee; race as Europeans understood it made no difference.

The role of the council at Chota in the eighteenth-century decision by the clan to adopt Molly is curious, and it may point to a subtle realignment in the relationship between clan and council as well as between women and men. From the accounts we have of Cherokee adoptions, we know that women controlled entry into the Cherokee world, and clan women's acceptance or rejection of potential adoptees sealed their fate. Molly's adoption should have rested solely with the women of the Deer clan. The adoption of an individual traditionally was not the concern of a council composed of men and including people other than those of the Deer clan.

By the American Revolution, however, councils had begun to insinuate themselves into a number of family matters, particularly when they involved non-Natives. The need to control warriors who sought revenge on colonists for the...