Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Greene

Abstract

Reviewed by: Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Greene Noel E. Smyth Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina. By Lance Greene. Indians and Southern History. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022. Pp. xvi, 184. $54.95, ISBN 978-0-8173-2112-3.) In Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community’s Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina, historical archaeologist Lance Greene investigates a community of Cherokees that evaded the Trail of Tears by absconding to Welch’s Town, North Carolina, from 1839 to 1855. A mixed-descent Cherokee man named John Welch and his wife, Betty, a white woman, owned a plantation there, and in 1838 they offered land and resources to nearly one hundred Cherokees who settled in the mountains on their property. Greene argues that the “hybrid space” of the plantation enabled the Welches to conceal and protect their community (p. 133). He shows how this hybrid [End Page 140] community was able to maintain a traditional Cherokee emphasis on localism and town-centered politics even as some individuals also practiced European-derived chattel slavery. The book is organized chronologically, with the first and second chapters providing a narrative overview of Cherokee history from the early republic to the Trail of Tears. The third, fourth, and fifth chapters offer an analysis of the material remains excavated by Greene at the Welch plantation site in 2004 and 2006. From the material remains, Greene reconstructs the political economy of Welch’s Town, which included the use of slave labor to grow surplus grains, and describes how this production was supplemented with subsistence farming and traditional gathering and hunting activities practiced by Cherokees residing in the hills behind the Welch plantation. Betty Welch ran the plantation’s outward-facing business, which allowed her and her husband to accrue wealth and to have some limited influence in southern American society. Betty and John Welch held at least nine enslaved African Americans in bondage, and Greene argues that “their success and the associated success of Welch’s Town depended upon the enslaved community on the plantation” (p. 134). This book adds to the growing literature on slavery in Cherokee country and the ways in which some Cherokees adopted chattel slavery to secure liminal spaces for themselves as Native peoples in the ante-bellum South. Greene is also interested in answering the question, “What was life like for the enslaved people, mostly women and children, held captive by the Welches?” (p. 105). The book, however, does not offer many satisfying answers. Furthermore, Green argues, “Ironically, those African Americans held in bondage enabled a small number of Cherokee families to challenge white hegemony.” He does not explain how “establishing plantation estates” defied “the ideology of white supremacy” (p. 21). The adoption of slavery by some elite Cherokee families seems to be another example of cultural hybridity, rather than a rejection of white supremacy. At the heart of this book is a marginalized community of Cherokees that resisted ethnic cleansing and also adopted chattel slavery in order to secure their survival. This fundamental dynamic could have been more deeply and productively analyzed, but the book leaves this critical tension underexplored. To Greene’s credit, he is careful to point out that Cherokee slaveholders could be just as cruel as white slaveholders, but in other areas of the book there are claims that are jarring and out of step with current arguments about slavery. Overall, this book is an important addition to our understanding of both Cherokee survival in North Carolina after 1838 and how the adoption of chattel slavery was used by some Native Americans to secure the survival of their communities in the antebellum South. The book does not offer much that is new about the history of chattel slavery or the specific experiences and lives of those enslaved at Welch’s Town. However, despite this limitation, the book provides a detailed and extensive account of Welch’s Town and of how Cherokee identity and localism remained strong among those communities through the nineteenth century and beyond. [End...