Blood Moon: An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation
By John Sedgwick
John Sedgwick was born in 1954, in Boston Massachusetts. His father R. Minturn Sedgwick was an investment adviser (Hissss) and his mother Emily appears to have been a homemaker. A member of a family that first arrived in America in 1636, John Sedgwick grew up with an advantaged lifestyle. He attended Groton School, a private boarding school and Harvard University (Oh dear. You were not kidding.), where he graduated Magna Cum Laude in English in 1977. While he was a senior at Harvard, Esquire magazine published a survey of Harvard bathroom graffiti that he wrote, it was his first published work. He married his first wife, Megan Marshal, also a writer and Harvard graduate in 1980, and they had two daughters. He published his first book not too long after in 1982, Night Vision about a real-life private investigator named Gil Lewis. He worked for Vanity Fair, GQ, Self, Newsweek, and the Atlantic while publishing several novels and nonfiction works. As journalists tend to do he drifted into writing history, starting with In My Blood where he researched his own family and their history of mental illness. Currently, he lives with his second wife, CNN analyst Rana Foroohar and her two children in Brooklyn, New York. Blood Moon was published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.
Before we get into the book itself though we’ve got to slam my own bias on the table for everyone to see. Otherwise, I'm not being honest with you, my readers, and being honest with you is something I always want to be. I myself have some Cherokee ancestry on my Mother's side, just enough to qualify for tribal membership (I've never voted in the elections since I felt that casting a vote for a government that had next to no effect on me was unfair to the people who did have to live with it). However, my knowledge of Cherokee history has always been spotty, since my Grandmother divorced my Mother's Father and passed away when my mother was a child. This is further complicated by the fact that my mother is deaf and very few members of her family bothered to learn ASL (Which is just flipping sad). So any knowledge I have had to be fished out and puzzled together from scraps, often working around my Mother's Father. My paternal Grandmother was a big help to me there, often seeking out and finding books for me to read (Everything he’s ever told me about his paternal grandmother was awesome). That said, the narrative that I pieced together wasn't entirely factual. I grew up believing that Stand Watie was a pure villain willing to go to war for the very people who threw the Cherokee out of their homes to keep his slaves and John Ross was a near saint of a man desperate to keep his nation from being dragged into a final ruinous conflict.
Mr. Sedgwick challenges just about every part of that narrative except the fact that the civil war was a ruinous conflict, killing one out of four Cherokee. Of the survivors, another quarter was left homeless, a third widowed and of all surviving children, a quarter was left orphaned (Holy crap. You know, given those statistics, I can understand why that narrative was a thing. Clarity of hindsight, and all.). While the civil war was the bloodiest war yet fought on North American soil, for the Cherokee it was an apocalypse that killed any frail hope of building a prosperous and free society independent of complete European-American control. What I haven't always known, but Blood Moon tells us, is that this was only the last and most brutal chapter of an internal feud that stretched back decades between Chief John Ross and the Ridge Family, of whom Stand Watie was one of the last surviving members in the Cherokee nation. That feud was both profound and petty, played for high stakes, and unbelievably sordid at times in its motives and conduct. (Buckle in folks, I suspect this is gonna be a bit of a ride.)
Mr. Segdwick starts us off at the beginning of the story, or at least as close as we can get to the beginning, with the birth of the man who would become the first and last grand patriarch of the Ridge family. He was born before the American revolution when the Cherokee nation still loomed across what would become Tennessee, Kentucky, the north of Alabama, Georgia, and parts of the Carolinas. The Cherokee lived in small villages and in clans, the woman farming, the men hunting. It was not a densely inhabited nation, the Cherokee as far as we know never numbered above 30,000. However, even then the influence of Europe wasn't that far away; because The Ridge, who would later be named Major Ridge (he was granted the rank of Major when the Cherokee marched with the American Army but that's later) was born to a Cherokee woman whose father was white. That wasn't the end of it of course, as he was born in time to oversee a major transition in Cherokee life. Mr. Sedgwick carefully takes us through his life, how he would have grown up, his marriage, and his career as a warrior. First fighting the Americans as allies to the British, then fighting the Americans trying to push them back and finally fighting with the Americans against the British and other native tribes. We are also given a close-up view of Major Ridge's children and their lives, such as John Ridge who despite being born with weak legs became an influential figure in Cherokee politics even though he was educated in New England and married to Sarah Northrup, the daughter of the school steward. John Ridge actually serves to show us the new emerging upper class of the Cherokee tribe. Many of them part white, bilingual, Christian, and copying European dress and ways of life and then we have John Ross. Chief John Ross didn't speak a word of Cherokee, was more Scottish than Cherokee in his ancestry, and was often accused of using his office for self-enrichment. Despite all of this he would maintain the support and loyalty of the majority of lower-class Cherokee, who were also the majority of the full-blooded natives in the tribe (Oh dear god. I could go on an anti-colonialist screed here very easily. Talk about the wolf guarding the henhouse, Jesus Christ.).
Mr. Sedgwick is also careful to show us what started the struggle and turned it violent. It came down to two things, first was a rather normal struggle for political power, the second was how Ross and the Ridges were dealing with a grave and massive threat to their ways of life. I speak of course of the land seizures carried out by the State of Georgia that were the direct cause of the Trail of Tears, an event the Cherokee consider near equal to the holocaust in its moral depravity and the sheer damage leveled on the nation (Well, being the victim of a state-backed genocide and geographic ethnic cleansing will do that. The way the European colonialists treated Native Americans of every stripe was just… look, we talk about slavery being America’s original sin, but the reality is, it was continuous with the genocide of the people who lived on this continent first. Arguably, it is also something that continues to this day by way of the bullshit done by the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the behest of their true masters: various corporate interests.{On the Cherokee side there’s a bit of extra bitterness that I will argue is well warranted. The Cherokee abandoned a life style of hunting/farming to adopt European style farming and livestock keeping. The Cherokee abandoned their clan-based laws to adopt European style laws and courts. A European style government. They adopted Christianity, their own written language, and were in the process of turning themselves into a copy of the Americans as well as fighting alongside them against other Indians. Only to be treated like this.}I can imagine that bitterness... Though again, hindsight is 20/20. It never mattered what they did, they weren’t white and thus would never be treated like people by the settler-colonialists. And still aren’t.) This book makes a strong case that the Cherokee are right. This is another part of the history I learned growing up that Mr. Segdwick only reinforces. As the government of Georgia used its state troops and murderous mobs to hound the Cherokee almost immediately after the war or 1812. For example, units of Andrew Jackson's (I wish there was a hell for this piece of shit to dwell in {On the flip side readers, I believe in hell and I firmly believe Jackson is sitting there}) militia army burned and looted their way across Cherokee territory on their way home, despite the Cherokee being their allies against the British and the Creek. At first, we see the Ridges and Ross are allies in the struggle to hold back invasion and pillage of their lands and homes but as the decades roll on and Presidents Andrew Jackson and later Van Buren make it clear that the federal government will not even bother to enforce the dictates of the Supreme Court against Georgia, the Ridges (correctly) realize that there is no hope of victory here, just the hope of taking as much as they can west. It's at this point that Ross, having already canceled elections, pretty much shuts them out of power and refuses to budge. Ross constantly told the Cherokee that if they just refused to move, sooner or later the US would give up and cut a deal that let them keep their land (With the hindsight of history though, that was delusional. Honestly, it was probably delusional at the time, to the point that it was like Comrade Dyatlov at Chernobyl insisting that the reactor had not, in fact, exploded.{It was delusional to the point that a good minority of the Cherokee didn’t buy it. The majority, however, many of whom couldn’t speak English, bought it, because they couldn’t hear what the whites were saying and they desperately wanted it to be true}Which is outrageously fucking sad.). It's possible he even believed it before the Trail of Tears began in earnest and US federal troops began rounding up the Cherokee and marching them out of their homes, with greedy white Georgians often swarming in behind them to loot and seizure the farmhouses and barns that the thoroughly Euroized Cherokee had built. When they didn't just burn them to the ground for the sheer thrill of it honestly. (This, BTW, is one of the reasons why statues of Andrew Jackson are being torn down. He was shitty as fuck to anyone who wasn’t white, and our anti-racist movement includes the atrocities committed against native peoples.)
This feud which sparked off in the 1820s continued past the Trail of Tears into the 1840s and into the Oklahoma territory, where violence would take hold. Ross scapegoated the Ridges and their supporters and the Ridges sought revenge for the hurts and insults slung at them. There was also a good deal of money at stake, 5 million dollars that the US government promised to pay to the Cherokee government and neither side believed the other would honestly share it out (Probably justifiably). This led to bloodshed and much like Kansas the Cherokee nation bled and threatened to split apart permanently well before the US Civil War began. This bloodletting claimed the lives of many of the leading Ridges and left Stand Watie as the last Ridge standing. By the time Mr. Segdwick arrives at the civil war, we see many people brutally murdered in their own homes. While Stand Watie and Chief Ross manage to scrap together a truce in the 1850s, it was blown apart when the US Civil War began. It's only after reading this book that I came to grasp Stand Watie's logic in siding with the Confederacy. The upper class of the Cherokee were slave owners, as the Cherokee had owned slaves well before any Europeans had shown up, and seeing all their white neighbors owning slaves convinced them that owning black slaves was the civilized thing to do (I’ll just be over here vomiting into my mouth.{Look man, when your example of “civilization” is the pre-civil war American South…} And I’ll just be retching more...). So men like Watie viewed abolitionists as a threat, additionally, Ross favored neutrality which would only piss off both sides but did slightly lean Union. So when the Confederacy promised to pay the debt the US government owed and officially recognize the Cherokee as a sovereign nation... Watie decided to risk it, besides it would let him get back at Ross. So a combination of personal grievance, a desire for justice in regards to murdered family members, and class loyalty (*Stares in Marxist*) started an even worse bloodbath that would claim several of Watie's and Ross' children and leave them both broken hollowed-out shells much like Cherokee society in 1865.
Blood Moon is a historical record and a tragedy, of how the leading members of the Cherokee nation fell to infighting and as such destroyed a lot of their own hopes and dreams. It doesn't shy away from looking at the many crimes and broken promises of the US, which played a huge role in what happened but when you read this book you are left with the feeling that if the Ridges had been better able to communicate to the average Cherokee what they saw coming or if Ross had been less pig-headed or less insistent that the damage could have been repaired; that the Cherokee might have been able to build something better and grander in Oklahoma. While the Cherokee continue today and have managed to repair a lot of the damage, I can tell you from my visits to the Cherokee museum as a child that the wounds still linger and this book gave me a deeper understanding of why they lingered. I don't think this book is perfect though, there is a lot of what I can only call speculation as to the motives of various men in the book and the full blood average Cherokee is often cast as a dupe in thrall to John Ross rather than a group of people with their own agency and beliefs that drove their loyalty and actions (That’s a general flaw that seems to happen in historical works when dealing with what I’ll call The Peasantry vis a vis their nobles.). That said it provides a lot of information on the men who were driving Cherokee decision making and the events and most likely motives that were part of those decisions. Because of this, I'm giving Blood Moon: An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation by John Sedgwick an A-. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the post-revolutionary history of the Cherokee people.
Alright, so I'm back folks and it was a nice vacation, I recommend isolation if you can pull it off these days. So Blood Moon was voted for by our ever-wise patrons and if you would like a vote on future reviews and themes for as little as a dollar a month join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads Next week we take a break from history and enjoy GI Joe Real American History Vol III. Until then wear your mask, stay safe and keep reading!
Mr. Segdwick starts us off at the beginning of the story, or at least as close as we can get to the beginning, with the birth of the man who would become the first and last grand patriarch of the Ridge family. He was born before the American revolution when the Cherokee nation still loomed across what would become Tennessee, Kentucky, the north of Alabama, Georgia, and parts of the Carolinas. The Cherokee lived in small villages and in clans, the woman farming, the men hunting. It was not a densely inhabited nation, the Cherokee as far as we know never numbered above 30,000. However, even then the influence of Europe wasn't that far away; because The Ridge, who would later be named Major Ridge (he was granted the rank of Major when the Cherokee marched with the American Army but that's later) was born to a Cherokee woman whose father was white. That wasn't the end of it of course, as he was born in time to oversee a major transition in Cherokee life. Mr. Sedgwick carefully takes us through his life, how he would have grown up, his marriage, and his career as a warrior. First fighting the Americans as allies to the British, then fighting the Americans trying to push them back and finally fighting with the Americans against the British and other native tribes. We are also given a close-up view of Major Ridge's children and their lives, such as John Ridge who despite being born with weak legs became an influential figure in Cherokee politics even though he was educated in New England and married to Sarah Northrup, the daughter of the school steward. John Ridge actually serves to show us the new emerging upper class of the Cherokee tribe. Many of them part white, bilingual, Christian, and copying European dress and ways of life and then we have John Ross. Chief John Ross didn't speak a word of Cherokee, was more Scottish than Cherokee in his ancestry, and was often accused of using his office for self-enrichment. Despite all of this he would maintain the support and loyalty of the majority of lower-class Cherokee, who were also the majority of the full-blooded natives in the tribe (Oh dear god. I could go on an anti-colonialist screed here very easily. Talk about the wolf guarding the henhouse, Jesus Christ.).
Mr. Sedgwick is also careful to show us what started the struggle and turned it violent. It came down to two things, first was a rather normal struggle for political power, the second was how Ross and the Ridges were dealing with a grave and massive threat to their ways of life. I speak of course of the land seizures carried out by the State of Georgia that were the direct cause of the Trail of Tears, an event the Cherokee consider near equal to the holocaust in its moral depravity and the sheer damage leveled on the nation (Well, being the victim of a state-backed genocide and geographic ethnic cleansing will do that. The way the European colonialists treated Native Americans of every stripe was just… look, we talk about slavery being America’s original sin, but the reality is, it was continuous with the genocide of the people who lived on this continent first. Arguably, it is also something that continues to this day by way of the bullshit done by the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the behest of their true masters: various corporate interests.{On the Cherokee side there’s a bit of extra bitterness that I will argue is well warranted. The Cherokee abandoned a life style of hunting/farming to adopt European style farming and livestock keeping. The Cherokee abandoned their clan-based laws to adopt European style laws and courts. A European style government. They adopted Christianity, their own written language, and were in the process of turning themselves into a copy of the Americans as well as fighting alongside them against other Indians. Only to be treated like this.}I can imagine that bitterness... Though again, hindsight is 20/20. It never mattered what they did, they weren’t white and thus would never be treated like people by the settler-colonialists. And still aren’t.) This book makes a strong case that the Cherokee are right. This is another part of the history I learned growing up that Mr. Segdwick only reinforces. As the government of Georgia used its state troops and murderous mobs to hound the Cherokee almost immediately after the war or 1812. For example, units of Andrew Jackson's (I wish there was a hell for this piece of shit to dwell in {On the flip side readers, I believe in hell and I firmly believe Jackson is sitting there}) militia army burned and looted their way across Cherokee territory on their way home, despite the Cherokee being their allies against the British and the Creek. At first, we see the Ridges and Ross are allies in the struggle to hold back invasion and pillage of their lands and homes but as the decades roll on and Presidents Andrew Jackson and later Van Buren make it clear that the federal government will not even bother to enforce the dictates of the Supreme Court against Georgia, the Ridges (correctly) realize that there is no hope of victory here, just the hope of taking as much as they can west. It's at this point that Ross, having already canceled elections, pretty much shuts them out of power and refuses to budge. Ross constantly told the Cherokee that if they just refused to move, sooner or later the US would give up and cut a deal that let them keep their land (With the hindsight of history though, that was delusional. Honestly, it was probably delusional at the time, to the point that it was like Comrade Dyatlov at Chernobyl insisting that the reactor had not, in fact, exploded.{It was delusional to the point that a good minority of the Cherokee didn’t buy it. The majority, however, many of whom couldn’t speak English, bought it, because they couldn’t hear what the whites were saying and they desperately wanted it to be true}Which is outrageously fucking sad.). It's possible he even believed it before the Trail of Tears began in earnest and US federal troops began rounding up the Cherokee and marching them out of their homes, with greedy white Georgians often swarming in behind them to loot and seizure the farmhouses and barns that the thoroughly Euroized Cherokee had built. When they didn't just burn them to the ground for the sheer thrill of it honestly. (This, BTW, is one of the reasons why statues of Andrew Jackson are being torn down. He was shitty as fuck to anyone who wasn’t white, and our anti-racist movement includes the atrocities committed against native peoples.)
This feud which sparked off in the 1820s continued past the Trail of Tears into the 1840s and into the Oklahoma territory, where violence would take hold. Ross scapegoated the Ridges and their supporters and the Ridges sought revenge for the hurts and insults slung at them. There was also a good deal of money at stake, 5 million dollars that the US government promised to pay to the Cherokee government and neither side believed the other would honestly share it out (Probably justifiably). This led to bloodshed and much like Kansas the Cherokee nation bled and threatened to split apart permanently well before the US Civil War began. This bloodletting claimed the lives of many of the leading Ridges and left Stand Watie as the last Ridge standing. By the time Mr. Segdwick arrives at the civil war, we see many people brutally murdered in their own homes. While Stand Watie and Chief Ross manage to scrap together a truce in the 1850s, it was blown apart when the US Civil War began. It's only after reading this book that I came to grasp Stand Watie's logic in siding with the Confederacy. The upper class of the Cherokee were slave owners, as the Cherokee had owned slaves well before any Europeans had shown up, and seeing all their white neighbors owning slaves convinced them that owning black slaves was the civilized thing to do (I’ll just be over here vomiting into my mouth.{Look man, when your example of “civilization” is the pre-civil war American South…} And I’ll just be retching more...). So men like Watie viewed abolitionists as a threat, additionally, Ross favored neutrality which would only piss off both sides but did slightly lean Union. So when the Confederacy promised to pay the debt the US government owed and officially recognize the Cherokee as a sovereign nation... Watie decided to risk it, besides it would let him get back at Ross. So a combination of personal grievance, a desire for justice in regards to murdered family members, and class loyalty (*Stares in Marxist*) started an even worse bloodbath that would claim several of Watie's and Ross' children and leave them both broken hollowed-out shells much like Cherokee society in 1865.
Blood Moon is a historical record and a tragedy, of how the leading members of the Cherokee nation fell to infighting and as such destroyed a lot of their own hopes and dreams. It doesn't shy away from looking at the many crimes and broken promises of the US, which played a huge role in what happened but when you read this book you are left with the feeling that if the Ridges had been better able to communicate to the average Cherokee what they saw coming or if Ross had been less pig-headed or less insistent that the damage could have been repaired; that the Cherokee might have been able to build something better and grander in Oklahoma. While the Cherokee continue today and have managed to repair a lot of the damage, I can tell you from my visits to the Cherokee museum as a child that the wounds still linger and this book gave me a deeper understanding of why they lingered. I don't think this book is perfect though, there is a lot of what I can only call speculation as to the motives of various men in the book and the full blood average Cherokee is often cast as a dupe in thrall to John Ross rather than a group of people with their own agency and beliefs that drove their loyalty and actions (That’s a general flaw that seems to happen in historical works when dealing with what I’ll call The Peasantry vis a vis their nobles.). That said it provides a lot of information on the men who were driving Cherokee decision making and the events and most likely motives that were part of those decisions. Because of this, I'm giving Blood Moon: An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation by John Sedgwick an A-. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the post-revolutionary history of the Cherokee people.
Alright, so I'm back folks and it was a nice vacation, I recommend isolation if you can pull it off these days. So Blood Moon was voted for by our ever-wise patrons and if you would like a vote on future reviews and themes for as little as a dollar a month join us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads Next week we take a break from history and enjoy GI Joe Real American History Vol III. Until then wear your mask, stay safe and keep reading!
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