Susannah Emory Explained

Susannah Emory
Birth Date:1740s
Birth Place:Great Tellico, Old Cherokee Nation (now in Monroe County, Tennessee)
Death Date:1797–1800
Death Place:Tugaloo River Region, Old Cherokee Nation (now in White County, Georgia)
Other Names:Susannah Fields, Susannah Martin

Susannah Emory (after 1741 – 1797–1800) was a Cherokee matriarch. She was born in the Cherokee country at Great Tellico, now located in Monroe County, Tennessee. Her family was displaced frequently because of various wars that took place on the frontier, but she was known to have been friendly to White settlers. Married three times, her descendants include many notable Cherokee leaders.

Early life and family

Susannah Emory was likely born in the 1740s, in the Old Cherokee Nation at Great Tellico, now located in Monroe County, Tennessee near Tellico Plains. Cherokee society was both matrilineal and matrilocal, meaning that kinship ties came only through the mother and the family lived in the home of the mother, or her extended family. Children acquired the same clan as their mother. Marriage between members of the same clan was forbidden, which meant that fathers were not considered to be related to their children. The role that fathers played in European families was performed by maternal uncles. Husbands and unmarried children lived with the wife and mother. Upon marriage, sons moved to their wife's residence. Emory is widely reported to be one-quarter Cherokee and the granddaughter of Ludovick Grant. Grant was transported from Liverpool to South Carolina aboard the ship Susannah in 1716, for participation in the Jacobite rising of 1715. He wrote in a report dated January 12, 1756, to the governor of South Carolina, that he moved into the Cherokee Country about 1726. Grant settled in Overhill Cherokee community of Great Tellico and worked as a trader for the Cherokee, and, through the 1740s, as the liaison between the Overhill Cherokee and James Glen, colonial governor of South Carolina.

Cherokee historian and physician Emmet Starr, wrote that Grant married a woman he did not name of the Long Hair Clan. Native American Studies professor Colin G. Calloway stated that Grant's wife was named Eughioote and that she belonged to the Long Hair Clan. Donald N. Yates, historian and DNA investigator called Grant's wife Elizabeth Tassel and stated that she and Grant married around 1726. Brent Alan Cox's brief biography of Grant's wife Eughioote states that she was born around 1706 in the Overhills, that her parents may have been Kayanteehee and Corn Tassell, and that she had been identified by other historians as both Elizabeth Coody or Elizabeth Tassel. According to Starr, the daughter of Grant, whom he did not name, married an Englishman, William Emory. Historian Patricia W. Lockwood stated that the daughter was sometimes referred to as Mary Grant. Yates and Cox both stated that the only daughter of Grant and Eughioote was named Mary, and Cox puts her birth at around 1726. Starr listed three children for William Emory and his wife: Mary, who married Rim Fawling and later Ezekial Buffington; Elizabeth, who married Robert Due and then John Rogers; and Susannah, who married Captain John Stuart, Richard Fields, and Joseph Martin.

Marriages

John Stuart

In 1751, Grant was assigned to supervise the traders in the Valley Towns along the Hiwassee River, and relocated his residence to Tomotley. Fields points out that it would have been unlikely for a wife and children to follow a husband in a move, as they would have lost the protection of their clan. She says a "more logical explanation" is that Emory's kinship group moved there first. John Stuart arrived in Tomotley in the fall of 1756. His company was tasked with selecting a site and building Fort Loudoun to protect Cherokee women and children in times of war. As they controlled food production, the Cherokee women who lived near the fort provided the soldiers garrisoned there with food. According to numerous historians, sometime after Stuart's arrival he had a child, known as "Oo-na-du-ta or Bushyhead", with Susannah. Sometimes the couple were described as married, while others describe Susannah as Stuart's consort. Cherokee women had sexual freedom to select their partners as long as they did not violate the rules against incest within a clan and there were no taboos against unmarried women having sex or having children.

John Richard Alden, who wrote a book about Captain Stuart, stated that the marriage was Cherokee legend and that he found no contemporary records from the eighteenth century of the union of Stuart and Emory. However, he also admitted that he was unable to uncover Stuart's European wife Sarah's surname or their marriage record either. According to Leah Leneman, a social historian, until the twentieth century, Scottish law recognized "marriage by mutual consent" and required no ceremony or certificate. Alden acknowledged that Stuart likely had relationships with Native women, but said he found no record of a son called Oo-na-du-ta or Bushyhead and called it "curious" that a son of Stuart would have remained with the Cherokee. Under Scottish law, even after adultery was decriminalized in 1709, bigamy remained a crime, and an illegitimate child had no legal relationship with their father or his family.

Ineffective leadership and diplomacy, combined with settlers intruding into Cherokee territory, led to Cherokee attacks on forts in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia in 1760. Cherokee women warned the commanders of Fort Loudoun of the French and Indian plans to attack the British. The fort was attacked by Standing Turkey and his warriors in March 1760 and the siege continued until August, when Stuart and James Anderson negotiated terms to surrender with the Cherokee chiefs. Stuart returned to Charles Town, which would have dissolved the partnership he had with Susannah. Removal by a man of his belongings from his wife's home, or placing a husband's belongings outside a wife's dwelling by the woman, ended their relationship. After failing to secure several appointments in 1761, Stuart became the British superintendent of Indian affairs for the southern district of North America, and died in Florida in 1779. Susannah's son Oo-na-du-ta married a Scottish-Cherokee woman named Nancy Foreman. Writer Carla Toney stated that Bushyhead and his cousin, John Rogers, son of Elizabeth Emory, were part of the Chickamauga Cherokee, who remained loyalists and resisted the American forces during the American Revolutionary War. Bushyhead died in Georgia prior to the Trail of Tears, but Nancy made the trek to Indian Territory with her sons in 1838–1839.

Fields

In retaliation for the Cherokee's successful conquest of Fort Loudoun, Jeffrey Amerst, commander of the British forces in North America, and William Bull, South Carolina's lieutenant governor, planned a raid on the Cherokee country aimed at destroying their food supplies. Cherokee survivors were pushed south to seek shelter among the upper towns of Muscogee Nation. Grant's last known letter to Governor Glen was sent from Estatoe, in the Lower Towns, located on the Tugaloo River. The town was destroyed and burned in 1760 by Colonel Montgomery, who sent his report to the lieutenant governor describing the destruction of 200 houses in Estatoe and Sugar Town. Writer David H. Corkran places Grant at Cheoah (also known as Cheowee or Cheowa). Fields stated that the family likely stayed in this area, as Susannah's children from her third marriage were born in the region around the Tugaloo River in what is now located in Habersham and White Counties of Georgia. By 1762, almost all of the towns east of the Appalachian Mountains had been destroyed during the Anglo-Cherokee War. The end of hostilities left multitudes of families displaced and a lawless frontier, where thieves and vagabonds perpetrated crimes, which became "by the summer of 1766, a major crime wave".

Numerous historians agree that Susannah's second husband was Richard Fields, with whom she had seven children: Richard Jr., George, Lucy, John, Turtle, Thomas, and Susannah. Fields (sometimes recorded as Field) was English, and worked in the Cherokee trade. He served as a witness to a land cessation along the Broad River of Georgia, which was drawn in Chota in 1771, between traders and eight sachem and warriors to settle their trade debts. In 1777, Fields was paid for bringing horses from the Cherokee to the Virginia militia. He was working as an armorer for the Cherokee in 1778, and his pay of £60 was requested from the Virginia Governor's Council by the Indian agent, Joseph Martin. Susannah was "uniformly friendly to the white people from the commencement of the revolutionary war" and warned them when they might be in danger, according to Judge David Campbell of Tennessee. Richard Jr., who was born around 1762, moved to Texas around 1820, became the chief of the Texas Cherokee and served until his death in 1827, when he was ordered to be killed by The Bowl. George fought in the Cherokee auxiliary under Andrew Jackson in the Creek War of 1813–1814. He participated in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. He migrated to Indian Territory and lived in the Saline district. His death on April 14, 1849, was reported in the Cherokee Advocate and The Evening Post. Lucy married twice, first to Daniel McCoy and then to James Harris. Turtle served as a soldier in the Creek War, and became a Methodist preacher in 1826. Turtle was one of the signers of the Cherokee Constitution of 1839, and a member of the Cherokee Council in 1840. The youngest daughter, Susannah, married George Brewer, and later Thomas Foreman.

Martin

Starr identified Susannah's third husband as Joseph Martin, the general and Indian agent who had employed Susannah's second husband. Lockwood confirmed that for a century, Joseph was considered by most historians to be Susannah's third husband, until research in the late 1990s, showed Joseph was Susannah's brother-in-law. Joseph was appointed as Indian agent in 1777 by Patrick Henry, a founding father and the Governor of Virginia. By 1780, Joseph's brother John (also known as Jack) was serving as a trader in the Cherokee country and living in the Overhill Towns. According to Lockwood, Susannah and John married in either 1781 or 1782, and settled in Coyotee town (also Coyatee), located twenty miles below Chota. Her children from her prior marriage to Fields lived with the couple at Coyatee. Lockwood believed the family moved to the Tugaloo region, along the Unicoi Trail which ran west from the Tugaloo River to the head of the Chattahoochee River, and settled in the Nacoochee Valley, now in White County, Georgia, around 1789. Fields thinks the family lived in the Nacoochee Valley when John Jr. was born based on a letter from Samuel Wales to Governor Gilmer, dated August 30, 1831, stating that John Jr. was born in Habersham County, Georgia, which at the time it was written included White County. The couple had three children: Nancy, John Jr., and Rachel. Nancy was the oldest child and married Jeter Lynch. After their parents died, she raised her younger siblings, and her eight children with Lynch. John Jr.'s birth date is listed on his tombstone as October 20, 1784. He served as a Cherokee Constitutional Convention delegate in 1827 at New Echota, was the first treasurer of the Cherokee Nation, and "first Chief Justice of the first supreme court ever instituted in the Cherokee Nation". He removed to Indian Territory and died on October 17, 1840, near Fort Gibson, where he was buried. The youngest daughter was Rachel, who was born on March 1, 1788, and married Daniel Davis.

Death and legacy

According to Fields, Susannah died during John Jr.'s adolescence, which Lockwood says would have been before he was sixteen. Many prominent Cherokee leaders descend from Susannah. Some of her notable descendants are:

References

Bibliography

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