Nancy's War, The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice, part six. Thomas Jefferson and the Origin of Democracy

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels (Nancy's War) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. The first novel is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc, then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

 

One of the great white admirers of the Cherokees was Thomas Jefferson, long before he was president, long before he wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, back when he was a student at the College of William and Mary. He heard the Cherokee leader Ostenaco giving a speech to his tribe. He was a surveyor like his father Peter, and Ostenaco had been a frequent guest at his house. Jefferson was deeply impressed by the way Ostenaco commanded the assent of his tribe without the use of force, but just persuasion. If the Cherokee tribe can do this, why can’t European colonists create a democracy in North America?

Is it too much to say that the Cherokees inspired the concept of democracy in the mind of Thomas Jefferson? Jefferson admitted as much in his writings, and Rice champions this viewpoint in his novel. Jefferson really said most of these things that Rice put into the novel. In particular, I found an almost word-for-word excerpt of an 1810 Jefferson letter to Governor Langston online. I am glad this quotation has been saved from historical obscurity. Apparently Rice just made up the part about Henry VIII, who was so fat that Dr. Newton should have taken his mass into account when calculating the orbit of the Earth; “but I digress,” Jefferson ends. Rice got into Jefferson’s mind.

To Nancy Ward, Thomas Jefferson was just Peter Jefferson’s little boy who had grown up and done something or other, she wasn’t sure what.