"The Indian Woman Peggy": Mobility, Marriage, and Power in an Early American City

There is come down an Indian woman," Robert Daniell wrote with some haste in the middle of November 1716. She "hath always the character of being a friend to the English," the governor of South Carolina continued, "and hath brought with her a Frenchman." In truth, the Cherokee woman had brought more than just a French captive with her to Charlestown. In addition to another French prisoner, Peggy had made the two-hundred-mile trek to South Carolina's colonial capital with her Charlestonian husband, their young son, and two more Cherokees. Yet none of those other travelers moved the pen of the most powerful man in Charlestown. What made Peggy so exceptional, then, that the governor took a personal interest in assuring "that she may be pleased" before her return home? As Daniell saw it, Peggy was out of place. Peggy appears to have been the only Cherokee woman who traveled to Charlestown to exchange a captive in the early modern era. More than anything else, Peggy's mobility pushed Daniell to acknowledge her presence and ensure that she "go away satisfied."¹

Over two centuries later, the handful of historians who have encountered Peggy in the colonial records have been equally baffled by her presence in Charlestown. Their reaction, however, was not to listen to what Peggy had to say as Daniell did. Instead, they retreated to the comfort of a well-worn assumption about Native people. As Philip Deloria has pointed out, expecting only to find "authentic" Cherokees in "Indian country" or along the "frontier" has rendered "certain histories unable to be spoken."² This is especially true for Native women. As Theda Perdue, an authority on the history of Cherokee women, wrote a decade later, "in Cherokee Society, home and hearth" were "a woman's domain." So, while women stayed in their towns and "became the conservators of traditional values" after the arrival of Europeans, Cherokee men were the ones who "entered a brave new world."³ For historians who noticed Peggy at all, her mobility represented a historical problem rather than any sort of historiographical promise.

Unsurprisingly, Peggy's presence in a colonial city during the autumn of 1716 has not yet merited any extended exploration. In a book that uses the "widely divergent gender roles" of Cherokees and Carolinians to analyze the eighteenth-century relationship between those peoples, Tom Hatley describes Peggy's actions as "the prerogative" Cherokee women had in "determining the fate of captives." However, he neglects to mention that Peggy delivered her French captive in Charlestown.⁴ Her mobility, in other words, did not matter. Though Perdue admits that "Peggy benefitted from the exchange," she quickly notes that the Cherokee woman served merely as "a courier for her brother" rather than as a woman driven to Charlestown by her own motivations.⁵ A recent study of the "gendered rhetoric" that shaped cross-cultural encounters in the colonial southeast makes a similar claim. For Michelle LeMaster, Peggy was only "following traditional practices in which women controlled the fate of captives."⁶ And while Sarah Hill notes that Peggy did, in fact, move "outside the household and beyond her village to pursue another kind of exchange," this scholar abbreviates her analysis with a reference to "matrilineage" rather than exploring the mobility that seems to have characterized Peggy's particular circumstance. Each of these historians, in other words, seeks to blunt Peggy's exceptional behavior by explaining it away with vague references to tradition.⁷ That Peggy took the calculated risk to make the dangerous trek to Charlestown with her son—several Cherokee women and children either died along the path to the colonial capital or were captured in the years surrounding Peggy's visit—demonstrates that mobility mattered to Peggy.⁸

Rather than dismiss Peggy and her visit to Charlestown as an exceptional case exemplifying the Cherokee's "traditional" approach towards captives, this essay dwells with Peggy in the colonial capital and examines what her mobility means for our understanding of Cherokee women and the colonial world they moved in.^9...