Cherokee elites held enslaved people and fled land seizures with them

Evidence

The Vann family was not spared. In 1833, Rich Joe and more than a dozen family members were powerless as they huddled together in a single room of their brick manor house while two white men who both claimed ownership of the estate through the lottery fought over who would get it. One of the men was a Georgia Guard commander, accompanied by soldiers. He ordered them to fire on his rival for the property. Gunshots ignited the wood of the showstopper stairway, which burst into flames. The Vann family escaped the fire, relinquishing their land and house but not the enslaved people, whom they brought along when they took refuge in their second home in Tennessee. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 496

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Vanns were Cherokee enslavers — worth noting the layered irony for later chapters on how Black and Native dispossession interact; a thread to chase.