that the Cherokee, uniquely among the Native American peoples of the early 19th century, had set about codifying and reducing to writing their language. A newspaper called the Cherokee Phoenix was being published by 1830--only to be suppressed by the Georgia legislature (not the US government, but by 1860 the distinction would have been lost on all concerned) in 1834. Even so, this prefigured by six years the infamous Trail of Tears, which forcibly relocated almost (but not all) Cherokee to Oklahoma, at US government behest. It is not necessary to point out the ambiguities and paradoxes implicit in Union sentiment among white settlers, Cherokee antipathy to the US government, and the lumping together of Southern sensibilities against black persons, whether slave or free, in the region to see that the larger point is that the region's cultural identity, if it can be so called, was not unitary in the run-up to the Civil War.
A second feature of discourse in this regard is that the non-Indian farmers, chiefly though not exclusively Scots-Irish in ethn
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