By Kenneth J. Cooper

Most people are astonished when I tell them the Cherokees owned slaves. Schools don’t teach about the slaveholding of the Cherokee and four other tribes who, most ironically, became known as the “Five Civilized Tribes.” The participation of some Native Americans in the abominable institution has to be one of its oddest dimensions.

Fortunately, a handful of diligent scholars have written books that do a good job of documenting this unusual part of American history. The first were “Red over Black” by R. Halliburton Jr. and “The Cherokee Freedmen” by Daniel F. Littlefield, both published in the Seventies. They have been followed by the more recent treatments of Katja May in 1996 and Celia E. Naylor in 2008.

Together, these academic books show how leaders of a young United States—as a matter of official policy—pressured the Cherokees and the other southeastern tribes to abandon hunting, practice large-scale agriculture and adopt slavery, all in the interest of becoming “civilized,” or more like white settlers. Most Cherokees never owned slaves. But most members of the prosperous, mixed white-Cherokee elite that governed the tribe did, on plantations that resembled those of southern white planters.

Starting in the early 1800s, the biggest Cherokee slaveholders belonged to the Vann family. James Vann owned as many as 115 slaves in Georgia and Tennessee. After his violent death in 1809, favored son Joseph Vann held a similar number in those states and Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, after relocating there ahead of the brutal forced march carried out by US troops in the winter of 1838 known as the “Trail of Tears.”

The Vanns are at the center of a new book, “The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story,” by Tiya Miles, a professor of history, American studies, Afro-American studies and Native American studies at the University of Michigan. Miles has emerged as a leading scholar of relations between African Americans and Cherokees. Her first book, published in 2005, “Ties that Bind,” narrated the lives of a Cherokee man and his black wife who lived in the 1800s.

Initially, Miles set out to do what none of the previous books has accomplished, primarily for lack of adequate source material—to tell the story of Cherokees’ slaves from their viewpoint and show what life was like for them. Her final product covers a broader group of people whose lives intersected on the northwest Georgia plantation: the Cherokee masters and their women, white Christian missionaries, free blacks and African-descended slaves. An impressive mansion, built from 1819 to 1821 with bricks the Vann slaves fired, survives as a tourist attraction near Chatsworth, Ga.

Tapping the detailed diaries and letters of the missionaries, whose church and school adjoined the Vann plantation, Miles draws the fullest published portrait yet of slaves to the Cherokee. It is not a pretty story, full of details similar to the horrible abuses on white-owned plantations. Yet she reveals some surprising differences too.

Tiya Miles

I have a personal interest in this history. My maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Oma Vann. She was—as I am, by birth—a descendant of Cherokee Freedmen, the tribe’s former slaves and free blacks who lived among them. Under an 1866 treaty, they and their descendants were entitled to “all the rights of native Cherokees.” The tribe’s referendum vote three years ago to revoke that right to Cherokee citizenship is now before a federal court in Washington.

My Oklahoma-born grandmother took her last name from her stepfather. Through this and another marriage, I have relatives whose ancestors, according to records of the federal Dawes Commission in the early 1900s, were enslaved by a John Vann, Sallie Vann and Joe Vann, likely members of a generation later than the Vanns whom Miles writes about.

James Vann, the patriarch at the core of the book, was by all accounts a hellion. He was also, in some sense, a chief of the tribe, though not the principal chief. He drank hard, abused his wives, stole from his own mother, shot a few of his house guests and killed his brother-in-law in a duel, Miles recounts.

His slaves fared worse. Once he burned down two slave cabins, for no apparent reason. The occupants escaped unharmed. He had slaves beaten, and had no compunctions about separating families when selling their members suited him.

One of his crueler acts was inflicted on Patience, an Africa-born slave woman he purchased in Charleston, S.C. in 1805. He made her walk to his plantation, nearly 375 miles—barefoot in winter. So badly frostbitten were her feet that she spent the rest of her life crawling on her knees, even while being pregnant and then caring for her children. .

That same year four slaves escaped from Diamond Hill and took with them all of the money James Vann had under his bed, $3,500, a huge sum back then. Now I was cheering. Then I got the feeling their bold acts might not turn out too well. Sure enough, the runaways were caught. Three of the four were publicly executed. One was shot, another hung. Most cruelly, the leader was burned alive.

One element of the tragic episode is hard to imagine on a white plantation. The runaways conspired with two white men, who wanted the money in exchange for assuring the slaves got away to freedom. Killing their master was part of the plot. The ambush failed.

A few years later, James Vann got his comeuppance. While he was drinking too much and verbally abusing other men one night in a tavern, someone swung the door open and fired a rifle shot through his heart. With Vann, unhurt, was a bodyguard—a slave of his who was heavily armed with two pistols, a rifle and a knife. White masters did not allow slaves to have weapons, certainly not guns, which Vann’s enslaved men shot on leisurely outings during the Christmas holidays, according to Miles.

His slaves had other uncommon liberties, which expanded after his unsolved murder. James Vann drank rum and danced with his slaves—in the big house, no less. On Sundays, he allowed his slaves to hire themselves out for pay. African drumming, a form of communication forbidden on white plantations, was permitted and actually appreciated, because of its similarity to Cherokee traditions. Slaves worshipped with the white Moravians on their adjoining mission, and slaves who spoke English and Cherokee served them as translators. In the Cherokee Nation, it was common for bilingual slaves to fill this empowering function for full-blood masters who didn’t speak English.

Vann’s widow became the first Cherokee to convert to Christianity. She cooperated with the missionaries to open, incredibly, a Sunday school to teach her own slaves, children and adults, how to read the Bible. Southern states banned teaching slaves how to read and write. To assure her slaves went to church on Sundays; Peggy Vann gave them Saturdays off to work for hire. Their work week shrank to five days.

Scholars have debated whether slavery in the Cherokee Nation was any better or worse than slavery as practiced by white Americans. Halliburton says there was no difference. Some scholars have suggested Cherokee masters were less harsh and more permissive.

Miles draws a more elaborate conclusion. She emphasizes the tribe was under enormous pressure from British and then American colonizers to abandon their traditional lands and conform culturally. Cherokees started enslaving Africans later and, she says, in the beginning, did so with the looser ways of the earliest white slaveholders. But “when the passage of time is taken in account, there was, in fact little difference between the ways that Cherokee elites and white elites” enslaved black people.

Kenneth J. Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a freelancer based in Boston. He also edits the Trotter Review at the University of Massachusetts Boston.