Global Encounters and the Archives: Britain’s Empire in the Age of Horace Walpole

A New Humorous Song on the Cherokee Chiefs, July 1762

This satirical song refers to a visit by three chiefs of the Cherokee Nation to the court of King George III in July 1762. The Cherokee were not the first to make a voyage to the British monarch in London, and as such, their embassy formed part of a longstanding strategy by which Native Americans used transatlantic diplomacy to achieve their aims. Yet this satire also reveals the ways in which British notions of indigenous difference permeated such visits, undermining the seriousness of indigenous diplomacy by recasting the Cherokee diplomats as threats to English masculinity and female sexual propriety. Catalog Record

Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University Library

Anonymous