By the eve of the American Revolution the Cherokee Indians in Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee had undergone generations of wrenching changes that had produced alterations in the number and nature of their townships and in the structure of their society. Disrupted subsistence patterns, devastating smallpox epidemics in 1738 and 1759–60, involvement in the colonial wars of European powers, and the scorched-earth campaigns of British armies in 1760 and 1761 intensified a prolonged population decline that reduced the Cherokees from an estimated 22,000 people early in the century to perhaps 3,000 warriors (about 12,000 people) in 1775. Cherokee towns declined in number, from more than sixty to forty-three reported in 1775, although that decline may reflect population concentration more than population loss. New technology and new values, overhunting of wildlife and adoption of domestic animals, combined with demographic decline, prompted major changes in Cherokee ecological relationships and set in motion modifications in settlement patterns as tribal towns began to give place to more individual farms and isolated settlements. Political relationships within and between Cherokee towns altered: colonial governments began to hold all Cherokees responsible for the actions of any Cherokees, traders and their alcohol fueled the young men's challenge to the authority of village headmen, and the influence of women seems to have declined as Europeans, primarily interested in military alliances and deerskins, dealt almost exclusively with warriors and hunters. New markets and new people induced Cherokees to shift from taking Indian war captives to trafficking in, and eventually holding, African slaves. Cherokee religion also appears to have undergone drastic changes in the eighteenth century.

While the Cherokees wrestled with far-reaching changes within their culture and society, other forces ensured that they would not be left in peace by outsiders. Their geographic location made them strategically important to the English colonies “as they form a barrier against powerful incursions of Indians on the Ohio and Illinois tribes and as a counterbalance against the Creeks in case of war with them.”