In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Rabun County, Georgia, an old man climbs as high as his bent body can muster. He shoulders a weathered field-drum against his side and places his feet carefully among the slick roots and worn rocks. One careless step could send him hard against the mountain. When he finds a steady spot, he settles the leather sling across his shoulder, tightens the ropes, and draws out the sticks to play Reveille — the old camp call of quick taps and rolling snares that once woke soldiers before daylight.
This is how the old man kept the Fourth every year — by thundering freedom into the hollows.
That old man’s name was Edward “Neddy” Williams, and he was my fourth-great-grandfather.
I’m not going to get into the part where family lore claims he was kidnapped by pirates at age ten, spent seven years as a seafaring plunderer, then escaped into the marshes of the Carolinas. I’m going to leave that part out, because the rest of the story—the part documented in newsprint by people who knew him, recorded in land grants, Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution files, and census records—is already big enough to contain many of the hopes, fears, and contradictions aswirl on this 250th anniversary of our country’s founding.
A 1903 story in Edward’s local weekly newspaper, The Clayton Tribune, wrote, “The old soldier was drafted in England to fight the Colonists, but when he landed in America, he took up arms with the Liberty Boys and fought for American liberty to the finish.” Edward was a military drummer known for his exceptional skill at the “old Muster-Grounds.” Drummers were the army’s signal system, calling troops to advance, retreat, rally, or stand fast. They marched near the flags and officers and wore reversed colors so commanders could identify them immediately. That visibility also made them easy targets for the enemy. Every soldier knew: if you destroyed communication, you could create chaos on the battlefield. Edward’s drumbeat was the pulse that steadied men when the battlefield dissolved into smoke, noise, and fear.
After the Colonies defeated the British, Edward married, bought land, and became a farmer. But in 1812, when British crews began seizing American sailors and forcing them into the Royal Navy, Edward pulled on his battle-worn uniform, packed his drum and field gear, and joined his old regiment to fight the British one more time. He was seventy years old.
The “Old Soldier” lived to be over 100.
The Tribune goes on to describe the somber majesty of his burial in “a quiet country cemetery down on Chechero.” His dying request was that he be “buried under the Honors of War.” A company of local Militia carried the remains to the cemetery, then formed a circle around the grave. “After each one had fired a blank load into it, they placed the old soldier in his last resting place while the grave was full of smoke.”
And then this remarkable detail: “On his arm was tattooed his name, Coat-of-Arms and the British Crown.” The man who beat his drum for American liberty still carried the mark of the empire he had abandoned.
Edward’s story by itself is one of triumph and patriotism that he celebrated every Fourth of July on that misty Blue Ridge mountaintop. But the echo of another drum belongs in this story too. That drum carries the legacy and shadow of Edward’s wife, my fourth-great-grandmother, Peggy Crittenden.
Before Georgia surveyors numbered the land, before courts and lotteries turned homeland into property, before patriots fought for independence from a king who claimed the right to own a continent, and before Columbus crossed the ocean and called an old world new, Cherokee drums already sounded in these mountains for ceremony, mourning, medicine, and memory.
Edward’s drum announced allegiance to a new nation. The Cherokee drum carried an older belonging, one rooted in waterfalls, cornfields, burial grounds, and a mother’s clan.
Edward chose America. Peggy Crittenden, his Cherokee wife, watched America tighten like a noose around her people. She saw the Treaty of 1819 strip millions of acres from the Cherokee Nation and promise “forever” security for what remained. But Georgia treated those promises as paper to be ignored, bent, and finally torn through. Twenty years later, that promise was trampled into the road we now call the Trail of Tears.
Decades later, Catherine Williams Montgomery, my great-great-grandmother, testified under oath about her Cherokee ancestry. Born in 1838 — the year federal troops tore Cherokee families from their homes and forced them into stockades for removal to Indian Territory — Catherine remembered her lineage clearly: “My grandmother was Peggy Crittenden, born on the Cherokee Nation of Georgia, and she was married to Edward Williams.” Those words were the anchor. Peggy was not a vague family legend. She was a Cherokee woman by birth, tied to the powerful Wolf Clan, a matrilineal world where identity, belonging, and continuity flowed through women like the rivers and creeks of their own land.
If Edward’s story was one of reinvention, Peggy’s was one of dispossession. He could change his name, take up a new allegiance, and be honored as a patriot. Peggy’s people could not simply choose another homeland. Their towns, fields, rivers, graves, and clan places were not interchangeable — they were identity. But claiming that identity could get you corralled and herded like cattle, a thousand miles to a foreign land.
The country Edward celebrated became the country that broke treaties, surveyed Cherokee land, renamed it, divided it into lots, opened it to lotteries, hunted gold in its creeks, and drove families west at gunpoint. By the end, about sixteen thousand Cherokee people were driven west, and more than four thousand were dead — not mostly by bullets, but by sickness, cold, hunger, exhaustion, and the slow violence of being torn from home.
Yet Peggy did not disappear. She survived in the Appalachian backcountry, inside a Williams household that offered both shelter and erasure. Edward’s white legal identity, veteran standing, and surname may have protected her from the machinery that seized other Cherokee families. But that protection had a price. To remain, her descendants had to live under Georgia law, carry English names, and let parts of themselves fall silent, even though, according to the Cherokee’s matrilineal system, all Peggy’s children were fully Cherokee and members of the Wolf Clan.
None of Edward and Peggy’s children or young grandchildren walked the Trail of Tears. They appeared on no rolls. They never received any compensation from the government for the loss of their ancestral lands. And years later, the Cherokee courts refused to recognize Peggy’s kin as members of the Nation. She stayed and therefore she lost. The court claimed she had “severed ties” with her people. As if staying made her any less Cherokee in her heart.
The irony is that the beloved farmland that sheltered Peggy from removal was part of the same land Georgia had taken from her people in the broken 1819 Treaty: hundreds of acres of rich Cherokee ground along the bottomlands of Chechero Creek — then cut into deeds and held under Edward’s white name — where Peggy planted her corn and apple trees, raised her nine children and passed the ground down to her Williams heirs.
I imagine her household in Warwoman country: rainbow trout in the creek, smoke rising into the ridges, Peggy tending the orchards, slopping the hogs, and carrying the older memory beneath every ordinary task.
Their children inherited both worlds — the drumbeat of a new republic and the wound of a people being pushed from their own ground. Edward’s Fourth of July drumbeat can be beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time. It can honor liberty and still echo across land taken from Peggy’s people. It can be sincere and incomplete. It can belong to a man who loved the country he chose while his wife endured what that country cost her. Of the forty treaties signed with the Cherokees, the Federal Government broke every one.
On the Fourth of July, we usually remember founders in broad strokes: declarations, generals, fireworks, flags. I remember an old man on a misty mountain, lifting his sticks above a worn drumhead. I remember the rough “E.W.” carved on a stone in that “quiet country cemetery down on Chechero,” and the black smoke in the grave as they lay his body down. I remember Peggy, a Cherokee woman of the proud Wolf Clan whose people had already given more to America than America was willing to admit.
The duty now is not blind praise. It is attention. It is holding Edward’s drum and the Cherokee drum in the same story. It is loving the ancestor without flattening the history. It is remembering that America was not born only in halls of power, but also in mountain cabins, Cherokee towns, creek bottoms, dangerous marriages, hidden bloodlines, and frightened human hearts.
This fall, when the leaves turn red and the waterfalls pour from the mountains, I plan to return to Rabun County, walk the land, and honor both drums. On October 17, The Sons of the American Revolution will place a formal marker at Edward’s grave — one last honor for the Old Soldier. Afterward, I will climb the ancestral trails in the Blue Ridge Mountains, look across the misty hollows toward the sacred waterfalls — with ancient names like ᎤᎫᏂᏱ (oo-goo-nee-yee) or ᎡᏍᏔᏙᎠ (eh-sdah-doe-ah) and I will honor the Cherokee grandmother who once called this home.
