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This engraved map of the Cherokee Country, prepared by John Lodge for Thomas Mante’s History of the Late War in North America (London, 1772), reflects British military intelligence developed during the French and Indian War, with particular relevance to operations on the southern frontier. Covering the region from the Carolina backcountry through the Appalachian highlands and into the upper Tennessee basin, the map depicts the spatial relationships among Cherokee towns, river systems, trails, and British forts as understood by military officers and Indian agents in the mid-1750s.
The Cherokee were vital allies to the British during the early years of the conflict against the French. The map identifies the four principal divisions of Cherokee towns (Upper, Valley, Middle, and Lower Settlements) situated along the Hiwassee, Little Tennessee, and Keowee Rivers. Each town is shown in relative geographic accuracy, labeled in Anglicized forms derived from reports by traders and interpreters. The accuracy and detail of the town placements suggest firsthand observation, reinforced by the network of roads and travel paths connecting them to British frontier positions.
Two British forts anchor the system: Fort Prince George, established near Keowee in 1753, served as a base for diplomacy and trade; Fort Loudoun, constructed in 1756 near the Overhill towns, was built to maintain the alliance and project British power into the upper Cherokee country. The reference to Captain Demere’s ten-day march from Keowee to Loudoun with 200 men provides a temporal benchmark that situates the map in the period of coordinated Anglo-Cherokee operations. These forts and their connecting roads were key to sustaining Cherokee support for British campaigns, especially during expeditions against French and allied Native positions in the Ohio Valley.
The map’s attention to trails, such as the Trading Path and various “Back Paths” between towns, indicates the importance of overland mobility in the region. It reflects the British reliance on Cherokee geography, both literal and conceptual, for movement of goods, coordination of military efforts, and extension of political influence. The accompanying notations about distances, elevation changes, and the quality of routes suggest that this was intended as a working document for those responsible for maintaining communications and logistics across difficult and unfamiliar terrain.
By the time Mante’s book appeared in 1772, the alliance had long since broken down. In 1759, rising tensions over unfulfilled promises and settler encroachments led to the outbreak of the Anglo-Cherokee War. British forces under Montgomerie and Grant destroyed many of the Lower Towns in 1760 and 1761. Fort Loudoun was abandoned and its garrison attacked after surrender. While the map's geography predates these events, it captures the moment when Cherokee and British interests were still aligned, and before the collapse of that alignment reshaped the political geography of the southern interior.
Lodge’s engraving is a rare near-contemporary image of a volatile frontier, made at a moment when the British Empire still depended on Indigenous alliance to assert power beyond the line of settlement.
Thomas Mante (bapt. 1733, d. c. 1802), army officer, historian, and sometime intelligence agent, was baptized Thomas Mant on 3 December 1733 at St Faith’s, Havant, Hampshire. He was the eldest of eight children born to Thomas Mant, an estate manager, and Mary Bingham, daughter of the church historian Joseph Bingham and his wife Dorothea Pococke. Nothing is known of his early education or training, but he began his military career on 25 June 1756 as a senior second lieutenant in the Royal Marines.
During the Seven Years’ War, Mante transferred to the 56th company of Marines in 1759 and participated in the major West Indies campaigns of 1759 and 1762. He served as one of seventeen assistant engineers under the Earl of Albemarle during the siege of Havana in 1762, and by June of that year had obtained a commission as a lieutenant in the 77th Regiment of Foot. That regiment departed Havana for New York in August 1762, but was disbanded the following year as part of postwar reductions. Mante, however, remained in North America: in 1763 he joined Colonel Henry Bouquet’s campaign against the forces of Pontiac, and in 1764 served as brigade major in Colonel John Bradstreet’s expedition to the western Great Lakes.
Placed on half-pay in 1765, Mante spent the next eight years in London. He sought appointments—most ambitiously, as lieutenant-governor of a proposed colony in Detroit—but failed to secure political support. He relied increasingly on borrowed funds and fell out with both John Bradstreet and Sir Charles Gould. During this period, he was employed by John Robinson at the Treasury to provide intelligence in anticipation of a renewed Anglo-French conflict. On 29 June 1769 he married Mary Silver at North Hayling, near his family’s home in Havant.
Mante’s literary career began in this first London period. Between 1770 and 1772 he completed four military works: three translations of treatises on tactics from the French school of Joly de Maizeroy—A Treatise on the Use of Defensive Arms (1770), Elementary Principles of Tactics (1771), and the two-volume System of Tactics (1781)—and his major historical achievement, The History of the Late War in North America (1772). This last work, issued with a suite of folding maps, drew on his own military experience and is still regarded as a valuable contemporary account of the Seven Years’ War. He changed the spelling of his name from “Mant” to “Mante” between 1770 and 1772, and used it consistently thereafter.
In 1773, Mante moved permanently to Dieppe, Normandy, where he had lived intermittently since 1769. He had been recruited by the Jacobite exile Jean-Charles-Adolphe Grant de Blairfindy to provide military intelligence to the French ministry of war. Though on the French payroll for a time, his payments ceased in 1774 amid suspicions that he was a double agent. Nonetheless, he remained in France, serving briefly as an excise officer and then attempting to operate an estate for raising British sheep. This project failed, and in 1778 he was imprisoned for debt. That same year, he published Traité des prairies artificielles, des enclos, et de l’éducation des moutons de race angloise, a treatise on English methods of sheep husbandry, which received formal approval from Louis XVI and was dedicated to Benjamin Franklin, then serving as American ambassador in Paris.
Released from prison in early 1781, Mante returned to London in poor health and near destitution. Rejected by his former associates, he found support from the publisher Thomas Hookham, who issued two of his novels, Lucinda and The Siege of Aubigny, in 1781–82. These were paraphrases of French originals. His final project was an ambitious Naval and Military History of the Wars of England, published in multiple volumes between c.1795 and 1807. He personally authored the early volumes and most of volumes five and six, which covered the wars of 1714–1771. Volume seven was only partially completed by him and finished by another hand; volume eight was written posthumously by an anonymous editor. Between 1800 and 1801 he also contributed nineteen essays, titled “Retrospect of the eighteenth century,” to The Gentleman’s Magazine. He died around 1802, still at work on his history.
Substantially based on the ODNB entry.
