Abstract

The Cherokee people were aware of Greek and Roman ideas through their contact with European colonizers, and they incorporated those ideas into their government alongside American culture. The Cherokee ratified and published their constitution in 1828, and some Greco-Roman ideas of governance are apparent in this document. The Cherokee newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, also expressed a broad understanding of the classical world by Cherokee people as they discussed the purposes of government. This paper investigates how the Cherokee Nation of the 19th century enacted these democratic ideas through voting rights, and compares them to Classical Athens and Republican Rome. This is done through looking at the requirements to vote alongside the process of voting, and then comparing that number of voters to the population of the society as a whole. Primary sources include: the Cherokee constitution, and the writings within the Cherokee Phoenix, the writings of Quintus Tullius Cicero, and quotations from Aristotle on the Athenian Constitution. This paper concludes that, in terms of voting rights, the Cherokee Nation of the 19th century was far more inclusive than Republican Rome, but only slightly more inclusive than Democratic Athens.

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