Tiya Miles’s assessment of oral histories has led her to conclude that the average Cherokee slaveholder was less oppressive than his white counterpart, although she admits that some major Cherokee plantation owners, such as James Vann, were capable of extreme cruelty.
Theda Perdue argues that the violence inherent in slave-ownership was tempered so long as the Cherokee remained in their traditional territory, and supports her argument with examples of Cherokee slave codes that were more lenient than those of the American South.
Halliburton disagrees, arguing that, “as slavery continued to mature as an institution, it became virtually identical with that of the southern states.”
Michael Doran emphasizes the high proportion of slaveholders who were of mixed lineage, implicitly arguing that slave-ownership never became a full feature of Cherokee society.
Perdue, in her more recent work, rebuts that viewpoint, expounding that the mixed-blood Cherokees, and, by extension, their economic practices, must be considered first and foremost as a sector of Cherokee society.