The College Fix

Michael Patrick Leahy of Breitbart.com dropped this bombshell yesterday: Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Cherokee ancestry is false:

After researching her story, it is obvious that her “family lore” is just fiction.

As I pointed out in my article here on Sunday, no evidence supports this claim. O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford had no Cherokee heritage, was listed as “white” in the Census of 1860, and was most likely half Swedish and half English, Scottish, or German, or some combination thereof. (Note, the actual 1894 marriage license makes no claim of Cherokee ancestry.)

It gets worse (emphasis mine):

But the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is that her husband, Ms. Warren’s great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee—the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which began in January, 1837.

No one living today should be held accountable for their distant ancestors’ actions, of course. But Warren specifically invoked her ancestry to curry favor at Harvard as a minority faculty member. The revelation that her ancestor was not a Cherokee–but in fact, a destroyer of the Cherokee nation–is truly a fitting punishment for trying to take advantage of such a trivial, and ultimately false, claim to minority status.

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