Inheritance was largely matrilineal, and kinship and clan membership was of primary importance until around 1810, when the seven Cherokee clans began the abolition of blood vengeance by giving the sacred duty to the new Cherokee National government. Clans formally relinquished judicial responsibilities by the 1820s when the Cherokee Supreme Court was established. When in 1825, the National Council extended citizenship to biracial children of Cherokee men, the matrilineal definition of clans was broken and clan membership no longer defined Cherokee citizenship. These ideas were largely incorporated into the 1827 Cherokee constitution. The constitution did, state that "No person who is of negro or mulatlo parentage, either by the father or mother side, shall be eligible to hold any office of profit, honor or trust under this Government," with an exception for, "negroes and descendants of white and Indian men by negro women who may have been set free." Although by this time, some Cherokee considered clans to be anachronistic, this feeling may have been more widely held among the elite than the general population. Thus even in the initial constitution, the Cherokee reserved the right to define who was and was not Cherokee as a political rather than racial distinction. Novelist John Rollin Ridge led a group of delegates to Washington, D.C., as early as the 1860s in an attempt to gain federal recognition for a "Southern Cherokee Nation" which was a faction that was opposed to the leadership of rival faction leader and Cherokee Chief John Ross.