Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen

Author:Pekka Hämäläinen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2022-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, an ambiguous resistance movement emerged in the southern coastal plains. The powerful Muscogees had faced both external and internal challenges for years, and had become dangerously divided. Alexander McGillivray, the son of a high-status Muscogee mother and a Scots-Irish father, played a central role in the movement. He was wealthy, having amassed Black slaves and established a plantation near Muscogee towns. He had announced that “the Crown of Spain will Gain and Secure a powerful barrier in these parts against ambitious and encroaching Americans.” To erect such a barrier, he maneuvered his way into the center of the Muscogee government by dominating the clan-based police force and the Muscogee National Council. A forceful and divisive figure, McGillivray was a student of natural history, a slave trader, and a skillful diplomat who had offered his services to both the British and the Spanish, privately promising the latter to keep the Muscogees subordinate to Spain. He worked as a silent partner for the formidable Scottish trading firm Panton, Leslie & Company, supplying munitions for Muscogee soldiers, while simultaneously using his Muscogee connections to boost his own influence: he was carving a personal colony out of the Muscogee Nation. McGillivray would eventually secure much of the Florida trade for Panton, Leslie & Company and, by extension, himself. He even stood out physically: unlike most Muscogee men, he did not have tattoos.7

Hoboithle Micco—“Tallassee King” to the Americans—opposed McGillivray, but he, too, operated outside the Muscogee National Council. Divided as they were, the Muscogees were vulnerable to land speculators and hostile colonial officials. In 1785, Georgia absorbed large tracts of the Muscogees’ land in the Treaty of Galphinton, which was negotiated by Hoboithle. A year later, the Muscogees ceded an extensive strip of land to the colony, hoping to alleviate the pressure from land-hungry colonists. The tactic failed. Believing that the federal government would be less covetous of Muscogee lands than the Georgians had been, McGillivray decided to reach out to New York, which was at that time the seat of Congress. With a retinue of thirty Muscogees, he traveled east on a horse wagon and was feted, on the president’s orders, in every town along the way. McGillivray negotiated shrewdly, securing a duty-free port on the coast of Georgia, which gave him a de facto monopoly on Muscogee trade. By then, he had spent much of his political capital on his various schemes and had been rejected by many Muscogees. On his deathbed, McGillivray declared that he wanted to die as an Indian, but he left most of his possessions to his sons, violating traditional Muscogee inheritance customs.8

The United States had to treat Indigenous nations cautiously. Like the Americans, Native Americans had secured their independence from colonial aggression through war, and the Americans could not simply dictate terms to them, given their numbers and military power. Secure in their position, the Ohio Indians negotiated treaties with the American republic. The most consequential of them was the 1784 Treaty of

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