"So Many Little Republics": British Negotiations with the Choctaw Confederacy, 1765

Abstract

The Choctaw Indians known to European colonizers of the eighteenth century were a multiethnic confederacy that had emerged in the protohistoric period. This essay reviews that process and uses the 1765 British treaty and land grant negotiations with the Choctaw to show how the Choctaw continued to insist on the divisional autonomy that reflected their ethnic diversity, even after a hundred years of contact. In March 1765, the Choctaw met with British representatives in Mobile to negotiate a boundary and land cessions in that city's vicinity. It was well after the close of the French and Indian War had spelled the end of the French colony of Louisiana east of the Mississippi and thus of the longstanding alliance between the Choctaw and the French. Not only were the Choctaw adjusting to the relative disadvantage of having only one European power to deal with, people intoxicated with their success who regard themselves as the masters of the world, but they were forced to reckon with a former enemy as well.1 The Choctaw were not at a loss, however. The elegiac tone that we perceive today in their public utterances on this occasion stems more from our knowledge of their eventual displacement than from their attitude at the time. As they had been doing since the first encounter with Europeans, the Choctaw adapted to the world as they apprehended it and attempted to force others to accommodate them. In this essay I am going to look at the 1765 congress for evidence that one hundred years of European contact had not made the Choctaw into what the Europeans wanted them to be-a single entity with which they could deal as such. Instead, the congress reflects the persistence and adaptability of the heterarchical, multiethnic confederacy of autonomous Ethnohistory 41:4 (fall 1994). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I8oI/94/$I.5o. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.113 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 04:33:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms