Taking Account of Property: Stratification among the Creek Indians in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

J N late June i814, Andrew Jackson, brigadier general in the United States army and future president, set out from Nashville, Tennessee, for Fort Jackson, a post recently built at the confluence of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers. The region would soon become central Alabama, and the state's capital city Montgomery would be established just south of the fort, but in i814, the land belonged to the Creek, or Muskogee, Indians. Their hunting grounds still covered nearly all of present-day Alabama, stretched across roughly half of Georgia, and reached down into north-central Florida. As Jackson neared his destination, he entered a country bearing the scars of war. Skeletons of livestock littered the landscape, and charred remains of burned houses and fields lined the riverbanks. Gaunt and desperate for food, the survivors of the conflict crowded around the feedbags of Jackson's horses, scavenging for kernels of corn trodden into the earth by the general's wellfed animals. I know your humanity would feel for them, Jackson wrote his wife, Rachel, after witnessing this scene, notwithstanding all the causes you have to feel hatred and revenge.1 Revenge was ostensibly Jackson's motivation for leading troops into the area nearly a year earlier, razing cornfields and houses, and killing hundreds of local residents. In April i813, the Creek Indians had erupted in a violent civil war. On one side, Redsticks, as they called themselves, opposed the recent emergence of a powerful and privileged Creek elite. Inspired by Tecumseh and by a number of Muskogee prophets, they sought to restore a time when their communities were not riven by political and economic inequalities, when the produce of a woman's farm and the labor of a man's hunt sustained every Creek household. On the other side, Creek leaders and their adherents defended the seductive wealth and power that came from adopting Euroamerican traditions such as slavery, market exchange, and coercive government.2 Some of these