Creek Confederacy Research Articles

Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill

Reviewed by: Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 by James L. Hill Angela Pulley Hudson Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818. By James L. Hill. Borderlands and Transcultural Studies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 323 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. In his influential essay "Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations," historian Brian DeLay observes that despite some important calls for correction, American Indian peoples have largely fallen "outside the professional mandate for diplomatic history."1 Building on an earlier argument by historian Arthur N. Gilbert, DeLay notes that the categorization of Native peoples as "legal oddities" since at least the mid-nineteenth century has fueled the field's oversight and is itself largely a consequence of colonialism and imperialism.2 Moreover, the continued erasure of Indigenous people from American diplomatic history depends on scholarly assumptions that Native peoples had no "foreign policy" and were both "disconnected from" and "irrelevant to … international events."3 Yet, as DeLay points out and as decades of work within the fields of Indigenous and settler colonial studies have demonstrated, there is a rich source base providing evidence to the contrary.4 Among the many contributions of James L. Hill's monograph, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818, its forceful call for greater incorporation of southeastern Indians into the diplomatic history of the Atlantic world is topmost. Hill's study addresses the intersecting themes of diplomacy, trade, and sovereignty in the Creek confederacy during the tumultuous period between the end of the Seven Years' War and the end of the First Seminole War, with an emphasis on the Chattahoochee and Flint River regions in present-day Georgia and Florida. But both his subjects and his source material range much further as he takes readers from Havana to Halifax, from Saint Augustine to Quebec, and from Tallahassee to London. Rather than appearing disconnected from or irrelevant to international relations—per DeLay's indictment of much foreign relations history—Creek, Seminole, and [End Page 408] Miccosukee figures, as Hill's careful analysis demonstrates, used maritime voyages, overland travel, and shrewd diplomatic dealings to advance their aims and protect their autonomy. Though the overall success of their actions was undoubtedly modest, Creek Internationalism lays bare the importance and impact of their efforts. It thus effectively answers DeLay's call for scholarship that undertakes "excavations of the struggle between indigenous polities, settlers, and states for practical control over space" and engages with "Indian polities and individuals as historical actors, rather than mere objects of state and settler aggression."5 Creek Internationalism argues that the two competing movements that emerged in the late eighteenth-century Creek world—one pushing for centralization (a nascent Creek nation) and one striving to protect and even enlarge town (talwa or talofa) autonomy and power—both engaged in inter/intranational diplomacy to achieve their aims. This broad assertion contributes to a long-standing discussion (some call it a debate) in Creek historiography: the degree to which the term nation appropriately describes what the Creek confederacy was or what mid-eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century Creek people wanted it to be. Scholars such as Steven C. Hahn, Joshua Piker, and Andrew K. Frank, among others, have produced thoughtful analyses around the question of Creek nationhood, as have a new generation of historians including Bryan C. Rindfleisch and Steven J. Peach.6 But consensus is elusive. And Hill's study does not move us any closer to resolution. To be fair, that is not his goal; instead, he takes that fundamental tension as a given and convincingly uses it as the foundation for his exploration of how foreign relations informed the internal debate in Creek country to a degree not fully recognized in extant literature. Through six more or less chronological chapters, Hill examines key episodes in which both Creek nationalists (those advocating some level of centralization) and Creek localists (those working on behalf of a distinct talwa or group of talwas) deployed "internationalism" (15), which he defines as a strategy designed "to secure recognition that their communities possessed sovereign rights" (15–16) on par with nation-states. Creek Internationalism makes two significant...

The Origins and Coalescence of the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy: A New Synthesis

In the wake of the European invasion, the pre-colonial Native South underwent a fundamental transformation. The pre-colonial Mississippian chiefdoms fell, and the people restructured themselves into new kinds of societies adapted to living on the edge of an expanding European empire. We call these new societies "coalescent societies" because they were all coalescences of varying people, languages, and so on. This essay takes a close look at the origins of the coalescence of the Creek (Muscogee) Confederacy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this essay, I collate the most recent archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence into a single, coherent account of the Creek coalescence.

Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal

In this sweeping account of Native American history in the Southern United States, Gregory D. Smithers lets “Native Southerners drive the story through their words and deeds” (11). Each chapter of Smithers’s book presents an overview of a specific era and details multiple case studies of societies and individuals, the identities they created, and the choices they made in responding to the pressures of their world.Smithers follows a chronological arc from the Paleo-Indian period to the Removal era. Chapter 1 addresses questions of origin, from archaeological theories to Native Southerners’ own creation, migration, and origin stories. Chapter 2 describes chiefdom societies like Etowah, Cahokia, and Coosa; while chapter 3 traces postcontact changes to coalescent societies like the Apalachees, Westos, Natchez, and the Creek Confederacy. Chapter 4 details the transformation of petit nations into larger societies like Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Catawbas in the eighteenth century. Chapter 5 analyzes responses to the emerging United States and pan-Indian alliances, while chapter 6 ends with Indian removals. While Smithers argues that neither societies nor geographic borders are static, he ultimately adheres to the South’s borders as defined by the National Museum of the American Indian.Smithers’s use of sources demonstrates the strengths of an ethnohistorical approach. He wrestles with the limitations of European sources when discussing Native American beliefs and cultures, seeking to engage Indian voices whenever possible. He consults oral traditions and stories as well as written accounts, some from colonial and state governmental papers, and others from Native-controlled sources like the Cherokee Phoenix. Both historical and archaeological research inform his nuanced picture of the Native South. In each chapter, he engages with current scholarly debates; for instance, his first chapter summarizes multiple theories of migration into the Americas, arguing that a focus on scientific, European hypotheses downgrades Native American explanations to simple myths. He treats oral traditions as valuable evidence in understanding the world of Native Southerners. This ethnohistorical methodology is the real strength of Smithers’s book, as he seeks to unpack Native Southerners’ identities by using their words, traditions, and physical artifacts. Creation stories helped explain the world’s existence and gave meaning to cultural mores and political structures. Over the centuries, Native Southerners found new ways to explain their changing world and either maintain or tweak their political structures. Large chiefdoms gave way to coalescent societies, and kinship, town, and clan ties became crucially important in explaining life and culture. Near the end of the book, local ties are subsumed into growing national or pan-Indian activities and identities. Through each change, Smithers keeps the focus on Native Southerners’ decisions on how best to navigate their world, exploring the variety of paths they took through multiple case studies. Instead of painting the Native South in broad strokes and generalities, Smithers offers snapshots of particular groups maintaining and creating their identities in a specific era, and later demonstrates how that identity shifted as necessary to meet new challenges.In his introduction, Smithers states his intention to reach a wide audience beyond just specialists in the Native Southeast. He accomplishes that goal by writing a clear, accessible account of dozens of groups across the Native South, stressing that cultural ties and identities remained crucial to the political decisions each person or group made as their world changed, both before and after European contact. While not comprehensive, his is a valuable contribution to a growing scholarship that seeks to understand Native American history through Native American voices.

Scotland's Lost Colony Found: Rediscovering Stuarts Town, 1682–1688

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic have failed to appreciate the significance of Stuarts Town, Scotland's short-lived colony in Port Royal, South Carolina. This article challenges the current view that Stuarts Town was primarily a business venture, focusing, instead, on the religious impulses that lay just beneath the surface of the Carolina Company. These concerns came to the fore as presbyterian persecution intensified in 1683 and the colony was reimagined as a safe haven for the true church, where the saving remnant of God's people could escape the terrible judgments befalling Scotland and where the gospel would be secure. Its purpose was collective, corporate, social and historical. On the ground in Carolina, however, colonisers behaved more like imperialists than religious refugees. Like Scotland, the Anglo-Spanish borderland was a violent and unstable place that bred fear of displacement and enslavement, but unlike Scotland it lacked a centralised power, giving the Scots an opening to make their bid for empire. They moved aggressively into this power vacuum, seeking in particular to capitalise on the perceived weakness of Spanish Florida to extend their reach into coastal Georgia, the south-eastern interior and as far west as New Mexico. Their actions created great anxiety in the region and, although the collapse of the Stuart regime finally put an end to their hopes, their short-lived colony transformed the borderlands, reorienting English, Spanish and Indian relations, sparking the coalescence of the Yamasee tribe and the Creek confederacy, and giving new life to the Indian slave trade that eventually shattered indigenous societies in the American south-east.

"A Man's Children Have No Claim to His Property": Creek Matrilineal Property Relations and Gendered Conflict at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

"A Man's Children Have No Claim to His Property"Creek Matrilineal Property Relations and Gendered Conflict at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century Miller Shores Wright The General [Alexander McGillivray Sr.] left behind him a considerable property in negros, horses, and cattle, little of which went to his children. According to the custom of this nation a man's children have no claim to his property, it belongs to his relations on the maternal line, and they seize upon it, as was the case in this instance. Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Weatherford, the first a sister and the other a maternal sister only, took possession of the greatest part of the property. . . . —Benjamin Hawkins, 1809 In 1809 the United States of America's Southern Indian agent, Benjamin Hawkins, wrote the above description of what occurred to the property of Creek headman Alexander McGillivray Sr. aft er he died in Pensacola in 1793. Writing sixteen years aft er the events occurred, Hawkins demonstrated that during his career among the Creeks, he had come to understand and appreciate the importance and power of matrilineages to the Creek people and other southeastern Native groups.1 Evidence shows that both Creeks and Euro-Americans understood some of the differences in how each organized their societies—including property inheritance and gender norms. Fueled by disputes over property that began within Creek families and expanded to include the involvement of Euro-Americans, changes within Creek property relations began to challenge the place of women and matrilineages in Creek society at the turn of the nineteenth century. [End Page 158] At the time of his death, McGillivray owned extensive lands, "sixty negroes, three hundred head of cattle, with a large stock of horses."2 He attempted to leave this property to his own children, but his matrilineal kin asserted their Creek rights to his property instead.3 Six years later, in 1799, McGillivray's sisters Sophia (Durant), Sehoy (Weatherford), and Jeannette (Milfort/Crook) also struggled to take possession of the property of another brother, Malcolm McPherson Sr., from McPherson's son. Both disputes were part of a new phenomenon that had only recently come to Creek country, in present-day Alabama and Georgia, with the colonial introduction of patrilineal property inheritance among the Creek peoples. Euro-Americans introduced these differently gendered property relations slowly over centuries of contact and intermarriage, which occurred in southeastern North America mostly aft er the middle of the seventeenth century.4 However, by the turn of the nineteenth century patrilineal property inheritance had become widespread enough to inspire conflicts and violence between Creeks following the deaths of family members. This violence exacerbated other tensions in Creek society—tensions that further attracted the participation of Euro-Americans in Creek affairs—and eventually exploded in the Creek Civil War of 1813–14.5 By the late eighteenth century the loose affiliation of Native groups that became known to the British and Americans as the Creek Confederacy was home to people from a multitude of Native ethnic groups that spoke several Native languages, including (but not limited to) Muskogee, Alabama, Uchee, Natchez, Koasati, and Hitchiti.6 Aft er first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century, Native populations in southeastern North America were decimated by waves of disease and the Native slave trade. The peoples who would form the confederacy known as the Creeks responded to the subsequent demographic collapse by coalescing into loose alliances built on the incorporation of outsiders into towns and clans.7 At the turn of the nineteenth century, geography placed the Creeks in close proximity to expansionist Americans from Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, to whom they had ceded lands in several previous treaties. The ceded territories were supposed to alleviate the desires for land of expansionist Americans, quash violence on the colonial periphery, and settle massive debts that Creeks incurred to British, American, and Spanish traders.8 As Tennessee was granted statehood in 1796, the Mississippi Territory was incorporated in 1798, and the Louisiana Territory was purchased in 1803, American expansion south, east, and westward into Creek country became a near certainty. Furthermore, the location of the Creeks, who were being surrounded [End Page 159] by American and Spanish...

Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal by Gregory D. Smithers

Reviewed by: Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal by Gregory D. Smithers F. Todd Smith Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal. By Gregory D. Smithers. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. 260. Notes, bibliography, index.) Employing the voluminous amount of secondary works dealing with southern Native Americans that have been published in the last two decades, Gregory D. Smithers has written a short and accessible overview of the southern Indian experience up to 1840 that will have great value for college students and professors alike. Although the book includes details concerning numerous different Indigenous groups of various languages—Muscogean, Southern Iroquoian, Siouan, and Caddoan—the author has done a fine job in clearly presenting his main theme of Native cultural continuity in times of extreme hardship and change. Smithers defines the Native South as extending eastward from the Louisiana-Texas border to the Atlantic Ocean, and southward from the Tennessee River to the Gulf of Mexico. (Although Texas is not included in his definition, the author does provide a bit of information on the Caddo Indians—the Tejas of Spanish Texas—due to the groups that resided in western Louisiana). Chronologically, the book begins with the question of origins and examines how these interrogations relate to issues of storytelling and identity among Native southerners. Throughout the entire work, Smithers intersperses Native oral traditions and viewpoints with the findings of modern secondary research. The author also makes sure to demonstrate how Native southerners coped with fluctuations in climate and local ecosystems, adopting new technologies and agricultural innovations as they saw fit. One of the highlights of the book is Smithers' explanation of the Mississippian chiefdoms that emerged in the centuries prior to European contact, along with concise descriptions of how kinship networks and clan systems functioned while buttressing chiefdom societies, subjects that are often baffling to the modern reader. Smithers also discusses the "Mississippi Shatter Zone" in the early eighteenth century, demonstrating how disease, warfare, and European colonial endeavors that inspired slave raiding caused the chiefdoms to decline and splinter. However, tribes such as the Choctaws, Creeks, and Cherokees built on their communal identities to coalesce during this period, enabling them to overcome the dangerous situation they found themselves in. [End Page 361] The situation became even more threatening for Native southerners during the era of the French and Indian War and the American Revolutionary War. The violence and warfare that resulted between Indigenous polities, combined with their involvement in the various wars, caused small-scale migrations within the Southeast, notably among the Cherokees. The author also charts the history of the development and migration of the Seminoles into northern Florida as a complex story of ethnogenesis, demonstrating how their emergence amounted to something more than a group of Lower Creeks migrating out of the Creek Confederacy. Instead, he shows how these dynamic communities had their ethnic origins among smaller tribes such as the Oconees, Yamasees, and other Florida Natives. The discussion of the Seminole emergence is an example of the author's commitment to investigating the smaller, forgotten Southern tribes, highlighting how the book is not just concerned with the so-called Five Civilized Tribes that usually dominate the discussion of Native southerners. Late eighteenth-century wars provided the backdrop for rekindling Native religious revivals and attempts to forge pan-Indian alliances as a means of countering the growing power of the American republic. Although these movements failed, ultimately leading to removal in the 1830s, Smithers shows how the Native southerners were able to hold onto their social and cultural traditions, maintained their Native languages, and worked to nurture bonds of kinship and community in Indian Territory. Native Southerners is a sophisticated overview of the history of the region's Indigenous groups, combining the latest historical research with Native oral traditions to provide an excellent introduction to the subject for students and teachers. F. Todd Smith University of North Texas Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Puzzles of Creek Social Organization in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract Despite intensive study by John R. Swanton, in the early twentieth century, of social organization in the towns of the early Creek Confederacy, we are left with certain puzzling features. The article outlines two of them. First, despite the remarkable attention paid to clans and clanship, the nature of local, corporate kin groups was never clearly resolved. Second, despite evidence of a strong separation between the matrilineal organization, on the one hand, and the town council on the other, Swanton gives numerous examples where the two seem impossibly commingled. The article offers thoughts toward resolving both puzzles.

Asserting Tribal Sovereignty through Compact Negotiations: A Case Study of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana

Asserting Tribal Sovereignty through Compact NegotiationsA Case Study of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana Jay Precht (bio) In 2001 Lovelin Poncho, chairman of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, declared the community’s new gaming compact with the state “a win for southwest Louisiana, our local communities and for the tribe.” The agreement included an unprecedented appendix that dictated how local non-Indian governments would divide Coushatta grants, required annual audits, and included a safeguard that decreased Coushatta payments if casino revenue fell. This agreement suggests that the Coushattas had successfully navigated what political scientists Jeff Corntassel and Richard C. Witmer call the “politics of perception” in the era of “forced federalism.” According to Corntassel and Witmer, the increasing role of state governments in Indian affairs, highlighted by tribal-state compacts required for Indian casinos, marked a new era in federal Indian policy beginning in 1988 that increasingly forced tribal leaders to use new political strategies to deal with negative public perceptions of gaming tribes. Obstacles faced by tribal leaders during this new era include demands that gaming revenue fund state and local governments and assumptions by outsiders, including government officials, that tribes are unable to handle their new business ventures. As a result, these tribal leaders have increased their political participation at the state and federal levels to overcome opposition to Indian gaming and often to influence overall gaming policy. Corntassel and Witmer’s forced federalism survey of tribal leaders begins to assess the impact of these new relationships, but only by studying the recent histories of specific gaming tribes can scholars fully understand how successfully these communities have employed lobbying strategies to assert their sovereignty and how different [End Page 67] regional, economic, cultural, and historical contexts impact a tribe’s ability to maintain or even increase their level of self-determination through negotiations with state, local, and federal governments. This article offers a case study of the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, a community with a successful casino and increased political influence in their region, based on the correspondence of local Coushatta and non-Coushatta political leaders, newspaper articles, and an analysis of the tribe’s 1992 and 2001 gaming compacts with the state of Louisiana. Between 1990 and 2001 the Coushatta Tribal Council overcame both internal and external political opposition and successfully navigated policy shifts on the local, state, and federal levels as each government adjusted to the challenges and opportunities created by Indian gaming, illustrating Steven Andrew Light’s contention that politics often prove more important than laws for issues surrounding Indian gaming. Coushatta success stemmed in part from a tradition of successful diplomacy, a clearly established Indigenous identity, experience working with local and state governments, and lessons learned from an earlier attempt to establish gaming on the reservation. However, the tribal government’s success came at a cost, as the push to establish their casino also marginalized tribal citizens opposed to the venture, and efforts to limit competition in their market embroiled the tribe in a lobbying scandal.1 Throughout their history, the Coushattas practiced shrewd diplomacy to ensure their survival and prosperity. The Coushattas have lived in their current location near Bayou Blue north of Elton, Louisiana, since the late nineteenth century. However, before settling there, community members relocated repeatedly to ally with powerful Indigenous confederacies to enhance their defense and trade opportunities. They often located in borderlands between European and European American nations to facilitate diplomacy. They made their first move between 800 and 1200 from their original homeland west of the Mississippi to the Tennessee River Valley and formed part of the Coosa chiefdom. Faced with English-inspired Cherokee and Westo slave raids, the Coushattas moved to the convergence of the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers in present-day Alabama in the seventeenth century and joined the Creek Confederacy. By the late eighteenth century, Coushattas had begun moving west to Louisiana, then Texas, and by the mid-nineteenth century, some of them had moved back into Louisiana, settling first at Indian Village near Kinder before finally homesteading land along Bayou [End Page 68] Blue beginning in 1884. In 1898 a Coushatta woman named Sissy Robinson put her 160-acre estate in trust with...

The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance by Richard A. Sauers, Peter Tomasak (review)

Reviewed by: The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance by Richard A. Sauers, Peter Tomasak Robert Sandow (bio) The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance. By Richard A. Sauers and Peter Tomasak. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2013. Pp. 240. Cloth, $35.00.) In The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance, Richard A. Sauers and Peter Tomasak take a microhistorical approach to northern wartime dissent and its suppression. While focused on rural communities in north-central Pennsylvania, the narrative illustrates broader patterns of protest across the Union. Republican editors coined the term “Fishing Creek Confederacy” to exaggerate and vilify antiwar sentiment in northern Columbia County. The label suggested both an organized anti-government conspiracy and prosouthern sympathies—concepts associated with “Copperhead” Democrats. Previous scholarship frequently echoes Democratic rhetoric, depicting men arrested by the government as martyrs of civil liberty. Consequently, military authorities appear villainous and authoritarian. Tomasak and Sauers seek to present “the truth behind the draft resistance in Columbia County” (xiii). Scholars of the Union home front have long documented the internal discord that arose. As early as 1928, Ella Lonn lifted the veil of northern patriotism to expose widespread opposition in Desertion during the Civil War. By 1960, Frank L. Klement’s The Copperheads in the Middle West anchored an expanding genre of midwestern political studies tracing Democratic resistance to ideological and economic roots. The theme is also central to Jennifer L. Weber’s more broadly focused Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (2006). Additionally, studies published in the shadow of Vietnam link opposition to the inequities of the draft, including Eugene C. Murdock’s One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (1971) and James W. Geary’s more highly analytical We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (1991). Most recently, Mark E. Neely Jr. has done much to frame the debate over wartime civil-military relations as well as the impact of partisan politics. His landmark The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (1991) largely absolves Lincoln’s military of partisan influence in administering flawed conscription and civil liberties policies. Yet in The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (2002), Neely argues that intense partisanship hindered the war effort and heightened fears of “treason.” In explaining Columbia County’s draft resistance, Sauers and Tomasak offer an orthodox view. They point to military failures and controversial policies of emancipation, the suspension of civil liberties, and especially conscription. They stress that political partisanship nourished discontent and resistance. The text generally sympathizes with soldiers and federal [End Page 316] officials enforcing unpopular draft laws. The authors find little evidence for abuse of power or political motivation. Republicans may have exaggerated the threat of Democratic opposition, but many believed the threat to be credible. As for opposition, the authors argue that organized resistance failed to materialize. Even the military expedition’s commanding officer declared the rumors “a grand farce” (56). Regardless, widespread grassroots dissent did exist. The book refers not just to heightened debate, confrontations, and informal meetings but to an amorphous “system of home defense” devised by local men to avoid the draft (119). As a form of material evidence, the authors conjecture that a ruined foundation atop North Mountain may have served as a “fort” for area deserters. More could be done to contextualize the nature, extent, and significance of draft resistance in Columbia County. The narrative suggests that Columbia County, while staunchly Democratic, was not a scene of widespread antidraft violence or above-average levels of draft evasion. Neither state nor federal conscription elicited significantly more than partisan condemnation. In July 1864, a veteran named James Robinson was shot leading a nighttime raid to arrest deserters and draft evaders. The authors conclude that he had no official capacity connected to the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau. His wounding (but not death, which came months later) along with “reports of widespread draft resistance” justified military operations (xii). It would be instructive to learn more about community-based politics and patterns of resistance. The Fishing Creek Confederacy has many strengths. It...

The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America by Joshua Piker (review)

Reviewed by: The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America by Joshua Piker Julie Anne Sweet (bio) The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America. By Joshua Piker. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 310. $29.95 cloth) On April 1, 1752, some Creek Indians killed several Cherokee not too far from Charleston, South Carolina, and although Acorn Whistler did not participate in the incident, he was held responsible and executed to avenge those deaths. Those basic facts, however, did not prevent the fabrications of four different versions of these events by four different storytellers who had four different agendas. After all, “telling the right story was more important than getting the story right” (p.11). Joshua Piker scrutinizes these four tales and uses them not only to show the complexity of colonial America but also to understand the storytellers themselves. The result is a brilliantly organized, smartly analyzed, creatively written text that both educates and entertains its readers. [End Page 109] Acorn Whistler’s death overshadowed his life, and his contemporaries chose to sacrifice him to save themselves, each for their own reason. South Carolina governor James Glen was in danger of losing his job as a new administration took power in London and reconfigured the British Empire, so he presented himself as an exceptional diplomat who understood the inner workings of Indian politics and could use his expertise to maintain peace among rival Indian nations. He arranged for Acorn Whistler’s death to promote reconciliation between Creeks and Cherokee while asserting British authority over Indian affairs. Malatchi, the leading headman of the Lower Creeks from the town of Coweta, sought to strengthen and stabilize the Creek confederacy while solidifying his position as the unequivocal leader, so he ordered Acorn Whistler’s death as retribution for the attack on April 1 and thereby demonstrated his influence over Creek politics. Upper Creek headmen from Acorn Whistler’s (possible) town of Okfuskee wanted to prevent further troubles with the Cherokee and the British, so they accepted Acorn Whistler as a scapegoat but expressed outrage over his death as an attempt to advance the supremacy of their town over others. Thomas and March Bosomworth, agents hired by Glen to travel to Coweta and meet with Malatchi about this matter, played political games in Charleston and Coweta in an effort to secure their standing in both British and Creek realms, so they chose to become involved in the affair and suggested that Acorn Whistler be blamed for the April 1 attack. In the end, these four stories not only told different versions of Acorn Whistler’s death, but they also revealed much about the persons telling the tales and about the worlds that they inhabited. Piker plots his own story carefully and thoughtfully, taking his readers through every nuance of every perspective about this particular event, and readers should be prepared to read every word so that they do not miss a single detail. Piker’s prose is neither tedious nor boring, however; instead, his writing style makes this book a true pleasure to read. His meticulous analysis of imperial affairs, Creek politics, and colonial America exposes the intricacies of life in this place and [End Page 110] at this time, but his astute insights about individual characters and their personal motivations are equally impressive and compelling. His endnotes are exhaustive and reveal conscientious research that few authors can match yet all should strive to emulate. Piker has crafted a multifaceted text that transcends the bounds of one discipline and shows how they are all interrelated, and he reminds historians to think beyond their own agenda and to include all viewpoints. Piker’s search for meaning in Acorn Whistler’s death thus provides readers with a comprehensive examination of this one incident while revealing its broader implications for everyone involved and teaching readers to appreciate the complicated nature of early America. Julie Anne Sweet Julie Anne Sweet is an associate professor of history at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she teaches colonial and revolutionary America as well as American Indian history. She is the author of Negotiating for Georgia: British–Creek Relations in the Trustee...

Natural Affinities: The Political Economy and Ecology of Desire in William Bartram’s Southern Gulf

Natural Affinities: The Political Economy and Ecology of Desire in William Bartram’s Southern Gulf Rob McLoone (bio) The end of the colonial era and the rise of the United States nation state brought drastic changes to the borderland regions of the American Southeast. For much of the eighteenth century, the Southeast was a decidedly inter-colonial space, with England, France, and Spain seeking to establish lucrative trade arrangements and routes among the powerful Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek nations that dominated the region. Despite these colonial pressures, many native groups sustained a measure of political and economic autonomy by continually repositioning themselves at the center of a delicate balance of power, often playing one empire off another. With American independence, however, international involvement in the region waned, trading options disappeared, and southeastern native groups and confederacies increasingly found themselves facing off with the U.S.: a single nation that was far more interested in land speculation and westward expansion than it was in equitable trade and diplomacy. As historians such as Robbie Ethridge and Claudio Saunt have demonstrated, the native populations of the Southeast faced a new world of changing market desires, where colonial systems of hospitality, gift-giving, and [End Page 67] cross-cultural affiliation were quickly diminishing under the growing shadow of the U.S. and its prospects of empire. Between 1773 and 1777, the Quaker botanist William Bartram traveled and lived among southeastern native peoples. This article presents his account of that journey, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws, as a literary effort to envision a world in which the older, colonial modes of economic association and affiliation could persist despite the discourses of assimilation and conquest that, by the time Bartram finally published his book in 1791, had come to dominate the national conversation. Existing historical and critical works by Douglas Anderson, Edward J. Cashin, Erica Hannickel, and others have done much to connect the Travels to Bartram’s concerns — clearly voiced elsewhere in his manuscripts — about the larger issues and events pertaining to independence and U.S. nationhood during these tumultuous years. This scholarship has shown that although the Travels sometimes seems to offer a romantic, even disconnected, view of the period, it is actually in dialogue with many of the debates and emerging ideologies surrounding early U.S. imperialism, Indian policy, and the structure of the Federal state. The humble botanist, after all, composed and edited much of his book while the U.S. Constitution was taking shape not far from his home in Philadelphia. He was also conscious of enjoying some public authority—due, in part, to the legacy of William’s father, the botanist John Bartram, and his transatlantic plant and seed business, which continued to make the Bartram name well-known among the learned and prominent men of the age. John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Secretary of War Henry Knox number among the many who sought out the younger Bartram’s advice or visited him at his garden. Here, I hope to expand our understanding of the political dimension and purpose of Bartram’s book by considering the Travels as a work of applied economic theory: an intermixing of political economy and ecology wherein the modes of affiliation and friendship that Bartram valued (quite highly) between whites and natives would remain essential to the social order of the Southeast. While Bartram’s political-economic vision in Travels encompasses southeastern peoples and regions rather widely (as did the actual route of his journey), the narrative particularly presents the lower-Seminole towns of Cuscowilla and Talahasochte — located on Florida’s central plain and the western coast of the [End Page 68] peninsula respectively — as shining examples of a fluid and equitable trade economy. Bartram’s account of the region surrounding these towns describes a porous, near-fantastical natural landscape of subterranean waterways, crystalline rivers, and flowing trade routes. Moreover, Bartram places some of the book’s most jubilant scenes of Anglo-Indian friendship, sympathetic affiliation, and mutually-beneficial exchange against this Gulf backdrop. Bartram’s Gulf therefore provides a theoretical...

The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance

The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance

Creek Indian Globetrotter: Tomochichi's Trans-Atlantic Quest for Traditional Power in the Colonial Southeast

This essay reinterprets the life of a famous Muscogee Creek leader and examines the relationship between chiefly power and foreign travel in American Indian studies and Atlantic world studies. In spring 1734, the Creek headman Tomochichi and British imperialist James Edward Oglethorpe traveled to London to ratify a treaty that established the British colony of Georgia in the neighborhood of the Creek Confederacy. During his five-month sojourn, Tomochichi forged alliances with the Georgia trustees and the British royal family that resulted in a unique trans-Atlantic network of patronage. Upon return home, he leveraged his ocean-going imperial connections to craft an authoritative chieftainship that dated to the seventeenth-century Mississippian era.

The Fishing Creek Confederacy: a story of Civil War draft resistance

The Fishing Creek Confederacy: a story of Civil War draft resistance

:Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier.(Indians of the Southeast.)

Thanks to Andrew K. Frank's new book, it should no longer be possible for historians to overlook a dimension of Great Britain's colonization of North America that was ignored for a long time. After closely examining all kinds of records, Frank estimates that at least eight hundred European Americans found spouses in Creek villages over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The implicit challenge that Frank's unprecedented study poses to common assumptions about Indian-colonial relations in early America has ramifications that actually exceed his own immediate purpose. According to many textbooks and monographs, traders in French America supposedly differed from their counterparts in British America because of their willingness to raise families in Indian country. But here we discover within the Creek Confederacy alone hundreds of Scotsmen, among other Britons, who fathered children with Native American women. When additional Indian nations are taken into account, how many more children of mixed British and Indian parentage lived, in Frank's words, “beyond the prying eyes of the European American observers” (p. 10)?

Aestheticizing a Political Debate: Can the Creek Confederacy Be Sung Back Together?

Aestheticizing a Political Debate: Can the Creek Confederacy Be Sung Back Together?

A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813-1814 (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 304 A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814. By Gregory A. Waselkov. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006. ix, 414 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1491-0. On Monday, August 30, 1813, a force of seven hundred Redstick Creeks attacked the fortified plantation home of Samuel Mims in the Tensaw District of the Mississippi Territory (now Baldwin County), killing five hundred men, women, and children. For Alabamians this event resonates as a turning point in the state’s early history. Gregory Waselkov’s exhaustively researched and eloquently written account of the Fort Mims massacre explains not only what happened but also why it occurred, and how it has since shaped American collective memory. “Remember Fort Mims” became the rallying cry of southerners during the War of 1812 and, as Waselkov insists, the event provided justification for the expulsion of the Native Americans from their territory to lands in the west. The events that climaxed in the 1813 attack at Fort Mims, as Waselkov illustrates, were more complicated than Indian reaction to white expansion . For more than a century the Creeks had adapted, preserving their independence by constantly reshaping their culture in the face of European encroachment. When the United States assumed control of the region in the 1780s, Creeks suddenly found that they had to adopt and refashion cultural elements to suit their needs while preserving their core beliefs, language, and customs. The rapid changes brought poverty and indebtedness to many Creeks and further accentuated differences between the Métis (those with Indian-white ancestry) and full-blooded Creeks. In 1811, Shawnee leader Tecumseh traveled south through the Creek country, encouraging a new pan-Indian religious, political, and military confederation. Tecumseh’s efforts revealed a social cleavage amongst the Creeks that erupted into a civil war between the conservative Redstick faction—called such because of their painted red clubs— and the faction that supported Creek assimilation into white culture. The Creek civil war between the two factions evolved into the Redstick War (Creek War) between the Creeks and the United States, which began with the attack on Fort Mims. The massacre of men, women, and children at Fort Mims generated American sympathy for a war against the Upper Creeks, the division of the Creek Confederacy situated along the Tallapoosa-CoosaAlabama river system. The states of Georgia and Tennessee, along with the Mississippi Territory, mobilized their militias for operations against the Redsticks, who in turn secured support from the Spanish in Florida and from British agents on the Gulf of Mexico. Andrew Jackson led the O C T O B E R 2 0 0 7 305 Tennessee militia south into Creek country, and, on March 27, 1814, defeated the Redsticks at Tohopeka (a fortified refugee town located along a horseshoe-shaped bend of the Tallapoosa River). The resulting American massacre of the Creek Indians at Horseshoe Bend seemed to balance the Creek massacre of Americans at Fort Mims. During the following weeks American troops swept through Creek country, destroying food supplies, detaining refugees, and tracking the Redsticks. By early August 1814, with their food supply exhausted and nowhere to hide, the Creeks signed the Treaty of Fort Jackson, relinquishing some twenty -three million acres of land in the Mississippi Territory (present-day Alabama) and Georgia to the United States. Many of the Creeks who evaded capture fled to Spanish Florida, where they joined the Seminoles and continued their struggle against American incursions. Fort Mims, Fort Dearborn (at the site of present-day Chicago), River Raisin (in southeastern Michigan), Hampton (in Virginia), Bladensburg (in Maryland), and Washington, D.C., all experienced defeats during the War of 1812. Yet those defeats are trumped by the victories at Lakes Erie and Champlain, at Baltimore, Horseshoe Bend, and New Orleans. Understandably, selective American memory highlights the victories and minimized the defeats. Thus Jackson’s victory on the plains of Chalmette overshadows the sacking of the capital city of Washington. But, as Waselkov emphasizes, the conventional Fort Mims narrative represents the attack as a sinister massacre of innocent Americans...

The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810 (review)

Reviewed by: The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810 Robbie Ethridge (bio) The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810. Edited by Thomas Foster. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003. Pp. xxiv, 511. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $75.00; paper, $34.95.) This volume is one of the most important collections of published primary source material on the southern frontier, the late eighteenth-century [End Page 127] Creek Indians, and the social and physical geography of the area that once comprised the Creek Confederacy. Benjamin Hawkins was U.S. Indian Agent to the Creek Indians of present-day Georgia and Alabama from 1796 until his death in 1816. The volume editor, Thomas Foster, notes in his introduction that much of Hawkins's writings have been available through various earlier publications, but all of these are now out of print. Foster's volume contains facsimile reprints of two of these publications (both of which were originally published in the Collections of the Georgia Historical Society): "A Sketch of the Creek Country, in the Years 1798 and 1799" and the "Letters of Benjamin Hawkins." The volume also contains two previously unpublished "viatories" written by Hawkins. A viatory (or "journal of distances") is the eighteenth-century equivalent of a field notebook. When Hawkins took trips around Creek country, he kept notebooks recording distances traveled and landscape features, both social and natural. Since he considered these only as field notebooks, Hawkins recorded the data in shorthand. In his introduction, Foster gives readers the necessary instructions on how to decipher Hawkins's shorthand. He also reconstructs the routes of the various trips, which is necessary for understanding location in the viatories. The viatories are staggering in their detail. Hawkins recorded geographical features, place names, environmental features, and towns along the routes that he traveled. The remarkable thing about the viatories, however, is that Hawkins, using eighteenth-century measuring conventions, located all of these features. For instance, when Hawkins noted a stand of longleaf pines on a stony ridge made of "curiously variegated- rock, flowered or spotted, of lead colour, white flint stone and dingy red, the red seems to have been spattered on" (9), he also gave a location for this feature. Using Foster's instructions, one can plot this ridge on a modern topographic map. Being able to reconstruct the historical landscape at this local level is very unusual. Even the most detailed historical sources usually do not give enough detail or are not accurate enough to allow one to pinpoint locations of environmental and social features. Yet, as ecologists make clear, to understand a landscape, one must understand the mosaic of local-level systems and their connectedness. Hawkins's viatories, then, may allow us, for the first time, to reconstruct the micro-level intricacies of the late eighteenth-century landscape and geography of what was once Creek country. The viatories are followed by a reprint of the "Sketch of the Creek [End Page 128] Country." Anthropologists and ethnohistorians regard Hawkins's "Sketch" as a reliable account of Creek life. Based on his field notes, Hawkins's "Sketch" contains detailed descriptions of all the Creek towns, local landscapes, people, and tidbits of town histories, followed by discussions of various cultural elements under headings such as "Government," "War," "Marriage," and so on. Hawkins's description of the Green Corn Ceremony, under the headings of "Boos-ke-tau," has long been considered one of the most detailed and important accounts of the late eighteenth-century Creek version of this important Southeastern Indian ceremony. The "Sketch" is followed by Hawkins's letters from 1796 to 1805. Hawkins kept regular communications with federal, state, and local leaders, both American and Creek. These letters, then, describe episodes, problems, solutions, and plans, both big and small, in which Hawkins had some role. He also recorded several "talks" of Creek leaders—a valuable source, since Indian voices are rare in the historical documents. Hawkins's writings also contain many "journals," diaries of his visits with Creek men and women that contain wonderful ethnographic descriptions of Creek towns and daily life. The Georgia Historical Society publications only contain letters through 1805, yet Hawkins remained in Creek country another ten or so years...

Archaeology of Aboriginal Culture Change in the Interior Southeast: Depopulation during the Early Historic Period

Members of Hernando de Soto's 1540 march through the interior of the southeastern US, as well as other explorers at that time, described encounters with complex and powerful Indian chiefdoms. Until this work by Marvin T. Smith, first published in 1987, scholars had argued about the role that Europeans played in the disintegration of that Mississippian culture. Rejecting the notion that the aboriginal nations acculturated to a European pattern, Smith shows that Old World epidemic diseases caused immediate population loss in interior areas. He develops a chronological framework for the period 1540-1670 based on European trade goods, which allows him to date the aboriginal sites and to examine the tempo of demographic shifts with more precision than archaeologists before him commanded. The effects of early European contact - documented with data that include artifacts associated with burial practices, public works, and craft specialisation - travelled farther than the European explorers themselves, as depopulation led to political breakdown and social collapse. One product of this collapse, Smith argues, was the Creek Confederacy of the 18th century, a mix of refugee populations who banded together in defence of alliances against the Europeans and other Indians.

Fossil Remains of 28,000-Year-Old Hominids from Sri Lanka

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