The Indian World of George Washington

by Colin G. Calloway

  He was right. He appointed Dinsmoor, Benjamin Hawkins, and Andrew Pickens as commissioners to survey and mark the line, but congressional delays in funding meant the measure had to be postponed until 1797. The commissioners met with Cherokee chiefs and warriors in April to ascertain and mark the line in accordance with the Holston Treaty.58 Francis Baily, the Englishman traveling through Cherokee country that summer, said the Indians disputed “every inch of ground with the Americans” and generally sent a party to watch the surveyors appointed to run a treaty line “in order to see that they do not go wrong.” Baily also encountered a group of squatter families waiting in the wings for the business to be completed. They had encroached on Indian country before, and the government had ordered them to remove; in fact, “the President actually sent a detachment of the army into the country to enforce his commands.” “This,” said Baily, “was the bone of contention, which was the subject of conversation in every place I went into.” People living within the limits of US territory shared the squatters’ outrage, “as they all hate the Indians, and think a little deviation from justice is a thing to be overlooked where their two interests clash with each other.”59 It was a problem neither the first president nor any of his successors would resolve.

  In 1798, with John Adams now president, Dinsmoor convened the Cherokees to meet at short notice with American treaty commissioners and obtained provisions for a treaty held at Tellico. The goal of the treaty, as Secretary of War McHenry gently phrased it, was “to dispose the minds of the Cherokees to make a sale of such part of their land as will give a more convenient form to the State of Tennessee.” The Cherokees balked at selling any more land, but finally thirty-nine chiefs, including Bloody Fellow, Rising Fawn, and Little Turkey, agreed to cede three more tracts of land on the northeastern border of Cherokee country, between half a million and a million acres in North Carolina and Tennessee. The United States promised to guarantee the rest of their country “forever, as contained in former treaties.” Dinsmoor attended as a witness. “You must,” Adams wrote to the Cherokees, “be convinced, that the United States can have your good only in view in keeping Mr. Dinsmoor in your Nation.”60

  Dinsmoor insisted on protecting the Cherokees’ land, but as a treaty commissioner he also helped separate them from their lands. His son believed Dinsmoor considered himself honor-bound to look after the interests of the tribe as well as the interests of the United States.61 Doing both simultaneously was possible under Washington’s construction of Indian policy that equated depriving Indians of hunting territory with moving them toward a more settled state as farmers. Dinsmoor became an instrument of the twin aspects of the policy: dispossession and civilization.

  On Christmas Eve 1798, en route to see the secretary of war in Philadelphia, Dinsmoor stopped off at Mount Vernon to pay his respects to the retired president. He handed over a letter of introduction from Benjamin Hawkins. Dinsmoor, Hawkins reminded Washington, was “one of those chosen to carry into effect the benevolent plan devised by you, for bettering the condition of the Indians in the southern parts of the United States,” and he had faithfully and ably carried out the task. In spite of violent resistance from “the mischief makers in this quarter,” the plan had succeeded; the Cherokees “are no longer to be called Savages, they are a decent orderly set of people, who possess unbounded confidence in the Justice of our government, and are worthy of its continued attention,” Hawkins assured the president. Dinsmoor spent Christmas at Mount Vernon. Washington is said to have given him a sword he had worn during the Revolution.62

  When John Adams dismissed Dinsmoor in 1799, Hawkins told the Indians that it was the work of their enemies who made misrepresentations to the new president.63 In 1800–1 Dinsmoor served as purser on the frigate USS George Washington, delivering tribute to Algiers to protect American shipping from the Barbary pirates. When Thomas Jefferson entered the White House, he recalled Dinsmoor to the Indian service. In 1802 he was appointed temporary agent to the Choctaws in southern Mississippi, a post he held for twelve years, implementing the same government programs he had initiated among the Cherokees.64

  The Cherokees made some fairly radical changes in governance and how they dealt with the United States. They placed limits on clan vengeance and established a police force.65 Cherokee towns for most of the eighteenth century functioned as autonomous bodies and made collective decisions based on tradition, kinship, and consensus; now, Cherokees began to create mechanisms for speaking with a single national voice in dealing with the United States, its treaty commissioners, and agents, and a class of leaders, often mixed-blood and wealthy, began to emerge as mediators with the nation-state.66

  In the face of growing pressures from the outside, some Cherokees succumbed to alcoholism. Some began to migrate west to Arkansas. Others withdrew deep into the Great Smoky Mountains, where they could live their old ways with little interference. Most continued to follow traditional ways and practice traditional ceremonies as a way of maintaining or restoring order in the midst of change and upheaval, but they adopted those parts of Washington’s civilization program they thought might bring greater economic and political security.67 In the next generation, the Cherokees built a modern Indian nation, adopting American-style agriculture, a written language, and a written constitution modeled on that of the United States. Principal Chief John Ross, who led the tribe for five decades, credited Washington and his wise and humane policies with setting the Cherokees on the path to becoming “a civilized Christian people.” Ross named one of his sons George Washington; he named another Silas Dinsmoor.68

  in cherokee country, washington’s civilization program in the 1790s offered a lifeline for people struggling to rebuild their nation in the wake of catastrophic defeat. Creek country had witnessed no such defeat. Creek power, and the prospect of Creek alliances with European or other tribal nations, continued to pose a formidable potential challenge to the expanding United States. Washington saw civilization as the path to peace, and he wanted his prescription to work in Creek country more than anywhere else.

  The Creeks accepted parts of the new programs. James Seagrove had been out of his depth in Creek country, kept in a constant state of alarm by foreign agents, rival chiefs, and intertribal factions. Washington replaced him in 1796 and appointed Benjamin Hawkins as principal temporary agent to the four southern nations, and to oversee the “civilization program” among the Creeks (see figure 7). The Indians already knew and respected Hawkins, Washington said. “I have chosen him for this office because he is esteemed for a good man; has a knowledge of Indian customs, and a particular love and friendship for all the Southern tribes.” Hawkins threw himself into the work. He left the US Senate, took up residence in Creek country, and remained there until his death in 1816. He spoke Muskogean, the language of most Creek people. They gave him, or he assumed, the honorary title of isti atcagagi, “beloved man,” and to some extent he stepped into the power vacuum left by Alexander McGillivray’s death a few years earlier.69 He toured Creek country, communicating “the benevolent views of the government” to the inhabitants and gathering information to help him in his work.70

  Figure 7 Benjamin Hawkins, treaty commissioner and chief architect of Washington’s “civilization policy” among the southern Indians.

  As Washington had done when traveling in Indian country, Hawkins kept note of fertile lands that would be suitable for agriculture. Both looked at Indian land with a calculating eye, assessing its potential for improvement, weighing its commercial possibilities, and figuring how to increase its capital value. As with Washington, the religious studies scholar Joel Martin points out, there was much Hawkins did not see: he “never saw Muskogees’ fields and streams in the ways that Muskogees saw them, animated with a thousand nonhuman spirits.”71 In the view of Washington and Hawkins, Indian lands, however extensively cultivated, had yet to realize their potential. Properly managed and farmed, Creek lands would be more productive. Creek farmers who adopted modern techniques wou
ld become more efficient, and they would need less land.

  In article 12 of the Treaty of New York the government had pledged, as we’ve seen, to supply the Creek Nation with domestic animals and implements of husbandry. That was the toehold of a comprehensive plan to transform warrior hunters into yeoman farmers and women farmers into farmers’ wives. Hawkins intended to implement that plan by introducing new technologies, scientific agriculture employing improved strains of seeds and plants and the latest methods of fertilization, a new economic system that would free the Creeks from dependence on hunting, free them of much of their hunting territory, and give them better food, more things, and a better life. Creek people would have access to manufactured goods and other commodities at the new government trading posts where they would purchase with cash, not on credit, and develop values of labor and property.72

  In fact, of course, Hawkins found Creek society already adjusting to change. The deerskin trade had been a mainstay of southeastern Indian economy throughout most of the eighteenth century, and Creek men had shifted from subsistence hunting to commercial hunting, participating in an emerging frontier exchange economy that involved Indians, colonists, and slaves and reshaped the cultures of each group. But overhunting had produced a dramatic decline in the deerskin trade and, as noted, Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793 created a boom in the cotton industry, and escalating demand for Indian land to be worked by African slaves.73 Traders had entered Creek country along old paths in the eighteenth century, but new roads were opening the land to growing numbers of settlers and slaves. A network of trails and paths connected Creek towns to other Indian towns and to American towns and ports.74 Hawkins regularly heard people speaking Scotch, French, Spanish, English, and African languages, as well as Muskogean and Yuchi, and he could have added Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Shawnee, and Mobilian, the lingua franca trade language of the Southeast.75 Boundary lines did not keep settlers off Indian land, and they were porous. Creeks and Americans passed back and forth in the give-and-take of daily economic exchange; to drink, socialize, and form liaisons; to graze and recover livestock; to steal horses.76

  Many Creeks raised hogs and cattle and grew cash crops for sale to whites. Ranching offered an alternative to the declining deerskin trade, and the Creeks were well on their way to becoming ranchers by the time Hawkins arrived in 1796. He listed almost every town as having herds of livestock and said Creeks liked raising stock better than any other aspect of the civilization plan. Contrary to Washington’s expectations, however, ranching required the Creeks to use more, not less, of their lands, even as it involved them in the larger frontier economy as practiced by Americans. Panton, Leslie & Company still retained more than one-third of the Creek trade, and almost all the Chickasaw and Choctaw trade, at the time of Washington’s death, but the old trading relationships were changing. Whereas the British had traded manufactured goods for deerskins, Americans, increasingly, traded for land.77

  In place of communal fields cultivated by time-honored practices, Washington and Hawkins wanted to see individual plots of land fenced in and rendered productive by modern techniques. Some Indian people fenced common areas for herding livestock, but for Hawkins, fences were a key marker of progress, indicating adoption of the new way of life that Washington envisioned and that he himself was trying to implement. Communities without fences had an appearance of indolence and poverty; those with fences displayed order, industry, prosperity, and good living. Fences not only kept cattle and hogs out of planted fields; they also represented adoption of new concepts of individual land ownership.78

  Creek women were more open to change than most Creek men, for whom hunting, along with war, was a traditional marker of masculinity and status. When he first arrived, Hawkins said, women welcomed him to their towns, prepared meals and lodging for him, gave him tours of their towns and fields, and talked with him at length about the civilization plan and what it would mean for them. They hoped it would prove true and said they would follow the advice of the president and the instructions of his agent.79 They started growing cotton and making homespun cloth, and some of them became supporters of his program. Spinning and weaving gave them greater economic independence and greater access to manufactured goods via the market economy. But Indian people were always selective in accepting what white men had to offer, and Creek women resisted the complete revolution in gender relations Hawkins proposed. When one woman suggested that he marry her widowed daughter, Hawkins “lectured her on the merits of patriarchy” and said he would only take a wife if she obeyed him and if her children and property belonged to him. The woman refused: “She would not consent that the women and children should be under the direction of the father, and the negotiation ended there.”80

  In his “Sketch of the Creek Country” written in the last years of Washington’s life, Hawkins listed thirty-seven Creek towns (talwas), twelve on the Chatahoochee and twenty-five on the Coosa and Tallapoosa, some of which had smaller satellite towns. He also listed the Seminole towns, “as they are Creeks.” In fact, the Creeks at this time had a total of perhaps seventy-three towns—forty-eight Upper Creek towns clustered in the valleys of the Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Alabama Rivers, and twenty-five Lower Creek towns on the Flint and Chatahoochee Rivers—and a total population between fifteen and twenty thousand.81 That population had multiple lines of potential fracture based on age, gender, language, clans, and towns; there were growing rifts between those who favored adopting American changes and those who opposed them, and gaps were widening between poor Creeks and wealthy métis who came to think of land as property and property as private wealth. Scottish traders who had married into southern Indian communities and their influential sons were reorienting Creek society toward a market economy, and some were more concerned with acquiring wealth and property than maintaining traditional ties of sharing and reciprocity.82 Robert Grierson, a Scottish trader, had married a Creek wife and had five children with her. He owned a plantation, three hundred cattle, and thirty horses, Hawkins recorded, and he grew and manufactured cotton. He employed Indian women to gather cotton in the fields, eleven “red, white and black” hands in spinning and weaving, and part of his family in preparing the cotton for them. His wife and daughter both spun, and he expected more of the Indian women to take it up.83

  At a time when what he called “the spirit of party” was tearing at the political fabric of his own society, Hawkins lamented its existence in Creek society. Factionalism prevailed “more or less in every town in the nation,” he said. Hoboithle Mico, “the first man that gave the land away to the white people,” according to one Creek, was now at the forefront of resistance to the new programs, and Hawkins singled him out as a troublemaker. The agent developed a working relationship with Hoboithle Mico’s rival, Efau Hadjo or Mad Dog, whom he described as “one of the best informed men of the land and faithful to his national engagements.” Efau Hadjo owned five black slaves and livestock. He was used to receiving gifts from British and French agents and expected them from the United States.84 Generational tension added to the unrest. Old chiefs struggled to govern young men “who are rude and disorderly in proportion to the intercourse they have with white people.” Older people complained that contact with whites had a detrimental effect on the morals and behavior of the young.85

  Washington, too, feared that this was the case. During the negotiations at Coleraine, Hawkins and the other commissioners pushed the advantages of establishing schools in Creek country. When the chiefs’ sons who attended grew up, they would be able to conduct the affairs of their nation like the white people did, keeping their own records without being cheated. But Cussetah Mico, also known as Eneah Mico, countered that educated Indians invariably turned out worthless and caused trouble. The commissioners assured them Washington knew that young Indian men educated in American towns turned out badly and attributed it to associating “too much with our bad people.” Creek youths, however, would be educated in Creek towns, under the sup
ervision and direction of their elders. Cussetah Mico was not persuaded. “This subject was further enlarged upon, but received with such dislike by the Indians, that it was postponed.”86

  In keeping with Washington’s recommendations that Indians form national legislatures modeled on that of the United States, Hawkins claimed he persuaded Creek town chiefs to establish a national council and to replace the system of clan vengeance with recourse to laws. The national council, in which representatives from all the towns met annually, seems to have predated his arrival, but now it exercised greater authority over domestic affairs and attempted to suppress blood revenge and retaliatory killings. The United States could now deal with a centralized body representing the Creeks as a whole; Hawkins thought it “indispensable, to enable the nation to fulfill its engagements with us.” But it also prompted shifts in clan and town loyalties and generated further divisions within Creek society.87

  As did Indian peoples in the North, many Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws accommodated to American ways as the best way to survive in the new nation. Some attempted to increase their status with both the United States and their own people by selectively adopting attributes of “civilization.” Those attributes included European styles of clothing, furniture, and household goods; Christianity; literacy in English; plowed fields; fenced property; and cotton cultivation.88 And African slaves. Many Indians and Africans had shared lives of enslavement in the colonial South, and they built relationships, shared aspects of their cultures, and sometimes made families. But later in the eighteenth century, as they were enveloped by a society in which slave labor was the foundation of tobacco and cotton production and was a symbol of status, southern Indians began to hold increasing numbers of African slaves. As the United States moved toward a rigidly biracial society, Indian slaveholders adopted increasingly racial attitudes that conflicted with traditional notions of kinship. By the time Washington died, many Creeks and Cherokees held and regarded African slaves much as their white neighbors did.89