89. Varnum Lansing Collins, “Indian Wards at Princeton,” Princeton University Bulletin 13 (1902): 101–6; C. A. Weslager, The Delaware Indians: A History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 309–11, 365 (Osage war party); JCC 28:411 (congressional committee), 468; Stephen Decatur Jr., Private Affairs of George Washington: From the Records and Accounts of Tobias Lear, Esquire, his Secretary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933), 57, 92; Knox Papers 26:129 (Congress funds in 1790); PGW, Pres. 2:433–35, 3:152, 403–4 (White Eyes letters), 4:215; Simcoe Correspondence 3:288–89 (“mischief”).
90. PGW, Pres. 9:281.
91. For example, PGW, Pres. 3:466, 573.
92. PGW, Pres. 7:257.
93. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 472.
94. David McLean, Timothy Pickering and the Age of the American Revolution (New York: Arno Press, 1982), 318–28, 345–46; Pickering Papers 61:164–65, 168; PGW, Pres. 7:204–6.
95. As would Jefferson: Daniel H. Usner, “Iroquois Livelihood and Jeffersonian Agrarianism,” in Native Americans and the Early Republic, ed. Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 201.
Chapter 15: Courting McGillivray
1. A Spanish census in 1793 listed thirty-one Upper Creek towns, twenty-five Lower Creek towns, and several smaller Seminole towns, and a total population of 15,160; Lawrence Kinnaird, ed., Spain in the Mississippi Valley, 1765–1794: Translations of Materials from the Spanish Archives in the Bancroft Library, 3 pts., vols. 2–4 of Annual Report of the American Historical Association for 1945 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946–49), vol. 4, pt. 3, 231–32; John Walton Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1938). 6.
2. Robbie Ethridge, “Creeks and Americans in the Age of Washington,” in George Washington’s South, ed. Tamara Harvey and Greg O’Brien (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 278–79; Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 3–4.
3. Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 9.
4. Lawrence Kinnaird, “International Rivalry in the Creek Country: Part I. The Ascendency of Alexander McGillivray, 1783–1789,” Florida Historical Society Quarterly 10 (Oct. 1931): 59; Kenneth Coleman, “Federal Indian Relations in the South, 1781–1789,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 35 (1957–58): 436; warrior estimates at PGW, Rev. 12:103; PGW, Pres. 3:124, 4:475, 530; Knox Papers 53:164 (estimates at p. 10 of letter); “behoves” at PGW, Rev. 13:221–22; Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (New York: Random House, 2007), 144
5. Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. ch. 3; Andrew K. Frank, Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
6. Edward J. Cashin, Lachlan McGillivray, Indian Trader: The Shaping of the Southern Colonial Frontier (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992).
7. John Pope, A Tour through the Southern and Western Territories of the United States of North America (Richmond, VA: John Dixon, 1792), 48.
8. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 13–17; Saunt, New Order of Things, ch. 3 and 188–89; J. Leitch Wright Jr., “Creek-American Treaty of 1790: Alexander McGillivray and the Diplomacy of the Old Southwest,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 51 (Dec. 1967): 382. On McGillivray and the Creeks in the Revolution, see also Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (New York: Random House, 2015), 24–34, 75–90, 177–82, 205–6, 246–55.
9. PGW, Pres. 2:254.
10. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 62.
11. DAR 17:184.
12. CO 5/82:368 (“Virginia Lie”), 372–73, 405, 432; CO 5/110:70–71; CO 5/560:71–74; Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 73–74, 90–93.
13. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 70.
14. Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 380, 383; Coleman, “Federal Indian Relations in the South,” 437.
15. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 73–74.
16. PGW, Pres. 3:519.
17. Kinnaird, “International Rivalry in the Creek Country,” 59.
18. William S. Coker and Thomas D. Watson, Indian Traders of the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands: Panton, Leslie & Company and John Forbes & Company, 1783–1847 (Pensacola: University of West Florida Press, 1986); Saunt, New Order of Things, 75–79; Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), ch. 9.
19. David A. Nichols, “Land, Republicanism, and Indians: Power and Policy in Early National Georgia, 1780–1825,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 85 (2001): 206–7.
20. DuVal, Independence Lost, 253.
21. “Letters of Benjamin Hawkins,” in H. Thomas Foster, ed., The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1810 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 250, 252.
22. PGW, Confed. 6:45–46 (“insanity”); Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 59; Randolph C. Downes, “Creek-American Relations, 1782–1790,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 21 (June 1937): 144.
23. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 65, 72.
24. Walter Lowrie and Matthew St. Clair Clarke, eds., American State Papers: Foreign Relations, 6 vols. (Washington, DC: Gales & Seaton, 1832), 1:278–79; Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 25, 75–76; Saunt, New Order of Things, 78.
25. Saunt, New Order of Things, 68.
26. DHFFC 2:165–67; EAID 18:372–73; James F. Doster, The Creek Indians and Their Florida Lands, 1740–1823 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974), 71.
27. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 103 (“beggar”); PGW, Pres. 13:226 (Willett).
28. DuVal, Independence Lost, 251, 255, 303.
29. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 105; Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 383–84; Downes, “Creek-American Relations,” 145.
30. ASPIA 1:18.
31. JCC 27:454.
32. JCC 27:456–457.
33. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 96.
34. ASPIA 1:17–18; DHFFC 5:1020–22.
35. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 97–98.
36. Coleman, “Federal Indian Relations in the South,” 440–41.
37. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 103.
38. Downes, “Creek-American Relations,” 147.
39. Florette Henri, The Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1816 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 42.
40. JCC 29:691.
41. Henri, Southern Indians and Benjamin Hawkins, 42.
42. ASPIA 1:49; DHFFC 5:1019; Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 103 (“ridiculous”).
43. Saunt, New Order of Things, 80; ASPIA 1:16–17; PGW, Pres. 3:124–25; DHFFC 2:167–69, 5:1017–18; EAID 18:390–91.
44. “Questions to the Tallisee King,” Aug. 6, 1790, Knox Papers 26:120.
45. Downes, “Creek-American Relations,” 152.
46. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 103–4.
47. Downes, “Creek-American Relations,” 160.
48. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 31.
49. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 31.
50. Saunt, New Order of Things, 80; “Questions to the Tallisee King,” Knox Papers 26:120; DHFFC 2:180–83; EAID 18:433–36.
51. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 139: ASPIA 1:18 (“Cincinnatus”); DHFFC 5:1022–24.
52. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 33; ASPIA 1:23 (“our life”); DHFFC 5:1037.
53. William T. Hutchinson et al., e
ds., The Papers of James Madison, 17 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press and Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1962–91), 9:348.
54. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 184.
55. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 239.
56. Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon, For Fear of an Elective King: George Washington and the Presidential Title Controversy of 1789 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).
57. ASPIA 1:15–16; PGW, Pres. 3: 23–38; DHFFC 5:1011–15.
58. ASPIA 1:59–63; DHFFC 5:1117–18; PGW, Pres. 3:135.
59. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 76–77.
60. The Blount brothers were “among the greatest speculators in American history,” along with men like Patrick Henry, Robert Morris, Timothy Pickering, and, of course, George Washington; Alice Barnwell Keith et al., eds., The John Gray Blount Papers, 3 vols. (Raleigh, NC: State Department of Archives and History, 1952–65), 1:xxiii (quote), 499–501 (Williamson letter); DHFFC 16:1256–57.
61. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 69–70.
62. DHFFC 1:120–27, 725, 5:998–1001, 1122–23, 11:1188–207, 1301–8.
63. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 74–75; PGW, Pres. 3:515; DHFFC 2:30.
64. Prucha, American Indian Treaties, 77; PGW, Pres. 3:521–25; ASPIA 1:54–55.
65. DHFFC 2:31–35.
66. The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates, in DHFFC 9:8 (“greatest Man”), 321 (“in the hands of Hamilton the Dishclout of every dirty Speculation, as his name Goes to Wipe away blame and Silence all Murmuring”), 432 (war services).
67. Diary of William Maclay, 128–33; The Journal of William Maclay, United States Senator from Pennsylvania, 1789–1791 (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1927), 125–30; DHFFC 2:35–36; PGW, Pres. 3:525–27; John Quincy Adams and Charles Francis Adams, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of his Diary from 1795 to 1848, vol. 6 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874), 427.
68. James Thomas Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation, 1783–1793 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 215–17; Mark J. Rozell, William D. Pederson, and Frank J. Williams, eds., George Washington and the Origins of the Modern Presidency (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), ix; Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 329 (cabinet as sounding board); Harlow Giles Unger, “Mr. President”: George Washington and the Making of the Nation’s Highest Office (New York: Da Capo, 2013), 84–89 (setting foreign policy); Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin, 2010), 592 (“bookshelf”).
69. ASPIA 1:31.
70. PGW, Pres. 3:551–64; ASPIA 1:65–68; DHFFC 2:202–10.
71. ASPIA 1:69–70; DHFFC 2:213–15.
72. DHFFC 2:211–12, 219; ASPIA 1:69–72.
73. ASPIA 1:72; PGW, Pres. 4:86 (“white wing”).
74. ASPIA 1:72; DHFFC 2:220.
75. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 244.
76. ASPIA 1:73–74; PGW, Pres. 4:86–88; DHFFC 2:222–26; Frank Landon Humphreys, Life and Times of David Humphreys, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1917), 2:6–8.
77. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 251–54, 260; DHFFC 2:226–27; Lucia Burk Kinnaird, “The Rock Landing Conference of 1789,” North Carolina Historical Review 9 (1932): 349–65.
78. Hutchinson et al., Papers of James Madison, 12:437.
79. ASPIA 1:75–77; DHFFC 2:229–30.
80. PGW, Pres. 4:91–94; Humphreys, Life and Times of David Humphreys 2:9–13.
81. PGW, Pres. 4:88; Humphreys, Life and Times of David Humphreys 2:8.
82. Humphreys, Life and Times of David Humphreys 2:4–6, 15; Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 3 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1901), 3:373.
83. ASPIA 1:78–79; DHFFC 2:236–40; Diaries of GW 5:499–500.
84. PGW, Pres. 4:471, 475–76.
85. PGW, Pres. 5:140–43.
86. PGW, Pres. 5:207–8.
87. DHFFC 19:1550.
88. PGW, Pres. 5:208n; Diaries of GW 6:42; Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 257–58.
89. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 41.
90. Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 384; Nichols, “Land, Republicanism, and Indians,” 208 (four-fifths of a cent); Ellis, American Creation, 149–50, 156. In an “Opinion on Certain Georgia Land Grants,” Jefferson argued that Georgia could not convey Indian lands to the Yazoo companies because the states had ceded the power to make war and treaties to the federal government; PTJ 16:406–8. Georgia could not convey to the companies a right it did not possess, explained Henry Knox; Knox to Wayne, Apr. 10, 1790, Knox Papers.
91. J. Leitch Wright Jr., William Augustus Bowles, Director General of the Creek Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1967); Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 385.
92. Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 385–86.
93. Gary L. Roberts, “The Chief of State and the Chief,” American Heritage 26 (Oct. 1975): 28–33, 86–89; Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 261–62.
94. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 268.
95. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 263.
96. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 265–67.
97. Carolyn Thomas Foreman, “Alexander McGillivray, Emperor of the Creeks,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 7 (Mar. 1929): 114; William Marinus Willett, A Narrative of the Military Actions of Colonel Marinus Willett, Taken Chiefly from His Own Manuscript (New York: G. & C. & H. Carvill, 1831), 110.
98. Roberts, “Chief of State and the Chief,” 86; Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 262. The Creeks’ Seminole relatives clearly had no fear of the sea, paddling large canoes made of cypress trunks to Cuba, the Florida Keys, and the Bahamas, and trading deerskins, honey, and dried fish for coffee, rum, tobacco, and sugar. William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida (London, 1792; fac. rpt. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980), 184; Calloway, American Revolution in Indian Country, 254.
99. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 43.
100. Diaries of GW 6:85.
101. DHFFC 20:2068.
102. PGW, Pres. 6:35; Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 43; Ellis, American Creation, 151–52; Roberts, “Chief of State and the Chief,” 86–87; Willett, Narrative, 112.
103. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 279.
104. Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 379.
105. DHFFC 22:1149–53; New York Daily Gazette, July 22, 1790, 695; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 54–56; Carole Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 191–206; Cécile R. Ganteaume, Officially Indian: Symbols That Define the United States (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2017).
106. PTJ 17:269, 271.
107. DHFFC 22:1131, 1165; Stewart Mitchell, ed., “New Letters of Abigail Adams, 1788–1801,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 55 (1947): 168–69.
108. Diaries of GW 6:80, 82; Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 389.
109. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 282.
110. Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 389.
111. Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 390.
112. FO 4/12:1, 76; DHFFC 21:1021.
113. ASPIA 2:599 (Fusatchee Mico); DHFFC 22:1172 (“patched up”).
114. John Trumbull, The Autobiography of Colonel John Trumbull, Patriot-Artist, 1765–1843, ed. Theodore Sizer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953), 166–67; Virginia Pounds Brown and Linda McNair Cohen, Drawing by Stealth: John Trumbull and the Creek Indians (Montgomery, AL: NewSouth Books, 2016).
115. PGW, Pres. 6:188; DHFFC 2:86–87; Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 386.
116. PGW, Pres. 6:188–96; Knox Papers 53:178; ASPIA 1:80; DHFFC 2:87, 22:1154–56; Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 386–88. The draft of the secret article is in Harold
C. Syrett et al., eds., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, 27 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1961–87), 26:548–49. Jefferson wrote an opinion on McGillivray’s monopoly of commerce with the Creek Indians; PTJ 17:288–89.
117. Knox Papers 26:129, 27:70.
118. ASPIA 1:81–82; IALT, 25–28; DHFFC 2:241–48.
119. Knox Papers 26:126, 129–30; PGW, Pres. 6:206–9; DHFFC 2:241–18.
120. PGW, Pres. 6:191–92; Knox Papers 26:129–30, 53:178; DHFFC 2:248–49.
121. Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 273–76.
122. PGW, Pres. 6:213–14; DHFFC 2:90–91; ASPIA 1:81.
123. DHFFC 20:2411; Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 394.
124. DHFFC 20:2412–20 (account and quotes of eyewitness Judith Sargent Murray at 2412–14); PGW, Pres. 6:249; Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 278.
125. PGW, Pres. 6:248. The treaty was published in the Gazette of the United States, Aug. 14, 1790, 559; Columbian Centinel, Aug. 25, 1790, 194; Connecticut Courant, Aug. 23, 1790, 4; Hampshire Chronicle, Aug. 25, 1790, 1; Daily Advertiser (New York), Aug. 14, 1790, 2; New-York Journal, & Patriotic Register, Aug. 17, 1790, 2; and many other papers.
126. Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 395; Knox Papers 53:171.
127. DHFFC 20:2372.
128. Quoted in Wright, William Augustus Bowles, 47.
129. Joshua Piker, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 199; Suzan Shown Harjo, ed., Nation to Nation: Treaties between the United States and American Indian Nations (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2014), 139.
130. PGW, Pres. 6:234.
131. Knox Papers 26:128.
132. Wright, “Creek-American Treaty,” 395–96.
133. DuVal, Independence Lost, 342.
134. DHCC 22:1169–1228; Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 45; Nichols, “Land, Republicanism, and Indians,” 216–17; cf. PGW, Pres. 10:1–2.
135. Diaries of GW 6:158.
136. PGW, Pres. 6:237–38.
137. PGW, Pres. 6:342; Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 275; Diaries of GW 6:70 (McGillivray quote); Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation, 262; Territorial Papers 4:34; Knox Papers 53:50.
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