CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Nations, Colonies, Towns, and States

AS JAMES AND ISABELLA BRUCE sailed out of Pensacola Bay in defeat, they could only hope that, as General John Campbell put it, the defense of Pensacola had caused the “diversion of such a powerful armament of France and Spain” for long enough that British fleets and armies elsewhere had “acquired conquests and victories that will more than compensate and counterbalance the loss of Pensacola.”¹ It was a reasonable hope in May 1781. Still, the loss of West Florida was important. Britain had, for the first time in the war, lost a colony that had not rebelled. The stakes were higher than ever. With the victory at Pensacola, Spanish and French forces were now free to take on St. Augustine, the plantation islands of the West Indies, British-occupied posts in New York or the south, Gibraltar, Minorca, India, or England itself. British officials now planned defenses based on what the empire could afford to lose and what it could not.²

Despite Campbell’s hopes, other fronts did not go well for the British. Augusta fell to Colonel Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee a month after Pensacola, when Creek forces did not get there in time. In the meantime, Continental Army General Nathanael Greene’s forces harassed British General Charles Cornwallis into marching north from the Carolinas and unwisely positioning his eight thousand men at Yorktown, Virginia. While Cornwallis might have taken Virginia and consolidated his hold over much of the south if he had been able to recruit large numbers of Indian allies, he chose dependence on regulars. He backed himself into Yorktown in hopes that its peninsula, easily reached by the British navy, would prove an effective position. If General Campbell’s “diversion” at Pensacola had held out longer, Cornwallis might have been right. Instead, fresh from the victory in West Florida, Spanish ships rushed to protect French shipping throughout the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, freeing French Admiral François Joseph Paul, the Comte de Grasse, to head for Yorktown to join with General George Washington’s Continental Army and French land forces. After they besieged Yorktown for several weeks, General Cornwallis surrendered to the French and the Americans on October 19, 1781.³

The American rebellion had resulted in much more damage than anyone in the British empire had imagined in 1770. The French, Spanish, and Dutch took advantage of the conflict to take over British trade and colonies. Indian allies who had seemed secure at the start of the war had not put British aims and tactics above their own. Britain, having lost West Florida and some of its Caribbean islands, stood to lose even more. By 1782, the English public had lost its patience with a long and expensive war that risked further defeats. On February 27, 1782, Parliament voted to stop attempts to suppress the rebellion. Two weeks later, Prime Minister Lord Frederick North resigned, and the new administration embarked on a commitment to peace, including granting independence to the rebellious thirteen colonies if absolutely necessary.⁴

Britain was on the defensive, but the continent’s future was far from certain. The rebellion’s leaders in Georgia feared that the British withdrawal was just a temporary measure to focus on the West Indies “and then return with redoubled fury” to reclaim its rebellious colonies.⁵ The Continental Army’s victory was fragile, and it had depended on massive assistance from European allies. The new nation was still deeply in debt, to individuals like Oliver Pollock and his friend Robert Morris as well as to the Dutch, French, and Spanish. Under the Articles of Confederation, the Congress had limited power to raise revenue because it could not tax income or property or levy duties on imports and exports. Like the United Nations today, Congress could only ask its member states for money, of which they had little to give. No one even knew how large the national debt was because so much of it took the form of receipts in the pockets of individual investors like Pollock for goods and services provided during the war.⁶

While war against the British might end soon, powerful Indian nations still posed a formidable threat to the new United States. Indians of the Northern Confederacy in the Ohio Valley had joined with Mohawk Joseph Brant’s force to raid the western parts of the colonies from Tennessee to Pennsylvania. Despite Britain’s failures with Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws in West Florida, the Northern Confederacy was coordinating with the British better than at any time earlier in the war. With the exception of the Cherokees, southeastern Indians had fought very little during the war. Under Payamataha’s guidance, they had built new alliances with one another and with the Northern Confederacy to ward off future problems. Spain was poised to have colonial possession over most of the continent, if it cooperated with Indians. Any worries that the Spanish monarchy had at the start of the war about the American Revolution being a threat to empires seemed disproven. Gálvez’s military victories and success in inspiring loyalty among colonists promised a strong and growing Spanish presence in North America. Spanish troops had put down the Tupac Amaru and other rebellions in its empire, while in Europe, independent republics seemed to be a dying breed. The independent states of Geneva, Sweden, and Poland and the Dutch and Venetian republics all seemed too unstable to remain independent, much less republican, while parliamentary reform had failed in England and Ireland.⁷

The map of the continental United States today so neatly spreads from east to west that it would be easy to imagine that it was the country’s “manifest destiny” to stretch “from sea to shining sea.”⁸ But this concept developed much later, in the nineteenth century. A patchwork of European colonies and sovereign nations was the most likely outcome of the war. It might include Spanish colonies, British Canada, the thirteen states (separately or together), multiple Indian nations, a pan-Indian confederacy in the Ohio Valley, other newly independent colonies, and free black colonies under the Spanish or British realm. Whatever the configuration, in 1781 it appeared that, despite the changes of war, multiple sovereignties would continue across North America, as different kinds of people continued to ally and fight for what they saw as their independence and opportunity.⁹

Making Spanish Subjects

Once the Spanish won West Florida, Gálvez had to decide how to prevent future rebellions and keep West Florida under peaceful Spanish rule. The Spanish could reference a common religion and system of law when dealing with French-speaking colonists on both sides of the Mississippi, but British West Floridians had strong prejudices against Spanish Catholic rule. Should he use the iron fist to impress upon his new subjects that the Spanish did not tolerate treason? Or should he continue his velvet-gloved strategy of persuading West Floridians that their best chance of peace, independence, and prosperity lay within the Spanish empire? Gálvez did both. After a small group of Natchez loyalists and Choctaws attacked Spanish-held Natchez in April 1781, his officers arrested a few leaders for violating the oath they had sworn to the Spanish king when they surrendered Natchez in 1779 but otherwise promised that anyone who renewed the oath of allegiance to Spain would receive amnesty. He circulated an order that anyone who raised the Spanish flag outside their houses would be recognized as loyal and would not be bothered. By distinguishing a few “traitors” from the rest of West Floridians, Gálvez demonstrated that Spain punished treason but welcomed peaceful subjects.¹⁰

Gálvez knew that Spanish triumph, his promises of prosperity and respect, and his decision after all of his victories to let the opposing militia return home without punishment had convinced some West Florida families that they had been wrong about Spanish tyranny and that they could happily live and work their lands under Spanish protection. Even some American families from the Carolinas immigrated to Spanish West Florida, finding peace and opportunity that they did not have in their war-torn home. Gálvez urged the crown to promote loyalty and prosperity by helping West Florida and Louisiana grow.¹¹

With every reason to agree to whatever Gálvez suggested, the king assured Louisianans and West Floridians that the Spanish empire would promote prosperity. In a royal proclamation of January 1782, King Carlos promised colonists that “their welfare should suffer no impairment.” The king granted New Orleans and Pensacola the right to trade freely with not only other posts in the Spanish empire but also France and its colonies, a rare privilege in this era when legal trade was usually restricted to one empire. While he lowered duties for all smaller ports in the empire, he completely exempted Louisiana and the Floridas. To encourage plantation agriculture, the king exempted slaves imported into Louisiana and the Floridas from import duties for ten years. The proclamations demonstrated the crown’s confidence that Gálvez could build a strong Spanish colony where Spanish, French, and English people could live in peace and prosperity alongside allied Indian nations, if at the expense of enslaved Africans.¹²

The words and actions of Gálvez and the king persuaded many French- and English-speaking landowners to remain Spanish subjects. Although many of the English speakers hoped that Britain would win the Revolutionary War, they gradually adapted to rule by their enemy. The end of the conflict on the Gulf Coast and Spain’s encouragement of commerce allowed many to buy slaves and export the tobacco and indigo they grew from New Orleans and Pensacola. The Spanish crown required its subjects to be Catholic, but as long as they did not publicly practice Protestant Christianity, the Louisiana and West Florida governments did not enforce the requirement to convert.¹³

War Continues

Although Britain had lost key battles and Spain had won West Florida, the British had not yet completely given up, and neither had Alexander McGillivray. While few Creeks had followed him to Pensacola, in the aftermath of British defeats at Pensacola and Yorktown, Creeks and their allies fought with much more persistence against the Americans. Creek bands, along with loyalist refugees, Choctaws, and Cherokees, raided the western edge of the southern states. Hearing rumors that the French and Americans were besieging British Savannah, Little Tallassee Headman Emistisiguo led a party of around 150 warriors there to see if they could help the British and also collect ammunition for their war on the Americans. In the early morning hours of June 24, Emistisiguo’s forces routed one of the American camps, destroying ammunition and supplies. The Creeks estimated that they killed or wounded at least a hundred Continentals and lost only seventeen of their own men in General Anthony Wayne’s countercharge. However, one of the fallen seventeen was “the brave, gallant Emistisiguo,” the respected Upper Creek headman and mentor of Alexander McGillivray.¹⁴ As the Creeks continued toward Savannah, they saw a small force, which seemed to be British. They sent twelve Creeks to parlay, but it turned out to be a contingent of Wayne’s army, commanded by Continental Army General Thomas Posey. General Posey captured the twelve emissaries and reported the incident to General Wayne, who was so angry at his losses to the Creeks that he ordered the men executed, despite Posey’s protests that killing a parlay party was murder. The Creeks had learned why his own men called him “Mad” Anthony Wayne.

When the surviving Creeks reached Savannah, they learned much worse news. The British were preparing to evacuate there too. Not only was their ally pulling out of another key port, but now, in order to ride home, the Creek party would have to cross territory that General Wayne controlled. Instead, the Creeks boarded British ships and sailed to St. Augustine in East Florida, the last remaining British post on the southern mainland.¹⁵

When the Creeks finally arrived home from St. Augustine, Alexander McGillivray learned the terrible news of Emistisiguo’s death and the British withdrawal. Would St. Augustine “have the same fate,” Creeks wondered, leaving their nation “at the mercy of its enemies”? Some headmen charged the British with violating treaties and “abandon[ing] them in their necessity contrary to the talks of the Great King.”¹⁶ With or without the British, they determined to continue their fight against American immigration.

As the mainland remained contested, the war for the West Indies continued as well. Leaving New Orleans in the summer of 1781, Bernardo de Gálvez, his wife, Marie Felice de St. Maxent, and two daughters sailed to Havana, where Gálvez contemplated where to strike next: Jamaica, the crown jewel of the British sugar islands? The Bahamas, an annoying base for privateering against Spanish and French ships? St. Augustine, whose capture would solidify Gálvez’s gains in West Florida? The port of Halifax, from which Spain might conquer Canada? The general knew that he had to act quickly if he wanted to press his advantage. Negotiators had agreed to meet in Paris, and if they agreed on a treaty, military strikes would have to cease. In the meantime, Spanish forces seized the Bahamas and the island of Minorca, in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Spain, and readied for their next attack. Jamaica seemed likely to be next. Foreseeing an attack on their most valuable colony without forces to fortify it, the British cut their losses.

The Treaty of Paris, 1783

Late in 1782, American, British, French, and Spanish representatives gathered to negotiate an end to the war and hash out what it meant for the territories they claimed. Although Indians had fought in most regions where the American Revolution was waged, none were invited to the negotiating table. The negotiations in Paris would establish American independence, but British desire to put the war behind them as quickly as possible created a shaky treaty. It set up conflicts over borders and sovereignty that would continue into the next century.

Spanish officials believed that they had succeeded in their war for empire. Spanish forces held the formerly British posts along the Gulf of Mexico and on the eastern bank of the Mississippi. Spain’s claims stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Flint River in Georgia (well within today’s state of Georgia) and from the Gulf to the Great Lakes, plus their progress in other parts of the globe. Spain had helped the rebellion by defeating Britain in the south, preventing the British navy from cutting off American supplies, and providing financial assistance, including through Oliver Pollock. King Carlos III knew his diplomats in Paris would have to defend his expansive claims against those of the British. The new republic on the eastern seaboard seemed much less likely to be a threat.¹⁷

In the uncertain days of the war, Americans had desperately needed Spanish assistance and had imagined sharing the trans-Appalachian west with their ally. In 1778, Virginia Governor Patrick Henry assured Gálvez that the United States had “more land than can be settled for many ages to come.”¹⁸ The same year, John Jay, the American diplomat in Spain, wrote that a mutually beneficial agreement with Spain was worth giving up any claim on the Floridas, “to which we had no title,” or navigation rights to the Mississippi River, “which we should not want this age.”¹⁹ Upon receiving a letter from Oliver Pollock about Gálvez’s victory at Pensacola in 1781, Massachusetts Governor John Hancock wrote to congratulate Gálvez and anticipate commercial intercourse “between the two countries to reciprocal advantage.”²⁰ Initially Congress had hoped that Jay could persuade Spain that sharing the Mississippi was in Spain’s interest. But in the middle of the war, when the British looked poised to take the south and Congress was desperate for a Spanish loan, Congress sent instructions to Jay in Spain to give up the demand for navigation of the Mississippi in order to get a treaty.²¹

Even then there were signs of emerging conflict between Spain and the United States. During the war, Oliver Pollock had, behind Gálvez’s back, tried to persuade Congress that the Floridas, the Mississippi Valley, and navigation of the Mississippi River were essential to the future prosperity of the United States. In 1779, he warned Congress, “I make no doubt you know the value of West Florida too well to give it up either by treaty or otherwise to any power upon Earth.” Pollock described for Virginia Governor Patrick Henry a postwar era in which Manchac and Pensacola belonged to the United States: “We can import our supplies of goods immediately from Europe and dispatch them up to the back settlements.” Under those circumstances, Pollock was certain, “the country would get completely settled and a flourishing commerce immediately take place after the war.”²² He pointedly sent a copy of the surrender of the Lake Pontchartrain settlers to Congress. Because they had worded their surrender as capitulation to the United States rather than to Spain, Congress might be able to use it to stake a claim to the Gulf region. Congress forwarded the document to Jay in Madrid, where they hoped it would add leverage.²³

By 1782, Jay was so frustrated with his inability to reach an agreement with Spain that he hoped the British—his enemy—would retake West Florida, believing that they would be more likely than the Spanish to allow Americans access to the Mississippi. Clashing ambitions veiled during the war were exposed in Paris. In September 1782, Jay joined Benjamin Franklin and John Adams in Paris, where he railed against the “extravagance” of Spanish claims extending to the Great Lakes and Appalachians. Instead, Jay said, the United States should possess all land east of the Mississippi and north of Pensacola and Mobile, leaving Spain the same sliver of coast the Choctaws had granted Britain after the Seven Years’ War. Of course, the Choctaws would have reminded him that it was their land, not his country’s or Spain’s.²⁴

Following Pollock’s lead, the American delegates in Paris used the victories of Virginia Militia General George Rogers Clark in the Illinois country and Continental Navy Captain William Pickles on Lake Pontchartrain to support their claims, even though the United States held nothing in between. Franklin belittled Spain’s northern claims, noting that “the Spaniards having taken a little post called St. Joseph, pretend to have made a conquest of the Illinois country.” Franklin asked rhetorically, “While they decline our offered friendship, are they to be suffered to encroach on our bounds, and shut us up within the Appalachian mountains?”²⁵ U.S. representatives shuddered at the thought that most of the Americas’ land mass, including rich farmlands west of the Appalachians, could be in the hands of the Catholic, monarchical Spanish, who had been until the 1770s a hated enemy and since then an imperious and lukewarm ally.

Trying to appease their American and Spanish allies, the French proposed a compromise. The Spanish would get the Floridas and everything between the Gulf and the Tennessee River (the present-day states of Alabama, Mississippi, and most of Tennessee), the United States would get the lands between the Tennessee and Ohio rivers (Kentucky and eastern Tennessee), and Britain would keep everything north of the Ohio River (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and the Great Lakes region). The proposal made sense. Each party would get a large swath of trans-Appalachian land, and there was a lot to go around. Each could deal with the Indians who claimed and lived on the land by allying with them or trying to conquer or buy their lands.²⁶

The Mississippi Valley had always been split into multiple sovereignties, even when the chiefdom of Cahokia ruled over much of it five centuries before. Since the late 1600s, European imperial and Indian national sovereignties had overlapped. The region’s riverine geography suggested many ways of dividing ownership. The people of the United States might desire some western land, but their country did not have the resources or stability to go far west of the Appalachians or overturn the sovereignty of the Indians who controlled the land.

Nonetheless, Americans were unlikely to recognize Spain’s or Britain’s claims to the very trans-Appalachian lands that had sparked conflict in the Seven Years’ War, Pontiac’s War of 1763, and the American Revolution itself. At the same time, if Iroquois leader Joseph Brant won his war, the Ohio River would be the northern border of the United States, which combined with Spain’s claims might leave the United States with none of these lands. Knowing the tensions between the United States and its French and Spanish allies, the British proposed a separate peace between themselves and their newly independent colonies. Wishing to defend the rest of its empire from Spain and France more than punish the rebels, the British negotiators secretly offered the American delegation everything between the Atlantic and the Mississippi from the Great Lakes to the Floridas. In a secret provision of the treaty that attempted to thwart Spain’s claims, British negotiators wrote that if Britain regained West Florida from Spain, Congress would assent to a West Florida border at N 32° 28’, but if Spain retained West Florida, Britain would support the Americans’ position that the West Florida border was farther south, at the 31st parallel (the northern border of today’s state of Florida). This article, if enforced, would give the United States an extra band of land five hundred miles horizontally by ninety miles vertically, including most of the lands of the Choctaws, Creeks, and Chickasaws.²⁷

Because John Jay had never managed to complete a treaty of alliance with Spain, Congress was free to make a British treaty without the Spanish, but signing a peace treaty without the support of its French ally should have been unthinkable. During the war, Congress had passed a resolution denouncing “wicked” rumors, “derogatory to the honor of Congress and of these United States,” that Congress would consider a separate peace without France. But now the British negotiators were offering more than the United States could refuse. In addition, according to John Adams, the British threatened that if the Americans did not agree, Britain would send troops to take West Florida from Spain and create a strong British presence to threaten the southern United States.²⁸

In November 1782, the American delegates agreed to the preliminary separate treaty with Britain and informed France and Spain of its provisions. They secretly wrote to Congress to ask for guidance on the matter of the West Florida border. Congress debated the question in March 1783. American Foreign Affairs Secretary Robert Livingston proposed honesty with the French minister and delaying a final agreement with Britain “until peace shall be actually signed between the Kings of France and Great Britain.” Congressman Eliphalet Dyer of Connecticut rose to oppose Livingston’s proposal and say that the border question “did not concern the interests of France.” Several other congressmen agreed. However, John Francis Mercer of Virginia worried that “it was unwise to prefer Great Britain to Spain as our neighbors in West Florida.” Indeed, some congressmen thought it “very reprehensible” of John Adams to withhold information from a country that had been an ally, if an unofficial one, in the war.²⁹

Congress was thousands of miles away, so the delegates in Paris proceeded. On September 3, 1783, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay hurried through the narrow streets of Paris’s left bank into a fine hotel and up the stairs to the room where a British member of Parliament was waiting. There, the men signed their names to the final version of the treaty ending the American colonies’ war with Britain and acknowledging American independence.

France and Spain had reluctantly assented to the treaty, although the Spanish probably would not have done so if they had known about the secret West Florida border. Like Britain, France wanted to cut expenses, which were growing into such a large war debt that the king’s ministers were considering new taxes. The French also wanted to hold on to their gains in the West Indies and feared losing ground in India. In contrast, the Spanish crown hoped to do more than just hang on to current possessions but rather to take Gibraltar as well as the rest of the Gulf, from East Florida to Jamaica. To end the war, Britain acknowledged Spanish possession of West Florida and French possession of the island of Tobago and gave Spain East Florida in exchange for getting back the Bahamas and Grenada, which France had taken in 1779. Thus Britain lost sixteen American colonies in the Revolutionary War, as well as Senegal in West Africa. Though Spain hoped to get Gibraltar, it would not give up Pensacola and Mobile to get it. The failure to agree on a border for West Florida set up future conflict between Spain and the United States.³⁰

Indians were even more disgusted than the Spanish by the negotiations in Paris. From Canada to the Floridas, they wrote protests, some of which were published in European newspapers. Alexander McGillivray convened a council of Creeks, Chickasaws, and Cherokees, which wrote a joint letter to the Spanish king explaining why the treaty could not possibly be valid: Britain had ceded land that it “never possessed…either by cession, purchase, or by right of conquest.” The letter explained that “we the Nations of Creeks, Chickasaws and Cherokees” did not “do any act to forfeit our independence and natural rights to the said King of Great Britain.”³¹ They were independent nations, and to them Britain’s surrender did not change anything about their territory or their sovereignty.

The United States denied that Indians between the Appalachians and the Mississippi were sovereign nations, insisting that they were subordinate allies or even subjects of Britain and therefore had lost the war. A Congressional Committee on Indian Affairs claimed in 1784 that Indians “were themselves aggressors in the war, without even a pretense of provocation.” They “determined to join their arms to those of Great Britain and to share her fortunes” despite “the friendly temper and designs of the United States.” In treaty negotiations, Congress even asserted that Indians’ British “friends” had failed them, “having made no stipulation in their favor.” Their land was simply “reasonable compensation for the expenses and alarms to which they have exposed their unoffending neighbors,” the United States.³²

In this radical rewriting of history, Indians had no independent sovereignty—they had ceded their independence to Britain during the colonial period and must “share her fortunes.” As early as 1777, in an effort to recruit Indian allies, British Superintendent of Indian Affairs John Stuart had warned Indians that “if the rebels should prove victorious you may be certainly assured that they would immediately endeavor to possess themselves of all your lands and extirpate you” and “would not leave a red man on the east side of the Mississippi.”³³ It seemed laughable in 1777 that the rebels would prevail over anyone, but now, Indians wanted to persuade Britain not to back down. A variety of rumors circulated among Indians and colonists: “the Spaniards have given Mobile and Pensacola to the English”; “the Americans have made peace with the English”; the Creeks have been “massacred with swords by American cavalry”; “the Shawnees are also conquered”; the Americans were coming down the Mississippi “to take Natchez, Manchac, and New Orleans”; the British were amassing an army at St. Augustine.³⁴

In late 1782 and early 1783, thousands of Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Mohawks, Senecas, Delawares, Shawnees, Tuscaroras, and Cherokees, including the Chickamauga leader Dragging Canoe, crowded into St. Augustine, the last British outpost in the south, to express their opposition to the Americans. They asked if the king really had ordered British troops to return home and had offered Indian lands to the United States and Spain. Surely “this talk is a Virginia lie,” they insisted.³⁵ Another Creek headman declared, “We have heard that the Great King intends to throw away this land.” In the war, he said, “we took up the hatchet for the English, at a time we could scarce distinguish our friends from our foes” and “lost in the service a number of our people.” What could make the king go back on his promises? the man asked. “Is the Great King conquered or does he mean to abandon us….Does he intend to sell his friends as slaves, or only give our lands to his and our enemies?” When British Deputy Indian Superintendent Thomas Brown advised them to make peace with the Americans and ally with the Spanish, Creeks replied, “we cannot take a Virginian or Spaniard by the hand[;] we cannot look them in the face.”³⁶

Indians discussed “confederating the whole body of Indians on the continent.” In St. Augustine, they joined loyalist refugees and their slaves, some twelve thousand in all, who had come by land from other parts of East Florida and by ship from Savannah and New York City as the British evacuated those cities. Surrounded by people urging him to continue the fight, Brown was still writing hopefully to British Commander in Chief of North America Guy Carleton in February 1783 that the British and their Indian allies could retake Pensacola and then take New Orleans. However, orders from King George III to prepare to evacuate East Florida because Britain and Spain had signed a preliminary treaty ceding it to Spain were already on the way. When McGillivray received the news, he could not believe it. As he put it, Britain “has no right to give up a country she never could call her own.”³⁷ The Creeks suspended their fighting to see what the peace would bring, but they knew that the Treaty of Paris would create more problems than it would solve.

The Chickasaws and the Dangers of Peace

Theoretically, the end of the war should have brought peace between the Chickasaws and all of their neighbors. Payamataha had long worked for peace, and now British pressure to fight would end. The British had advised Indians to make peace with the Spanish and the Americans, and that was exactly what Payamataha intended to do. Yet the fact that actual land possession and sovereignty were still undetermined made keeping the peace as tricky as ever. Whereas in 1763 Chickasaws had cheered as their French imperial enemies left, the withdrawal of their British ally meant that the Chickasaws lost supplies, protection from settler encroachment, and the security of a border that they had defined. Scottish trader and loyalist James Colbert would bring the Chickasaws and Spain to the brink of war, which would take all of Payamataha’s diplomatic skill to prevent. To continue Payamataha’s policy of peace, the Chickasaws would need to manage all of these neighbors with care.

Southeastern Indians had already identified the Spanish as the obvious new ally who could deliver European goods and military support. Throughout 1782 and 1783, Chickasaws and other Indians visited Spanish New Orleans, Mobile, Pensacola, Galveztown, Baton Rouge, Natchez, and St. Louis in huge numbers. The crown nearly tripled spending on Indian gifts from the previous year, ten times what they had spent in some prewar years, and still Indians pressed for more. Esteban Miró, who became the acting governor of Louisiana in Gálvez’s absence, wrote from New Orleans that he was going through Indian presents at an astonishing rate and was “on the verge of exhausting the innumerable gifts” they required.³⁸ At all the posts, Indians “daily present themselves” asking for muskets, powder, musket balls, linen, calicos, ginghams, blankets, hats, needles, thread, pins, scissors, knives, paint, mirrors, hoes, hatchets, saddles, and bridles.³⁹

Chickasaw alliances with other Indians and with the Spanish needed ongoing attention. Chickasaw diplomats met with individual Indian nations, and the delegation of Chickasaws, Shawnees, Delawares, and Cherokees that had been traveling south of the Ohio River since 1780 or 1781 arrived in St. Louis in March 1782 to meet with Spanish Commandant Francisco Cruzat. They carried wampum belts of peace and asked for “the protection of our Catholic sovereign” and “a firm and sincere peace with the Spaniards.” Cruzat agreed, eager to have these valuable multiple alliances. For the Spanish and for most Indian peoples of the region, the end of the war could bring stability and security.⁴⁰

But a small group of resolute British loyalists threatened that peace, including the Scottish trader and loyalist James Colbert and his Chickasaw sons. Whereas Lachlan and Alexander McGillivray were able to align their diplomatic and economic goals with both Creek Headman Emistisiguo and British representatives, Colbert worked against Payamataha while trying to advance a British-Chickasaw military alliance. During the James Willing crisis, Colbert had tried unsuccessfully to persuade individual warriors to fight for the British. For his efforts, the British made Colbert assistant commissary to the Chickasaws and military leader of any volunteers he could recruit, hoping that he would be more aggressive than Payamataha. Colbert neglected Chickasaw ways of making foreign policy, and most Chickasaws rejected his interference. In the past, Chickasaws made it clear that they saw Colbert as a Briton, not a Chickasaw, by complaining to British officials that Colbert’s hunting party was intruding on Chickasaw lands and that he was illegally trying to establish a plantation.⁴¹

Colbert had fled Chickasaw country after the Spanish took Mobile and Pensacola, but by 1782 he was back and had attracted a small band of hardcore loyalist refugees from Natchez and other formerly British communities, his own sons from within the Chickasaw nation, and a few other young Chickasaw men. While the Spanish saw him as a rebel against their legitimate authority on the Mississippi, Colbert saw himself and his loyalist followers as “English subjects” and himself as a “Captain in his Majesty’s Service.”⁴² Like small bands in many places and times who seek to force the hand of a powerful empire, Colbert’s men employed tactics of terrorism and kidnapping.

Upon his return to Chickasaw country, Colbert began leading raids on the Mississippi River. Barges carried products from Indian hunting and French farming downriver with the current to New Orleans, then free and enslaved riverboat men poled the barges with imported goods more slowly back upriver. In early May 1782, an opportunity for Colbert came up the river with both significant booty and the potential for leverage over the Spanish. Nicanora Ramos, the wife of St. Louis Commandant Francisco Cruzat, was on a barge heading up the Mississippi to St. Louis with their four children and four of their slaves, along with two merchants, the crew, and a barge-load of goods for colonists and Indians around St. Louis. Knowing the St. Louis commandant’s wife was on board, Colbert and his men captured the barge at gunpoint, informing Ramos and the others that they were “prisoners of the King of Great Britain.”⁴³ Ramos was on her way back to St. Louis with her toddler Josephe, Marie Gertrude (who would turn four during the ordeal), six-year-old Antoine, and the oldest, Joseph, who was around twelve. The slaves included a young black woman probably named Marie Andrée, who served as the children’s nanny.⁴⁴

Colbert’s plan was to take the booty, ransom Ramos in return for loyalist prisoners, and, if all went perfectly, spark a war that would kick the Spanish out of the eastern Mississippi Valley. The word spread that Colbert’s men were awaiting British, Choctaw, and Chickasaw reinforcements to attack American posts in the Illinois country. Could Payamataha’s two decades of diplomacy with Spaniards, Quapaws, Choctaws, and others all be in vain? Would his nation be drawn into war by a man many Chickasaws did not even like?⁴⁵

Kidnapping the wife of a colonial official and stealing goods belonging to the king’s army was an act of war, and Acting Spanish Governor of Louisiana Esteban Miró reacted accordingly. He prepared two hundred troops to march from New Orleans to Natchez “for the destruction of these evildoers” and called for military assistance from the Quapaws.⁴⁶ In the meantime, Cruzat learned of his wife’s capture from some Delaware Indians. He made plans to lead troops from St. Louis, and he encouraged Kickapoo Indians from Illinois to join as well.⁴⁷

If fighting broke out, the Chickasaws were likely to be caught up in it. Knowing that the Chickasaws were the real power on that part of the Mississippi, Miró demanded that if the Chickasaws did not intend war against Spain, they should expel Colbert and the other British men and prevent them from raiding on the Mississippi. A Quapaw delegation soon arrived in Payamataha’s town carrying a message from Governor Miró. He demanded to know if the Chickasaws intended “to wage war on us, or to live peacefully.” If the Chickasaws wanted war, Miró said, then they should be following the rules of war and engaging in real battles, not allowing Colbert to attack women and others “that do not have arms to defend themselves.”⁴⁸

Both Spaniards and Chickasaws were relieved when Nicanora Ramos managed to persuade James Colbert to free her by needling him with reminders of what a dangerous and unvalorous act he had committed. The safe arrival of Ramos and her children in New Orleans calmed the escalating preparations for war. “With the arrival of Madame Cruzat,” rejoiced Miró, “things have changed their appearances.” He continued to prepare a force to lead to Natchez, but now its purpose would be to reinforce it against an attack by Colbert and Georgians, not war in Chickasaw country. Instead, Miró sent a Spanish emissary to meet with the Chickasaws “to reconcile, to calm, and to appease them” and to discuss Colbert as a mutual irritant.⁴⁹ Miró sent Payamataha a white flag and invited him to New Orleans to “give me his hand.” We can almost hear Miró’s sigh of relief as he wrote to Gálvez, “Your Excellency knows the small gain and the great loss” that the French suffered in their two unsuccessful attempts to defeat the Chickasaws. Fighting the Chickasaws would require a huge operation of thousands of men, lasting many months, with no guarantee of success in the end.⁵⁰

Payamataha quickly took advantage of Ramos’s freedom to mend fences. The episode had shown just how fragile his peace was. Now the Chickasaws and Spanish could agree that the problem was a handful of “fugitives from Natchez and…roving traders,” who did not represent most Chickasaws or even most loyalists. Ramos’s testimony helped. She declared that while Chickasaws knew of and received proceeds from the raiding, they had not participated in the actual capture and had “not done anything bad to her or the other prisoners.”⁵¹

Payamataha and the Chickasaws conducted conciliatory diplomacy with Miró as well as with the Quapaws, Kickapoos, Kaskaskias, Cherokees, and Creeks. Quapaws and their Great Chief Angaska helped the Chickasaws mend fences with the Spanish, including Cruzat in St. Louis. The efforts paid off when Colbert and his followers attacked the Spanish Arkansas Post on April 17, 1783. The Quapaws declined to defend the post for fear of fighting any Chickasaws with Colbert, although they were close by and were supposed to be Spain’s closest allies in the region. In August 1783, with Quapaw help, a Chickasaw party ratified the peace again with the Spanish at Arkansas Post. The emissaries assured the Spanish that, “except for Colbert’s family, all are very contented” with Spanish friendship.⁵² To keep lines of communication open with the Spanish, Payamataha sent Chickasaws to live near Arkansas Post and the Quapaw towns and arranged for the Arkansas Post Commandant to send a trader to live among the Chickasaws. In southeastern Indian tradition, Payamataha was exchanging fanemingos, or “squirrel kings,” diplomats whose role was to keep good relations between allies.⁵³

Following Payamataha’s strategy of peace with all, the Chickasaws began to treat the United States as a legitimate country and to try to incorporate it into their policy of peace with all. For most of the war, the Chickasaws had treated the Americans as an internal problem for the British empire, not a potential Chickasaw ally; however, in July 1782 Payamataha dictated a message to all American leaders offering, in Payamataha’s tradition, “to be at peace with you that our corn may grow and our stores increased for the benefit of our children.” In his speech, Payamataha represented the Revolutionary War as a bump in the road of generally good relations and the future as a return to a prewar alliance with English-speaking neighbors, even those who had thrown off their empire. Payamataha claimed that they were “formerly very good friends and I thought we should be always so.” There had only been “some small differences” when George Rogers Clark “settled a fort in our hunting ground without our leave.” Now, Payamataha sent them a flag of peace and hoped “to see it as it used to be.”⁵⁴ A delegation carried Payamataha’s message to every settlement west of the Appalachians. In turn, the Chickasaws advertised to the Cherokees and others that being “at perfect peace with the French, Spaniards, and Americans” gave them “goods in plenty” and made them “contented and in a flourishing way.”⁵⁵

Payamataha would soon discover that it was difficult to negotiate with thirteen mostly independent sovereignties. As the plural “States” implied, figuring out who represented the “United States” was difficult. In July 1783, Payamataha and other headmen dictated a letter to the president of Congress. They had heard “that the Americans have thirteen councils composed of chiefs and warriors,” adding, “We are told that you are the head chief of a grand council which is above these thirteen councils,” yet people claiming to represent Georgia, Illinois, Virginia, and assorted groups of settlers had approached the Chickasaws claiming the right to negotiate for themselves.⁵⁶ As a new nation, it was especially important for the United States to demonstrate its sovereign voice, yet representatives of Congress, state governments, and private individuals all claimed to be “Americans” with the power to make treaties, leaving Indians in doubt of American seriousness.⁵⁷

Chickasaws proposed peace to any Americans they could find. In direct negotiations with a Virginia representative in October 1782, the Chickasaws blamed the British for past conflicts between themselves and Virginia. Payamataha, Mingo Houma, and a rising young leader named Piomingo (or Mountain King) declared that they had fought George Rogers Clark at Fort Jefferson only because “the English put the bloody tomahawk into our hands, telling us that we should have no goods if we did not exert ourselves to the greatest point of resentment against you.” But now the British had “left us in our adversity,” and Chickasaw “women and children are crying out for peace.” The Chickasaws agreed to “bury the bones of our slain on both sides and forget all.” In fact the Chickasaws had been defending their territory, and the British had no power to force the Chickasaws to wield “the bloody tomahawk” in any case.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, the British had been the Chickasaws’ ally and provider of European goods for eighty years. If they were truly gone, it was safe to blame them.

The Chickasaws made their opposition to land cessions so clear to the Virginia negotiator at that October 1782 meeting that he did not even bother proposing any; still, Americans too often turned the conversation toward acquiring Chickasaw land. In January 1783, Virginia Governor Benjamin Harrison (whose son and great-grandson would be presidents of the United States) sent commissioners to the Chickasaws with orders to buy Chickasaw land while at the same time asserting that the United States already owned the land by conquest from the British and therefore could take it without paying for it. At the same time, George Rogers Clark sent one of his men to try to buy Chickasaw land south of the Ohio River in what he hoped to make part of Kentucky. Shawnees and Cherokees had been telling the Chickasaws since at least the 1760s that Virginians were land grabbers. Perhaps they were right.⁵⁹

Payamataha hoped that Congress would control these people who seemed to act independently with no regard for either proper diplomacy or the actions of other states. In July 1783, Payamataha and Mingo Houma appealed to Congress as the Americans’ supposed supreme political body to control the various states and independent groups that were making offers and demands or even just “marking lines through our hunting ground.” Payamataha expected to deal with the highest level of American government because “we are head men and chiefs and warriors also, and I have always been accustomed to speak with great chiefs and warriors.” If American governmental structure was as Chickasaws understood it, Congress should “put a stop to any encroachment on our lands without our consent and silence all those people who send us such talks as inflame and exasperate our young men.”⁶⁰

Independent negotiators, unauthorized surveyors, and Congressional fecklessness were annoying, but they did not overturn Chickasaw control over their lands. The Chickasaws allowed loyalist refugees to live in Chickasaw country under Chickasaw rule, but independent settlements were not allowed. For example, in 1784, a group of speculators including North Carolina Governor Richard Caswell, Virginia Governor Patrick Henry, and future U.S. senator William Blount claimed lands south of the Tennessee River based on a Cherokee grant and Georgia permission, but opposition from Chickasaws and other Indians in the region kept it from happening. Although sovereignty and land possession might be contested, Chickasaws still controlled Chickasaw country. Their population continued to grow, and they spread their farms further across the landscape, continuing a process of decentralization that they had begun in the first years of peace after the Seven Years’ War. Still, Americans’ land ambitions obscured the path forward. Not everyone agreed that peace with everyone was best. Some Chickasaws tried to prevent negotiations with Americans as too risky, while others sought to minimize relations with Spain. Many wished that the British would return.⁶¹

The Ambitions of Alexander McGillivray

As with the Chickasaws, Creek sovereignty and control over the land endured in the midst of change. After Emistisiguo’s death outside Savannah in 1782, Alexander McGillivray’s prominence grew in both Little Tallassee and the Creek Confederacy. He had established valuable connections in many Creek towns and had shown the potential to become a prominent headman and diplomat. However, as the British withdrew from the southeast, he lost his European connections. McGillivray and the Creeks had to decide what they would do in a world without the British.⁶²

At first, McGillivray explored the possibility of continuing the fight. In the spring of 1782, he traveled to Chickasaw country to discuss Creeks and Chickasaws fighting together against the Spanish and the Americans. As their official policy was peace, however, the Chickasaws said no. McGillivray also considered linking his efforts with James Colbert. He visited Colbert’s camp while Nicanora Ramos was held captive there. In McGillivray’s presence, probably trying to impress him, Colbert boasted of the many ways he was going to damage the Spanish “with fire and blood.”⁶³ McGillivray chided him: “You talk very freely, and are making our projects known” to the captives, who “will not forget to publish our intention.”⁶⁴ This encounter seems to have persuaded McGillivray that Colbert was too much like the irresponsible and unconnected James Willing.

McGillivray again had the chance to leave Creek country for good. According to McGillivray, Georgians repeatedly proposed “restoring to me all my property and that of my father.” But he declined the offers.⁶⁵ Similarly, when McGillivray was in St. Augustine in the fall of 1783, British General Archibald MacArthur offered to evacuate him along with the other loyalists. He could have sailed to Jamaica or Britain or even joined his father in Scotland.⁶⁶

But Alexander McGillivray chose to return to his mother’s town and his growing family. By 1783, he and Elise Moniac had their own children, Alexander (Aleck), Margaret (Peggy), and Elizabeth (Lizzie), all of whom, in Scottish patrilineal tradition, he considered his own and taught to speak English. Because their mother was Chickasaw, they belonged to a matrilineal Chickasaw clan as well as being part of a Creek household in Little Tallassee. Even more important, McGillivray was the mentor of the children of his sisters, Sophia, Jeannette, and Sehoy. McGillivray envisioned a prosperous life in Little Tallassee with his family, slaves, plantations, and cattle as well as a future as a Creek leader. McGillivray would live the rest of his life in Creek country—“my country.”⁶⁷

But McGillivray’s previously most useful connection—the British—was now largely irrelevant. Indians in the north had persuaded Britain to retain its Great Lakes posts, in defiance of the Treaty of Paris; however, once the British turned St. Augustine over to the Spanish, there were no British on Creek borders. Headmen Hoboithle Miko of the Upper Creek town of Great Tallassee (also known as Tallassee King or Tame King) and Neha Miko of the Lower Creek town of Cussita (also known as Fat King) were in charge of negotiations with the formerly British colonies of Georgia and the Carolinas. If McGillivray wanted to continue his career as a Creek diplomat, it would have to be with the Spanish and with other Indian nations. Having been one of the loudest Creek voices urging war against Spain, his new role would require a sharp reversal.⁶⁸

Straight from his disappointment in St. Augustine, McGillivray traveled to Spanish Pensacola in early 1784 for his first negotiation with his old enemies, who, he hoped, would become the Creeks’ new supplier of weapons and ammunition. If the Creeks could build interdependent economic and diplomatic relations with Spain, Creek warriors could defend their political and territorial independence, and McGillivray would have markets for the products of his plantations around Little Tallassee. In order to persuade Spanish officials of his value to them, McGillivray advertised himself as their greatest asset in Creek country, a man to whom they could relate and who in turn could relate to the Creeks. He explained to Spanish West Florida Governor Arturo O’Neill (another “wild goose” Irish Catholic, just like General Alejandro O’Reilly and Margaret O’Brien’s father) that he was “a Native of this Nation and of rank in it.” McGillivray assured O’Neill that the Creeks preferred to ally with Spain because “the protection of a great Monarch is preferred to that of a distracted Republic.” The Creeks were also turning to Spain because, as McGillivray put it, “we have been most shamefully deserted” by the British.⁶⁹

McGillivray’s efforts with the Spanish succeeded. The Creeks approved establishing alliance and trade with Spain, and Spanish officials began writing about him with admiration and hope. José de Ezpeleta called McGillivray “an Indian of talent and education and a great deal of influence with those of his nation.”⁷⁰ Miró called McGillivray a “mestizo by birth,” meaning mixed Indian and European, who had become the best of both worlds. There were plenty of men of European descent living in Indian communities, but Miró drew the conclusion that McGillivray’s talents and Creek lineage made him different. “As his mother was the daughter of one of the principal chiefs,” Creeks “have adopted him as such in the entire Nation,” and he held “a kind of authority” in all the Creek towns. Yet also, Miró wrote, his father had educated him “as a son of Europe.”⁷¹ As they got to know him in the mid-1780s, Spanish officials idealized McGillivray as someone who thought and acted European but whom the Creeks saw as an especially wise Creek.

This was exactly the reputation McGillivray wanted to have among Europeans, but in fact he gained prominence among the Creeks by old-fashioned Creek methods. As Miró recognized, McGillivray’s family line made him eligible for leadership. He did not have the war experience of Payamataha or Emistisiguo, but he had proved himself brave enough during the Revolutionary War. Now he traveled throughout Creek country to build connections in every town of Upper Creeks, Lower Creeks, and even Seminoles. Part of the Creek Confederacy, the Seminole towns were composed of Creeks who had moved south into East Florida earlier in the eighteenth century and combined with Florida Indians and former slaves, some of whom had escaped during and immediately after the Revolution. Seeking to maintain intra-Creek relations and dissuade Seminoles from seceding from the Confederacy, McGillivray encouraged Spanish officials to establish a convenient trading house for them in East Florida. The Spanish eventually did so at San Marcos de Apalache (St. Marks) on Apalachee Bay in 1787, and McGillivray traveled there to introduce the Spaniards to the Seminoles.⁷²

As war ended and trade reopened, economic opportunities arose, and McGillivray took full advantage. Like his successful neighbors in the Floridas and Louisiana, he built his prosperity on the backs of slaves. Although he lost his father’s Georgia plantations, McGillivray owned black slaves who grew cash crops and livestock on his father’s old plantation at Little Tallassee and another half a mile up the Coosa River. He established a new plantation on the Tombigbee River north of Mobile as well. McGillivray sold his agricultural products in Spanish Pensacola and Mobile and bought slaves, who in turn expanded his production.⁷³

Creeks had long owned and sold slaves, but plantation slavery had come to Creek country just in the past few decades. While most Creek men hunted and Creek women farmed as in the past, McGillivray and some other Creek men and women lived more like their wealthy white neighbors. They owned livestock and relied on enslaved men and women to farm. McGillivray lived in a log house with windows and a stone chimney, while most of his Creek neighbors lived in houses, built by Creek women, made of plastered vertical slats with horizontal woven cane. Although other Creeks practiced slavery and produced for the market, this new planter class increased economic disparities among Creeks, removed their families from the kinds of labor most Creeks did, and accumulated wealth at unprecedented rates. However, Creeks had long been diverse, and they had strong common interests in protecting Creek land and sovereignty and gaining access to European markets, whether for the fur trade or for plantation products. McGillivray understood that conducting Spanish diplomacy and distributing Spanish supplies would be central to his authority among the Creeks, and most Creeks seemed to see McGillivray as useful in their economic and diplomatic negotiations with Europeans.⁷⁴

McGillivray encouraged both Creeks and Spaniards to allow British loyalists to live under their sovereignty. There was some extra land in Creek country and in Spanish West Florida and Louisiana. In return for protection and a little land on which they could build farms and businesses, these settlers would respect Creek or Spanish authority and help them withstand illegal incursions. If the settlers in Creek country had children with Creek women, their children would follow the matrilineal line and be Creeks themselves. For those who chose to settle in the Spanish Gulf Coast colonies, McGillivray advised West Florida Governor O’Neill, “If liberty of conscience would be allowed to them they could be contented and happy under the king of Spain’s government.” These offers should be only for loyalists, though, people whom the Americans had deprived of peace and prosperity and who would be willing to submit to Creek or Spanish authority. In contrast, Americans, “disposed to leave their own government and their taxes,” should not be welcome. People who wanted to leave responsibility and authority behind would be a “rebellious crew,” not useful subjects for either Creeks or Spain.⁷⁵

Indeed, Americans were already trying to take Creek land, with or without Congress’s approval. Hoping to persuade Creeks to cede some of their hunting lands, the Georgia legislature invited them to a congress in 1783. Creeks were busy preparing for the fall hunt and, in any case, felt that diplomacy with the Spanish, British, and other Indians was more urgent. Creeks knew that the Georgians would make similar requests and threats to those of Governor John Martin the previous year, who had said that Georgians wanted “to live in peace and friendship” and “provide plenty of goods of all kinds” but were not afraid “to send our warriors up to your towns…and lay them in ashes and make your women widows, and children fatherless.”⁷⁶ Martin was clearly trying to hide weakness under bluster. Indeed, at nearly the same time he was writing General Nathanael Greene that Georgia “is much distressed at present for want of ammunition.”⁷⁷ To the Creeks, the Americans seemed too obnoxious and divided to be promising allies. Therefore, when the Augusta meeting convened, only the two headmen responsible for maintaining good relations with the United States attended: Hoboithle Miko and Neha Miko.

Contemporary observers and historians have sometimes misunderstood divisions of diplomatic responsibility within southeastern Indian nations and confederacies as “factions.” Rather than divisive political factions, these were really assigned roles given to regional leaders. Hoboithle Miko and Neha Miko were peace chiefs whose role was to promote peace with Georgia and the Carolinas, much as the “white town” of Little Tallassee was to keep the peace with Mobile and Pensacola. Even if other Creeks went to war, they were supposed to try to keep channels of communication open and to be ready to be the first negotiators if the Creeks wanted to make peace. Among the Choctaws, the Eastern, Western, and Six Towns divisions had different negotiating responsibilities, which is how Six Towns Choctaws ended up on the opposite side of the Siege of Pensacola from other Choctaws. The Chickasaws assigned specific diplomats to specific places as well. Although well-functioning roles could develop into real divides or even civil war, as they did among the Choctaws in the 1740s, these assignments did not necessarily indicate differences of opinion. In recognition of this role, Hoboithle Miko was sometimes called the Halfway-House King, a man who could negotiate for people on both sides. During the Revolutionary War, Hoboithle Miko and Neha Miko had regularly gone to Georgia to meet with U.S. Indian Commissioner George Galphin and others to collect goods and to maintain lines of communication, and they hoped to reestablish trade now that the war was over.⁷⁸

At the 1783 meeting in Augusta, though, to the astonishment of both headmen, the Georgians presented them with a treaty to sign. This pre-drafted “Treaty of Augusta” stated that the Creeks would cede thousands of acres between the Ogeechee and Oconee rivers. This was not how treaties worked. The treaty with the British at Augusta twenty years earlier, for example, included not only headmen from every Creek town but also crowds of Creek men and women to witness and ratify the agreement. Treaties were days-long engagements in which each party dramatically demonstrated its ability to rule and speak for its side before they settled into the business of negotiations. The Creeks in attendance in 1783 represented only four of the at least sixty Creek towns. The two headmen told the Georgians that they had no standing to agree to a treaty on behalf of the Creek Confederacy. The Georgians’ failure to perform their part left much doubt that they represented their country either. Through some combination of promises and armed threats, the Georgia negotiators persuaded Hoboithle Miko and Neha Miko to sign, although they continued to insist that their signatures meant nothing unless the entire Confederacy ratified the treaty. When they returned home and explained what had happened, the Creeks held a National Council at which headmen representing all of the towns agreed to send a message to Georgia that land cessions, in McGillivray’s words, “could only be valid by the unanimous voice of the whole, as joint proprietors.”⁷⁹ Creeks began to call Georgians ecunnaunuxulgee, “people greedily grasping after the lands of the red people.”⁸⁰

“Hopothle Mico, or, The Talassee King of the Creeks, engraving by John Trumbull, 1790. (Special Collections, Fordham University)

The Creeks were annoyed, but they did not think that Georgia’s outrageous claims were much to worry about. Although the Georgia Assembly named the land between the Ogeechee and Oconee rivers “Washington County” for their victorious general and offered land grants there to veterans, in reality it was still Creek country, and any Americans who tried to settle there were risking their lives. Indeed, Georgians feared a Creek war, especially if supplied by Spain, and hoped that their own aggressiveness would persuade Congress and surrounding states to come to their rescue. To outside observers, including the Creeks, unruly settlers pushing the boundaries of their states or seeking to escape them entirely were a sign of the weakness, not the power, of the United States. Such people had overthrown their empire for free land and no taxes. They could not be trusted to be loyal to their own new government. Now some of them wanted, as McGillivray put it, “to erect and establish what they call a western independence out of the reach of the authority of Congress.”⁸¹ Surely a country founded on disobedience could not last long.

Undermined by independent citizens and states, Congress itself was also dangerously independent in international affairs. In 1784, privateers captured an American ship off the coast of Morocco. While Americans believed that they could transcend the rivalries of the old world and could have free trading rights as neutral vessels, to the Barbary States (Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli, and Tunis) this freedom meant only that Americans were no longer protected by treaties with Britain. At home reading newspapers from London and Charleston, McGillivray reflected that the Americans and Barbary pirates were “well matched” in their penchant for theft.⁸² The latest conflict was only another sign of American weakness. McGillivray noted that “the whole continent is in confusion. Before long I expect to hear that the three kings”—that is, of Spain, Britain, and France—“must settle the matter by dividing America between them.”⁸³

As Alexander McGillivray observed the difficulties of the thirteen states in establishing their legitimacy and of the Creeks in protecting themselves against the states, he determined to transform the Creek Confederacy into a nation. Nationalizing would have implications for both internal Creek affairs and their relations with others. Within the Creek Nation, towns and clans would continue to rule themselves, but in diplomacy and trade policy, they should act as one, much as Congress was trying to do for the states. As he gained prominence, he strengthened the National Council, which had been mostly an Upper Creek meeting called in times of crisis but became a more regular body representing all Creek and Seminole towns. McGillivray increasingly spoke for the Creeks in negotiations with outsiders. As McGillivray looked toward the nineteenth century, he believed that a more centralized Creek Nation could operate on the same level as other modern nations. In letters to Spanish officials, he began to refer to the Creeks as “a free nation,” one that determined its own land use and foreign policy like any other nation.⁸⁴

Americans, too, recognized that McGillivray sought Creek nationhood. One Virginian who knew him even speculated that he wanted the United States to “acknowledge the independence and sovereignty of the Creek nation, and admit them as a member of the federal Union.”⁸⁵ Admitting an Indian nation as a U.S. state was not an outlandish idea in the 1780s, but it was not what McGillivray had in mind.

Of course Creek sovereignty was not a new idea—Europeans had never exercised sovereignty over the Creek Confederacy—but McGillivray developed a language of independent nationhood that carried particular weight with late-eighteenth-century Europeans and Americans. In the past, Creek governance was mostly an issue for Creeks to debate among themselves, not something they needed to assert to outsiders. Now McGillivray was explicit that the Creeks governed their own independent nation. As he put it in a letter to West Florida Governor O’Neill, the Creeks “consider themselves brothers and allies of Spain only,” not Spain’s subjects.⁸⁶

Although Creeks continued to argue over foreign policy, there was little serious opposition to his beginning to represent a united Creek national foreign policy to the Spanish. He was not what some Spanish officials called him, the “supposed Principal Chief of the Creek Nation.” He was too young to be a headman at all yet, so he was not even a member of the National Council. Even as he grew older, his Wind clan status would allow him to be only second headman of Little Tallassee, not first. Instead, McGillivray became the Creeks’ chief diplomat to the Spanish. Later, Creeks added to his title of Isti Atcagagi (“Beloved Man”) and called him Isti Atcagagi Thlucco or “Great Beloved Man,” thereby singling him out as the Creeks’ greatest advisor on foreign policy.⁸⁷

McGillivray in turn used his advisory and diplomatic status to work for his nationalizing project. The lack of uniformity in Creek foreign policy during the Revolutionary War had frustrated him. Becoming a centralized nation, at least in foreign policy matters, would prevent such frustrations and allow him to act as a more powerful leader at home and with representatives of other nations and empires. Being recognized by European powers as a nation would increase Creek stature in the world and McGillivray’s influence at home. Like Creek diplomats before him, McGillivray at times projected a greater power over Creeks than he had in order to influence outsiders and in turn increase influence at home.

Still, McGillivray answered to his fellow Creeks, much like Payamataha among the Chickasaws. Creek and Seminole towns continued to govern themselves, and McGillivray never set foreign policy alone. As he explained, “all my proceedings” were “directed by the general voice of the Whole Nation.”⁸⁸ As the Creeks had confederated, they had transitioned from having individual towns or clusters of towns make foreign policy to having leaders of different towns be responsible for diplomacy with different peoples, as Hoboithle Miko and Neha Miko were with Georgia and the Carolinas and McGillivray was with West Florida and Louisiana. Similar to Congress’s difficulties with individual state diplomacy under the Articles of Confederation, McGillivray grew frustrated with this multi-node style of diplomacy, which still allowed for contradiction. His desire to centralize Creek foreign policy to prevent U.S. expansion would bring him into conflict with Creeks who wanted to continue spreading diplomatic power across towns and matrilineal clans.⁸⁹

The Congresses of Pensacola and Mobile, 1784

The lesson that most white Americans and Indians who lived within the boundaries of the United States and in the contested Ohio Valley took from the brutal fighting of the Seven Years’ War and the Revolutionary War was that people of Indian and European descent were not meant to live together. In contrast, mutual hatred was not the lesson of the Revolutionary War on the Gulf Coast, where faith in interdependence was stronger than ever. Native and Spanish leaders believed that they could work together to forward mutual independence and prosperity.⁹⁰

Although historians usually portray the years following the American Revolution as a decline in Indians’ sources of European alliance and weapons, at least for a while the Spanish and many Indians living nearby saw potential for a new and better alliance. They all saw the Americans as people who did not share their values. Europeans and Indians in the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi Valley agreed on territorial integrity and political sovereignty. Indians could rule their lands while colonial powers had coastal towns and interior trading posts. Europeans could claim colonial dominion over allied Indian lands vis-à-vis other colonial powers without actually ruling on the ground. Europeans and Indians could and did disagree and even went to war over access to land and resources. Yet when compared to the belief expressed by Congress and the states that Indians were under their direct rule, late-eighteenth-century Spaniards and southeastern Indians were in much closer agreement about the reality of their relationship.

Bernardo de Gálvez was determined to use Indians’ disgust at both the rebels and the British to expand Spanish North America. He wrote the crown that his experience north of Mexico had “demonstrated that the conservation and prosperity” of Louisiana and West Florida “depend primarily on the friendship of the Indian nations who inhabit them, and this can only be done by means of gifts and a well established trade.”⁹¹ Minister of the Indies José de Gálvez supported his nephew’s desire to protect Spain’s expanding northern empire however he thought best. Before leaving New Orleans, Bernardo de Gálvez sent his father-in-law, Colonel Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent, commandant of Louisiana’s white militia, to Spain to requisition goods for Indian gifts and trade. Maxent presented himself at court as Gálvez’s representative to argue for $80,000 in one-time alliance-building gifts, $200,000 to set up merchants for permanent trade, and another $100,000 of goods to be available at New Orleans, Pensacola, and other posts to host visiting Indians. The king “at once agreed” and sent Maxent to the principal factories of Spain and its ally France to gather the merchandise.⁹² In 1784, Governor Miró invited the Creeks to Pensacola and the Chickasaws and Choctaws to Mobile to discuss a grand alliance “on which the permanent tranquility of these Provinces depends.”⁹³ As long as southeastern Indian and Spanish goals aligned, they could ignore the charged question of whether Indians were truly independent allies or subject vassals.

Over the previous year and a half, McGillivray had established himself as the primary Creek ambassador to the Spanish, so he would be the main Creek negotiator at the Pensacola congress. In preparation, representatives from throughout the Creek Confederacy met at Little Tallassee in April. They agreed to ally with Spain, and they commissioned McGillivray to write the governor of Georgia “a positive refusal to every thing they desired of us.” A few weeks later, McGillivray and the rest of the delegation representing the Creeks set off for Pensacola.⁹⁴

On June 1, 1784, the Creeks and the Spanish concluded an alliance of mutual recognition of sovereignty and mutually beneficial trade. McGillivray signed on behalf of the Creeks, and Acting Louisiana Governor Esteban Miró, West Florida Governor Arturo O’Neill, and Intendant Martín Navarro—Louisiana’s chief financial official—signed for Spain. A casual reader of this treaty and the previous year’s Treaty of Augusta with Georgia might assume that the Treaty of Pensacola was less legitimate. While fourteen Creeks signed in Augusta, only McGillivray did at Pensacola, and his Scottish name is less Indian-sounding than Hoboithle Miko and Neha Miko. But speaking and listening mattered infinitely more to Creeks than signatures, and the two assemblies could not have been more different. At Pensacola, Creek headmen from every town participated in the negotiations, and interpreters worked to make sure everyone understood everyone else. Large numbers of Creek men and women witnessed both the speeches and the signing. McGillivray signed as their legitimate representative.⁹⁵

The compatibility of Spanish imperial dominion and Creek political and territorial independence was central to the agreement. McGillivray and the other Creeks stressed that the Treaty of Paris was invalid because Britain had no right to cede Indian land to the United States. In accepting Spanish imperial dominion over the region, the “free nation” of Creeks, as they put it, “expect His Majesty to protect them against the intentions of those who believe they have a sovereign right in the villages.” The Spanish negotiators agreed. They pledged that “the generous mind of his Most Catholic Majesty is far from exacting lands from the Indians.” The Creek Nation was “the proprietor,” and the king simply sought “to secure and guarantee to them, those [lands] which they actually hold, according to the right by which they possess them.”⁹⁶

Of course, Spain was not operating an empire for the benefit of indigenous peoples; still, it was possible that the Gulf Coast and its interior could be both Spanish and Indian. Indians could rule on the ground, while Spain could delineate the region as Spanish vis-à-vis its imperial competitors. Spanish explicitly placed their king in contrast to his competitors. “To prove how different his way of thinking is far from that of his Britannick Majesty,” the Spanish negotiators pledged that if the Creeks ever lost their lands to any “enemies of his crown,” the Spanish king would grant them lands elsewhere in his empire.⁹⁷ It was not a new position for Spain. Since at least 1532, the Spanish crown had explicitly recognized (although not always guaranteed) that “the Indians shall continue to possess their lands.”⁹⁸

McGillivray and the Creeks wanted more; they believed that the Spanish had a responsibility to defend the Creek border from the Americans. However, Miró and O’Neill did not have permission to make a pledge that would be so likely to bring about a war with the United States. Miró did promise to take the Creeks’ argument to the king and “see if there was a way to remedy the marking of the boundaries.”⁹⁹

Spanish alliance was important to the Creeks not as much for Spain’s military might as for its access to European markets and manufactured goods. Spain pledged to provide regular payments to the Creeks as well as “a permanent and unalterable commerce.”¹⁰⁰ To support the pledge and seal the alliance, the Spanish handed out a huge amount of goods, much of it from the shipment that Gilbert de St. Maxent had recently sent from Spain. The Creeks received 300 guns, more than 8,000 knives, 200 pounds of beads, 6,000 gunflints, 12 large medals, 12 small medals, 30 gorgets (ceremonial collars), and large volumes of gunpowder and musket balls. The list went on for three pages. The Spanish assured the Creeks that the bounty would continue. The crown substantially increased its budget for Indian presents, including guns, powder, and ball. To ensure Creeks a world market for their furs and other products, the Spanish contracted with Scottish merchants, particularly Lachlan McGillivray’s old friend William Panton and his partner John Leslie. While this situation was not ideal for Spain, southeastern Indians were accustomed to England’s cheap goods and particular kinds of silver ornaments to which these Scottish merchants had access. And the important objective was, as Miró put it, that “the Americans do not introduce themselves into this trade.”¹⁰¹ In turn, the Creeks agreed not to trade with any other Europeans or Americans.¹⁰²

The Spanish appointed McGillivray their commissary in the Creek nation, the same office he had held for Britain. His job was to enforce the Spanish and Creek trade agreement and to facilitate communication between the Creeks and Spanish officials in West Florida and Louisiana. At the Congress, the Spanish granted McGillivray “certain trading privileges,” including the right to import goods from the Floridas into Creek country, which he made good on by partnering with Panton and Leslie.¹⁰³ Like Oliver Pollock, McGillivray hoped to work international trade on the Gulf Coast to his advantage.

McGillivray hoped that the Spanish alliance would demonstrate Creek power and persuade Americans to “drop the pretended right of sovereignty they claim over our country” and to see that “the right they found on the cession of Great Britain is unjust, the Creek Nation being allies and not subjects to that crown.”¹⁰⁴ The Creeks made Hoboithle Miko return to Augusta to insist that the Augusta treaty was invalid. While doing so, he also instructed Americans in Creek diplomacy. If Georgia wanted land, it needed to convene a real treaty.¹⁰⁵

Hoboithle Miko returned to Creek country in November with what McGillivray termed “a very satisfactory answer.” The governor and assembly of Georgia had, according to Hoboithle Miko, forbidden settlement on the contested lands “in the strongest manner.” McGillivray believed that the Creek-Spanish alliance had scared Georgians, who did not want to fight Spanish soldiers or Creeks armed with Spanish weapons. He told O’Neill that “the true reasons” that the Americans “pretend to be so moderate to us” was “their jealousy to Spain.”¹⁰⁶ He was confused, then, at the later Georgian insistence on land west of the Ogeechee River. He wrote Georgia that the Creeks “protested in the strongest manner against your people settling over the old boundary of Ogeechee.” He explained that the lands “between Oconee and Ogeechee form a principal part” of their hunting lands, “on which they generally take three thousand deer skins yearly.”¹⁰⁷ Georgians’ refusal to listen would plague the Creeks for years to come and make them more determined on a strong alliance with Spain.

While McGillivray and the Creeks sought a European ally and European munitions with which to threaten the United States, Payamataha and the Chickasaws were pursuing their strategy of peace when they met with the Spanish in Mobile a few weeks after the Pensacola congress. In contrast to the farcical Georgia-Creek Treaty of Augusta, the Chickasaws had signed a real treaty with Virginia the previous November, the Treaty of French Lick. Virginians had begun to move to Kentucky and to the Cumberland River around a town they would soon call Nashville for North Carolina Continental Army General Francis Nash. These places were borderland hunting grounds, far from the main parts of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, or Creek nations.¹⁰⁸

The Chickasaws wanted to keep Americans from moving any closer to their real hunting lands, including those on the Tennessee River (which they called the Cherokee River) west of Cumberland. In the negotiations, the Chickasaw headman Piomingo charged that “the White people have got a very bad trick that when they go a hunting.” They “find a good piece of ground” and “make a station camp at it, and the next thing they go to building houses.” The treaty pledged that Virginians would respect Chickasaw hunting rights along the Tennessee River, and it included no land cession. For their part, the Virginians asked the Chickasaws to drive out the Delawares living on the south side of the Tennessee River, because they had been attacking Americans on the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers. The Chickasaws agreed but did nothing; starting a war against the Delawares would defeat the whole purpose of Payamataha’s policy.¹⁰⁹

With these agreements in hand, the Chickasaws did not intend to work against Americans when they came to Mobile in June 1784 to confirm peace with Spain. Representatives of all the Chickasaw towns promised the Spanish “to maintain an inviolable peace and friendship” with Spain but also to “remain quiet in our land, without mixing in any war with the whites.” Given Payamataha’s past efforts, they somewhat redundantly pledged “peace and friendship” with the Creeks, Choctaws, Quapaws, and “all the other Nations of the Continent, especially those of the Mississippi River, excepting only the Kickapoo Nation,” with whom all was not yet settled.¹¹⁰ Remembering the trouble James Colbert had caused, the Chickasaws pledged to deliver to the Spanish any outsiders who proposed war between them and Spain, and they promised to try to keep their young men from raiding horses and cattle around Spanish posts and prevent any piracies on the Mississippi. The Spanish in turn promised “to provide to the Chickasaw Nation permanent and unalterable Commerce under the most equitable prices.”¹¹¹ The Chickasaws returned home with tangible proof of their successful diplomacy. Counting what they consumed in Mobile, the Spanish had given them over 5,700 pounds of bread, 9,400 pounds of rice, and 2,400 pounds of beans, plus enough meat and cornmeal for their stay and medals for Chickasaw headmen.¹¹²

The month after the Mobile congress, Chickasaws attended a pan-Indian conference in the Ohio Valley to discuss uniting the Northern Confederacy with southern Indians to form “a General Confederacy” of Indian nations. As in the past, the Chickasaws did not align perfectly with the confederationists’ aims. The Chickasaws and Kickapoos at the conference had trouble getting along, and Chickasaws resisted other delegations’ efforts to draw them into war against the Americans.¹¹³

Helping other Indians make peace with the Spanish was more the Chickasaw style. In the summer of 1784, Chickasaws and Choctaws led a delegation of over a hundred Iroquois, Shawnees, and Cherokees to meet Commandant Francisco Cruzat at St. Louis, where they declared that they had “wanted to get to know the Spanish ever since we heard they replaced the French.” The Iroquois, Shawnees, and Cherokees claimed that the British “dominat[e] us tyrannically,” preventing good relations with Spain. Now that the British and Americans had “formed two distinct nations,” the situation was far worse. As the Indians explained, “The Americans, a great deal more ambitious and numerous than the English, put us out of our lands,…extending themselves like a plague of locusts in the territories of the Ohio River.” They baited Cruzat by saying that the Americans had asked them, “Why do you want to go to see the chiefs of a poor nation that will never give you anything?” But surely the Spanish would prove the Americans wrong. Cruzat pledged Spanish friendship and provided presents to prove that the Spanish were not poor. In meetings such as this one at St. Louis and the congresses at Pensacola and Mobile, Indians and Spaniards persuaded one another that they could share the continent and together contain the United States.¹¹⁴

Spanish and American Ambitions

In 1783, Congress gave Bernardo de Gálvez’s portrait, presented by Oliver Pollock, a place of honor in the room where Congress met. Soon, though, Congress moved the portrait to a less public wall in the house of the president of Congress. Perhaps the Spaniard’s eye upon their deliberations was more than they could take. By then, Congress was more worried about Spanish ambitions on the continent than grateful for Spain’s help.¹¹⁵

Prospects looked good for an expansion of Spanish North America. Louisiana Intendant Martín Navarro figured that British trade on the Mississippi had totaled hundreds of thousands of dollars. With “free trade for all” and “a numerous population,” Louisiana and West Florida could be more profitable than ever before and could protect Mexico from “new enemies who look at our situation and happiness with too much envy,” meaning the Americans. He looked back to the model of Acadian settlement in Louisiana before the war and imagined similar success with new French, German, Irish, and West Indian settlers. After all, the Broussards and other Acadians had become loyal and valuable subjects of the Spanish crown. Prosperity would attract and foster loyal subjects, who in turn would be useful against “new enemies.”¹¹⁶

The American states were already starting to look like potential foes. Their claims in the Illinois country, Kentucky, and west of Georgia were disturbing. After the Treaty of Paris, the Spanish crown continued to assert its most expansive claims. Spain declared in March 1783 that its possessions included the Illinois country, those lands north of the Ohio River that later became the states of Illinois and Indiana. Virginia was claiming the region on the basis of George Rogers Clark’s seizures of the colonial Illinois posts of Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia (with the financial help of Pollock and the Spanish), but the Spanish pointed out that the mostly French colonists did not actively support the United States, that Clark had failed in his attempts to take Detroit, that the Chickasaws had driven him out of their lands, and that the Spanish had taken Fort St. Joseph on Lake Michigan. The American states were obnoxious but also weak and poor, as their continuing debts to Pollock and Spain showed. Surely Spain could keep them in their place as dependent neighbors.

American officials knew the border with Spain would be a problem. U.S. Secretary of Foreign Affairs Robert Livingston was not alone in suspecting that the Spanish court’s wartime “delays and slights” to John Jay were intended to preserve whatever territory Spain wanted after the war.¹¹⁷ During the war, American officials prepared their arguments for having the Ohio Valley and Illinois country as part of the United States. In 1780, James Madison wrote Jay that Spain’s only possible objection was that it took this territory from Britain and therefore “has a right to regard them as lawful objects of conquest.” Certainly Gálvez would see this conquest as evidence enough for possession, but Madison reasoned that George Rogers Clark had won more posts and therefore that the United States had a greater right to the region. Madison concluded that, except for Natchez on the Mississippi River, “Spain has a claim by conquest to no post above the northern bounds of West Florida,” which he defined as the 31st parallel.¹¹⁸

Madison imagined a prosperous future for the western United States: “In a very few years after peace shall take place,” the Ohio Valley and Illinois country “will certainly be overspread with inhabitants.” They could grow “wheat, corn, beef, pork, tobacco, hemp, flax, and in the southern parts, perhaps, rice and indigo, in great quantities,” which they could send down the Ohio and Mississippi to Spanish and French islands in the West Indies. On the other hand, if Spain impeded American trade on the lower Mississippi, the goods would instead travel upriver through British Canada, and “France and Spain, and the other maritime powers will not only lose the immediate benefit of it themselves, but they will also suffer by the advantage it will give to Great Britain.”¹¹⁹ Congress could use the west for land grants to veterans and land sales to raise revenue “for discharging the debts incurred during the war.”¹²⁰ Without the power to tax, selling public land was the most appealing source of revenue, which, as Oliver Pollock knew only too well, Congress desperately needed.

This uncontested future of global trade and profitable new lands resided only in American imaginations. Spain had controlled the mouth of the Mississippi for two decades, and its victories over the British only made that right more secure. Despite the Treaty of Paris, for now, Congress could only grumble over imperial ambitions and the “mutilation of our country.”¹²¹ Impatient with Americans’ repeated insistence that the 31st parallel was West Florida’s northern border, King Carlos III in 1784 closed the port of New Orleans to American and British traffic and forbade both from navigating the Mississippi. He explicitly declared that the Treaty of Paris between the British and the Americans could not dictate the limits of territory that Spain had conquered during the war. In New Orleans, Governor Miró stationed soldiers at the mouth of the Mississippi to prevent American and British ships from entering. He ordered Francisco de Cruzat at St. Louis to treat American merchants “as smugglers, guilty of the crime of illegal trade.”¹²² Similarly, Bernardo de Gálvez decreed that no non-Catholic families could settle in Louisiana or the Floridas. French Catholic families living in now-American Illinois were invited to Spanish territory.¹²³

Following a suggestion by Oliver Pollock, Georgia attempted to extend its claim as far south and west as Natchez, falsely claiming that, before the war, Natchez had belonged to British Georgia rather than British West Florida. In 1785, the Georgia legislature created “Bourbon County” along the Mississippi between the 31st parallel (south of Natchez) and the Yazoo River (north of Natchez). Commissioners from Georgia proceeded to Natchez, where, to the great shock of the Spanish commandant, they ordered him in the name of Georgia to surrender the fort to them. He of course refused, reiterating that the Spanish claim “is as far as the Tennessee if not further.”¹²⁴

In response to this assault on Spanish sovereignty, Acting Governor Miró prepared gunboats with five hundred veteran regulars from New Orleans, the ship Galveztown with troops from Pensacola, plus six hundred militia from throughout Louisiana and West Florida. Meanwhile Gálvez promised to send the nearly four hundred New Orleans troops that were still with him at Havana. West Florida Governor Arturo O’Neill was to work with Creeks and other Indians “to spread terror on the frontiers of Georgia and Carolina.”¹²⁵ Spanish mobilization slowed when Chickasaws and Cherokees informed O’Neill in July that reports of an American force marching on Natchez were “imaginary.”¹²⁶

Rather than proceed with force, Georgia’s commissioners had hoped that the colonial population of Natchez would again rise up against Spain, but Gálvez had persuaded them that Spain was the best protector of their independent livelihoods. Most residents of Natchez were English speakers. Some had been loyalists during the war, but most had come more recently for the economic opportunities, which were substantial. In August 1785, Natchez’s 275 white families owned a total of 900 slaves, who produced an astounding $150,000 annually in tobacco, cotton, corn, lumber, and other products, mostly sold down the Mississippi through New Orleans. It was no wonder that Americans wanted the Mississippi for its route to market and its productive lands. But the Spanish empire was serving Natchez well, and its people had no desire to rock the boat.¹²⁷

Not only did English-speaking locals not support Georgia’s action; neither did Congress. Fearing war with Spain and international outrage, Congress in October 1785 resolved that “although Congress conceive they have an undoubted right to all the territory within the limits specified in the definitive Articles of peace and friendship between the Crown of Great Britain and these United States, yet they view with real concern the unwarrantable attempts of any Individual of these States to disturb the good understanding which so happily subsists between the two Nations.”¹²⁸ For now at least, border-settling would be a matter of diplomacy, not war.

The Spanish crown sent a special envoy, Diego de Gardoqui, to negotiate the border with Congress. Gardoqui’s company, based in Bilbao, had shipped goods to the rebels during the war, and he had an interest in forging postwar economic connections in North America. Gálvez instructed Gardoqui to insist on the broadest interpretation of Spanish possession and to ignore American threats. Spain had the right and the might. Congress should know that, as Gálvez put it, “we have in the province sufficient veteran troops, a war-wise militia, the friendship of many Indian nations who dislike the Americans, and more than enough experience in forest warfare.”¹²⁹ It would be Gardoqui’s job to secure Gálvez’s victories.

In New York City, the nation’s capital from 1785 to 1790, Diego de Gardoqui sat down with John Jay, now the American Secretary for Foreign Affairs, to resolve their countries’ differences and to try to build a beneficial alliance. Jay weighed the importance of western lands against other financial considerations for his new country. While land grants and sales would help westerners and speculators, trade with Spain and Spanish colonies through eastern ports would provide a much-needed economic boost for merchants and farmers closer to the coast, who struggled to compensate for the British markets they had lost by revolution. Congress instructed Jay to get both, but Jay knew from his years of futile negotiating in Madrid during the war that Spain could not be pushed around. And, as Jay learned secondhand from Oliver Pollock, Spain was firm on keeping Americans out of Natchez and the lower Mississippi.¹³⁰

Once they set the issue of Mississippi navigation aside, Jay and Gardoqui forged an agreement that could benefit both countries. The draft treaty opened free trade between the Spanish empire and the United States. Americans would have access to Spain’s markets around the world, which paid in gold and silver, and Spanish products would flow freely into the United States. An agreement with King Carlos III would continue his tolerance of Congress’s failure to repay its debt (or even make its interest payments). Jay presented the treaty to Congress, arguing “that a proper Commercial treaty with Spain would be of more importance to the United States than any they have formed, or can form, with any other Nation.” If the United States broke with Spain, France would likely side with the Spanish, leaving the United States without either of its powerful European allies. Spain had already been helpful to the United States in establishing trade and diplomacy in North Africa and could help open markets in the Mediterranean. As for Florida’s border, Jay believed that “it would be better even to yield a few acres, than to part in ill humor” with Spain, which could be either “a very convenient neighbor, or a very troublesome one.” Navigation of the Mississippi was not worth fighting a war over, at least not yet.¹³¹

Congressmen in New England and the mid-Atlantic tended to agree with Jay that good commercial relations, including the right to sell fish in the Spanish empire, were worth compromising West Florida and the Mississippi. They supported changing Jay’s instructions to allow him to back off on his demand for navigation of the Mississippi. In the summer of 1786, seven of the thirteen states voted to give up the demand. They had enough votes to change Jay’s instructions, but James Monroe, leading the minority of mostly southern states with land interests in the west, introduced a motion stating that the decision needed nine aye votes under the Articles of Confederation because it was a matter of treaty ratification. It became clear that, even if Congress changed Jay’s instructions, the final treaty would not be ratified. The stalemate would continue. To the Spanish, the failure of Congressional delegates to agree on a treaty was simply more evidence that the United States might not last to see the new century.¹³²

Conclusion: Unsettled Borders

In the 1780s, a single country that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande would have seemed an unlikely future. Surely the land would continue to be ruled by multiple sovereignties. Kentucky or another western settlement might become its own independent nation bordering the United States, the Chickasaw Nation, the Cherokee Nation, Spanish West Florida, the Creek Confederacy, and even perhaps a free black colony under Spanish protection. Different states and colonies might fight, ally, overlap, and change over time, but surely none of them could overrun all of the others.

Across North America, Indians still controlled most of the land. For two centuries, the Spanish, French, and British empires had tried to colonize the continent. They had built permanent posts, beginning with St. Augustine and Santa Fe, and established alliances, traded, and fought wars against and alongside neighboring Indians. Particularly in the British colonies, settlers had farmed previously Indian land and pushed hard against the Indians who opposed them. But by the American Revolution, Europeans still truly controlled less than 20 percent of the lands north of Mexico. Of course kings and imperial officials wanted to control their colonial claims, but their empires were large and spread out, and they had to adapt to a variety of local power arrangements.

By the 1780s, the French and Spanish empires were accustomed to ruling colonies of diverse peoples on the edges of powerful Indian nations. Colonial hierarchies gave subjects, from slaves to royal officials, a variety of rights and levels of social and political prestige. People who could not be incorporated, such as independent Indian nations, could be allies and, ideally, strengthen the colony’s security. As the British empire took more direct control over its colonies in the eighteenth century, it moved toward this model as well, one that the British would apply in India in the nineteenth century.¹³³

Ultimately the United States would also be an empire, but of a different sort. In Thomas Jefferson’s vision, it would be an “empire of liberty.” But liberty for whom? As U.S. settlers moved west, they would establish new independent farms and take with them the ideals of agrarianism and republicanism. As part of the United States or as new countries allied with the United States or with Spain or Britain, these western settlements would not layer authority as European empires had. They would be places where white men and their families would prosper and rule. But in the 1780s, thousands of Indians and Europeans were determined not to let this vision come to pass. The decisions made in the coming years regarding how best to advance independence and prosperity would determine the shape of the world to come.