Encyclopedia of North American Indians -

Encyclopedia of North American Indians

McGillivray, Alexander

(1750-93)

Creek statesman

Alexander McGillivray was an important figure in Creek history and an example of an emergent political phenomenon in the histories of all the large southern Indian groups. He was the son of Lachlin McGillivray, a Scottish trader, and Sehoy, a Creek woman of the Wind clan. But because the Creeks, like other southern Indians, were matrilineal, meaning that they reckoned kinship through the mother's line, McGillivray and those like him whose mothers were native women were in the eyes of the Indians fully as Indian as they despite their nonnative fathers and surnames.

McGillivray's contributions to Creek history owed much to the identity of both his parents. He was born in his father's trading compound at Little Tallassee, a Creek town on the Coosa River near present-day Montgomery, Alabama, and was raised there and at Augusta and Savannah, speaking and writing English from an early age. As a youth he studied in Charleston and apprenticed in business in Savannah. This early education prepared him to function in the English colonial world. At the same time, McGillivray was exposed to the world of his mother and her Wind-clan kin. From them he learned how to be a Creek. Until his death he served their interests, as he understood them, above all others.

McGillivray first appeared on the public stage in 1777, when he returned to Little Tallassee with a commission as assistant commissary in the British Indian service. Until the end of the American Revolution in 1783, he organized and directed Creek participation as allies of the Crown in the southern theater of the war. He supplied warriors for fighting in Georgia and for the defense of Pensacola, but Creek leaders made their own decisions on this internecine conflict and McGillivray never succeeded in fielding large armies against the rebels. More a politician than a warrior, McGillivray gained valuable experience during the war as he argued the British case among Creek leaders. Facile with the culture as well as the language of both sides in the struggle, he also won the respect of many who saw him as a uniquely talented interpreter of the outside world.

In 1783, Great Britain ceded to the United States and Spain its claims to all the land south of Canada. Georgia acted on that cession by expanding onto Creek lands. The Creeks were hard-pressed to respond. Best understood as an alliance system composed of refugee groups drawn together for mutual security after the Mississippian chiefdoms were shattered, the so-called Creek Confederacy of the 1780s was a collection of autonomous towns that shared neither language, a common perception of events, nor a sense of Creek national identity. The national council provided a forum where town leaders discussed issues of mutual interest, but it lacked the mechanisms for policy making or execution that characterized European-style governments.

McGillivray responded to Georgia's expansionist policy by arguing that the Creeks had never surrendered their landed and sovereign rights to the king and that the king therefore had no authority to cede them to the United States. He also took several steps to assure that his claims of Creek sovereignty would be respected.

On the foreign-policy front, in the mid-1780s McGillivray met with representatives of the tribes of the Great Lakes and the Ohio River valley to discuss uniting with them in a massive effort to halt further American expansion west of the Appalachians. He also began negotiations with the Spanish in Florida. Formalized by the 1784 Treaty of Pensacola, the Spanish alliance guaranteed the Creeks their political and territorial rights within Florida and opened an avenue for importing goods, especially military hardware. McGillivray also corresponded with the governments of Georgia and the United States, hoping to convince both that any failure to respect Creek boundaries would be met with force. In response to continued expansion by Georgia, between 1785 and 1787 Creek armies attacked the invaders and expelled them from the contested areas. In conjunction with the Chickamauga Cherokees, McGillivray also sent parties of warriors to harass the Cumberland settlements in present-day Tennessee.

But the most important steps McGillivray took were in the direction of domestic political change. Two Creek headmen, Hoboithle Mico (Tame King) of Tallassee and Eneah Mico (Fat King) of Cusseta, responded to Georgia's claims for Creek land by selling large tracts on the Creeks' eastern border. The two leaders claimed authority over these lands because their hunters used these territories. McGillivray, on the other hand, believed that their actions threatened the survival of the Creek Nation. If they could claim the right to sell off pieces of Creek territory, then other town kings could sell the rest and the Creeks could lose their whole country. He therefore rejected the cessions as unauthorized and illegal, claiming that the tracts were part of the Creek national domain and could be sold only by the national council. But in the absence of a central government with executive powers, McGillivray had only two courses of action. He sent squads of his Windclan kinsmen to torment Hoboithle Mico and Eneah Mico and destroy their property. And, empowered by the Treaty of Pensacola to control the flow of trade goods, McGillivray also denied them access to weapons for their warriors. Their towns, vulnerable to the retaliatory raids of the Georgia militia, could not be defended unless they subordinated themselves to McGillivray's authority. In this way McGillivray hoped to break the historic Creek pattern of political decentralization and forge a national government. Only with political power equal to their military strength, McGillivray believed, could the Creeks protect and defend their lands and sovereignty.

The crowning moment in McGillivray's career occurred in 1790 when he completed the Treaty of New York. McGillivray exploited President George Washington's desire to bring peace to the Creek-Georgia frontier to gain federal guarantees of Creek borders and recognition of Creek sovereignty. Circumventing Georgia, the treaty established a direct relationship between the United States and the Creek Nation. The treaty also affirmed McGillivray's control over Creek trade, thereby strengthening his hold on the tribe's economy and improving his ability to subordinate Creek towns to his nationalist purposes.

On February 17, 1793, less than three years after the conclusion of the Treaty of New York, McGillivray died. Never a robust man, he suffered throughout his adult life from the effects of syphilis and rheumatism. It seems that, exhausted by the pace of his life, he simply wore out. McGillivray's death came at an inconvenient time for the Creeks. His domestic political reforms were far from complete. Indeed, factional opposition to his centralist efforts continued, in different forms, for several decades. But those who had accepted McGillivray's ideas about Creek nationalism kept them alive, and in the 1820s, as the removal crisis took shape, a new generation of Creek leaders built on McGillivray's beginnings to create a centralist political response to removal.





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