CHAPTER 10

Comercio Libre

Revisiting a Concept on Trade and Borders in Creek Homelands

RACHEL B. HERRMANN

Comercio libre is a policy with unwieldy historiography. It has confounded scholars for several reasons: The name of the policy has been mistranslated; the Spanish introduced it incrementally throughout the Gulf South; unofficial relaxations to rules preceded the royal orders that formally wrote more liberal trade conditions into law; the main company responsible for trade between Spanish ports and Creek (or Muscogee) towns became exempt from comercio libre’s import and export duties; and historians have not sufficiently considered rivers in their discussion of the policy. This essay explains how comercio libre affected Creek townspeople during a time (c. 1763–1804) when Spaniards, Britons, and Americans disputed the riverine borders of Creek homelands in Florida and Louisiana. Creeks’ knowledge of and control over rivers and swamps enabled them to take advantage of imperial competition and Spanish weakness. After 1784, this geopolitical power offered them better terms of trade in comparison to non-Indigenous people. The decentralized nature of Creek networks of kinship and politics forced the Spanish to liberalize their trade policy in ways that allowed Creeks to determine who and what crossed their borders.1

“Free trade” had such a different meaning in the eighteenth century that I choose not to translate comercio libre as “free trade” as other scholars have done; retaining the Spanish better reflects the policy’s range of applications. In 1962 Jack Holmes proposed that historians use the term libre cambio, or liberal trade. When he identified the error of translating comercio libre as “free trade,” both he and the translator he cited unfortunately consigned the important insight to a footnote. Nowadays, free trade and protectionism are oppositional ends of national trade policy. The eighteenth-century reglamentos (regulations or rules) for comercio libre, however, did not propose tariffs for revenue only, as free trade was defined in the century before the Second World War; nor did they propose to eliminate tariffs, as free trade is understood today. The title of the policy guidance for 1778—relevant because it increased confusion across a contested border by altering trade regulations in Louisiana but not Florida—is Regulation and royal tariffs.2 Comercio libre, similar to other mercantilist policies of the era, had a protectionist core.

As Fernando Aguerre Core observes, comercio libre manifested in contradictory ways across Spain’s empire.3 Recent work explains the policy in places with Atlantic and Gulf South connections. David Narrett characterizes comercio libre in the Louisiana-Florida borderlands as a “commercial door half-open,” meaning that in the 1780s it granted some non-Spanish merchants limited access to Spanish ports, the ability to import manufactured goods and export certain raw materials, and the permission to pay lower duties on an ad hoc basis. Paul Gilje casts 1795 as a watershed moment in which Spain granted duty-free trading rights—which he calls “free trade”—to American merchants in New Orleans. Elena Schneider and Adrian Finucane deal with Cuba. Finucane examines the period prior to comercio libre, exploring uneasy, interdependent relationships between Spanish and English merchants. Schneider shows how comercio libre increased the availability of enslaved laborers and expanded slavery; Havanans sought continued access to British trade and protected markets in Spain’s American empire.4

Other scholarship has expanded historians’ thinking about the merchants and filibusterers involved in the Creek deerskin trade during the time of comercio libre, but this essay departs from this work in its reinterpretation of tariffs. José Antonio Armillas Vicente opined in 1976 that opposition to Spanish tariffs stemmed from a combination of Creek “ignorance” and greedy American offers. William Coker and Thomas Watson dealt with the Scotsmen who obtained tariff exemptions from the Spanish through their work for the prominent trading firm Panton, Leslie and Company. Coker, Watson, and Narrett write of the opportunism that drove merchants’ and adventurers’ power grabs in the Louisiana-Florida borderlands. James Hill convincingly argues that when Creek leaders including Alexander McGillivray invoked the term “free trade,” they were referring to the “notion that nations had the right to select their own trade partners,” and this ability is what made them international. But Hill suggests that McGillivray did not mean for the term to refer “to an antitariff ideology,” and here we disagree.5 Sources in Spanish archives, which have been incompletely excerpted and published, document the half decade that McGillivray spent arguing against the levying of Spanish tariffs. This chapter’s revisiting of these sources finds that Creek leaders and predominantly anonymous Indigenous women responded knowingly to comercio libre and campaigned in talks and letters to obtain lower barriers to trade. Comercio libre’s policymakers rarely granted full exemptions from tariffs, making it even more significant when they opened the door to do so in 1789.

This revisionist interpretation of tariffs first delineates the borders of Creek homelands and discusses Spanish, English, and American claims to land and water in those homelands where comercio libre operated. These were homelands where non-Indigenous people imagined river borders that for decades they failed to map and to control, and where they struggled to enforce the policies they enacted. On the coast between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, Anglo-Europeans claimed four colonies: Georgia, East and West Florida, and Louisiana, which also encompassed parts of present-day Alabama and Tennessee. Semi-aqueous, “sustenant” places in these homelands were characterized by fertile, riverine land and towns and ocean-facing Spanish and English forts and trading houses. Although these claims were bounded by rivers and characterized by disputes over river boundaries, Robbie Ethridge explains that from river mouths on the Gulf Coast, European and American vessels were incapable of navigating above fall lines and further into Creek country. To travel long distances, Creeks and non-Indigenous traders used overland paths, which scholars interpret as physical roads and metaphorical relationships of kinship, alliance, and war. Using a path required permission and good relationships, but using a waterway required relationships, knowledge, and technology that Europeans lacked. Creeks, by contrast, possessed excellent riverine knowledge and power because of the positioning of their towns and agricultural fields above fall lines, the lightness of their water vessels, the seasonal floods that required learning about fords, and the wild water plants that women harvested to sustain communities.6

After considering these watery boundaries of Creek homelands, this essay draws on work about the Creek deerskin trade to explain continuities and changes during the period of comercio libre. In so doing, it pushes back against scholars’ contentions about the trade in dressed deerskins. According to current scholarship, throughout the eighteenth century Creeks sought peaceful, plentiful, and steady trade across borders. Trade followed clan networks and served the interests of different towns. This historiography concludes that by the era of comercio libre deerskins had depreciated almost 50 percent compared to pre-Revolutionary levels, and merchants sought undressed deerskins instead of the dressed deerskins that women prepared. Hunters acquired more debts, and young men supplanted the elders who had strived to maintain a gendered balance in the trade.7 This chapter discusses manuscript Spanish price schedules for dressed and undressed deerskins, and interprets them as evidence of Creek women seeking in 1784 to maintain trading power. Indigenous women’s marriages to Anglo-American traders had allowed them to preserve relationships of kinship and obligation earlier in the century; by century’s end those marriages enabled them to exploit Spanish dependence on foreign merchants and to maintain some trade in dressed deerskins. Finally, this essay explains why these relationships were ultimately incapable of protecting Creek homelands.

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Before the era of comercio libre the Spanish were ambivalent about trading with Native Americans in the Gulf South. Then, during the American Revolutionary War they captured Mobile (in 1780) and Pensacola (in 1781), becoming claimants to British trading places. Some background on earlier eighteenth-century borders, geographical knowledge, trading places, and movement of towns and people is necessary to understand a shift in Spanish attitudes: from a policy of ambivalence to a willingness to liberalize trade for Creeks.

Indigenous negotiators limited Europeans’ efforts to survey and mark the boundaries they claimed. Between 1763 and 1783 when the British claimed East and West Florida, the leader named Emesteseguo from the town of Little Tallassee on the Coosa River successfully confined British colonists between fall lines in Creek country and the sea coast. Representatives of the French and Spanish empires relied on the evidence of writers who had never traveled to the Americas and mapmakers whose knowledge was limited to coasts and some rivers as far as the tide flowed. Under the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the Spanish relinquished their claims to Florida and reacquired Louisiana from the French, who had earlier failed to clarify Louisiana’s boundaries. The treaty confirmed the Mississippi River as the border between Spanish claims to the west and British claims to the east without identifying a Louisiana-Florida border. The British hoped to open “corridors of settlement” along West Florida’s rivers and new trade paths to the Creeks. These ambitions resulted in the acquisition of geographic information about forts, harbors, and rivers. After 1783, when the Spanish regained their Florida claims, Spanish and US officials disputed west-east boundaries between Louisiana and West Florida, and north-south boundaries between Georgia and both Floridas.8

From Indigenous perspectives this space had long possessed clear coastal and riverine borders that differed from European borders. Creek leaders repeatedly explained that they had rented but not sold Atlantic- and Gulf-facing coastal land to the British and Spanish. As late as 1792, two speakers named Okillissa Chopka and Tustunie Opoia sent a talk reminding the Spanish, “The Land your people live on at St. Augustine, St. Marks & Pansacola is ours & only lent by us to you.”9 The Tombigbee River was Creek country’s westernmost border and its easternmost was the Savannah, which demarcated Creek lands from Cherokee lands. Between these two rivers were three south-flowing river networks that sustained Creek towns; one, the Oconee, Ocmulgee, and Altamaha, met the ocean on the Atlantic. The other two, the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Apalachicola; and the Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Alabama flowed into Gulf waters. Facing west from Creek country were the Choctaws, and facing north were Cherokees. Although European mapmakers were able to depict the locations of Creek towns, accessing them was another matter.10

As Elizabeth Ellis explains, these coalescent societies of the Gulf South were comprised of multinational settlements adjacent to foreigners living under different governments, which facilitated access to international markets. It was as common for inhabitants of Indigenous towns to move on rapidly as it was to relocate after staying more than a decade. Towns themselves moved, and consequently appear and disappear from colonial maps. Decentralized Indigenous power was exercised at the level of the town (talwa) and satellite town (talofa). Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Shawnees, Natchez, Seminoles, Yuchis, and Yamasees populated Creek talwas, which were more than just villages: the term referred to the larger group of people who shared council fires and square grounds, where political and cultural activities occurred. The Upper Creeks, whom the Spanish called the Talapuches or the Talapuz, had towns sited west of the Lower Creeks, along the Tallapoosa, Coosa, and Alabama rivers, with important towns at Little Tallassee, Muccolossus, Okfuskee, Okchai, and Tuckabatchee. Lower Creeks, whom the Spanish called Uchizes, had key towns on the Chattahoochee, Flint, and sometimes Ocmulgee rivers, including Apalachicola, Coweta, and Cussita. The Creeks who in the nineteenth century developed separate identities as Seminoles lived in the early eighteenth century around San Marcos de Apalache near the confluence of the Wakulla and St. Marks rivers, and along the St. Johns River (also known as the Alachua) in Florida. By the late eighteenth century Seminole towns are discernible on the Apalachicola, St. Marys, Suwanee, and Flint, and south from the Apalachicola River to Tampa Bay.11

Over the eighteenth century Creeks’ interest in Gulf trading places increased while their towns moved and they became reacquainted with Spanish trading partners. In the first part of the century, Lower Creeks relocated several towns to the Ocmulgee and Savannah Rivers to privilege interaction with Atlantic-facing English colonies. The 1773 New Purchase, a “land-for-debt agreement” in which British deerskin traders called in debts and pressured Creeks and Cherokees to cede more than two million acres on the Savannah River, helps to explain voyages by these townspeople to Cuba. Their diplomats boarded Havana-bound Spanish fishing vessels to search for an anti-British alliance and additional markets. In 1775 Escuchape (or Escotchaby), the Lower Creek mico (headman, or chief) of the town of Coweta (which by then was located on the Chattahoochee River), visited Havana to explain his town’s shifting trade priorities. Escuchape’s interpreter said that the English had declared war, and his townspeople had killed them “along with their shops and for this reason planned to spread their Establishment” to “Tampa Bay.” He and his war captains offered to negotiate on behalf of “the Indians of the Talapuz Nation.” From Tampa, they proposed maintaining with Cuba “a reciprocal Trade of Pelts, Horses and other fruits.” Cuba’s governor declined Escuchape’s export offer, saying that the Spanish and the English were at peace. He was unenthusiastic about the arrival of other visitors and offers to export to Havana “horses, Deer Pelts and other Goods which abound in their Lands.” Meanwhile in Upper Creek homelands, after 1763 communities led by Emesteseguo built new connections to the British via the southern path to Mobile and Pensacola. They cultivated alliances with new claimants after the Spanish captured Pensacola, by which point Pensacola had replaced Charleston as the deerskin trade’s most important port.12

Iberian policymakers’ interest in the deerskin trade increased when it became clear that Americans sought the Creek homelands that constituted Spanish and US claims. Offers such as Escuchape’s to export deerskins became appealing to the Spanish officials who learned about Anglo-American land hunger through reports from Upper Creek leaders. Strategists viewed Native Americans in Florida as subjects whose geopolitical power could be used to create “a barrier” that would preserve the zone that policymakers aspired to control: far west of Creek country, between New Orleans and the mines and markets of New Spain.13

The Bourbon Crown’s new policy of comercio libre first focused on these more valuable trading places, which were accessible via Creek paths and waterways. The policy’s implementation in Cuba (1765) and Louisiana (1768) resulted in increased migration to places where the import and export duties on some goods had been reduced, and Spanish officials granted exemptions on duties to certain people trading certain goods.14 The Spanish imposed less favorable trading conditions on American merchants than those they negotiated with Native Americans. The US government attempted to claim more river space. Before 1795 Spaniards denied US ships the principle of navigational rights, preventing vessels from navigating around Florida and to New Orleans. The Spanish channeled exports of American goods into Louisiana via two rivers—the Ohio, and then down the Mississippi—and charged duties as part of the policy of comercio libre (15 percent before 1788, 6 percent thereafter). While he was secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson cited the Law of Nations to try to persuade the Spanish that the Mississippi River should be “considered as a streight of the sea.” The land, he wrote, only rose above water level “here and there, in spots and slips,” implying that this was ocean space that should be shared. The Spanish position was that the Mississippi was not the sea; access via the coast remained forbidden to US pilots.15

By the time the Spanish started paying attention to Creeks, many aspects of their town politics and trade practices resembled those earlier in the century. Politics still operated through the towns, which retained designations of red for war or white for peace and treaty making; and Beloved Men (or town councilors) still introduced themselves to Spanish, British, French, and American people by explaining what town they represented. Trade paths still ran between towns and colonial ports in Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and Pensacola. Deerskins went to leather brokers in London, Bristol, and France for resale to leather manufacturers. The trade involved both men and women; men butchered hides from the white-tailed deer (ítchu), which they delivered to their wives’ towns, where women processed them into dressed deerskins. For most of the century the trade operated on credit, which hunters needed to obtain ammunition and powder to hunt, and goods and manufactured cloth to supply their kin. British traders required credit and multiple years of work to counteract logistical shipping and spoilage problems from worms. Before the New Purchase, trade debts had operated as a form of relationality and interdependence, and people waited multiple years before requiring repayment.16

Creeks continued to use marriage to regulate trade; women collectively managed land, and always married outside of their clan. Metawney, the daughter of a Coweta headman and Escuchape’s sister, married the Irishman George Galphin. From the plantation called Silver Bluff that Galphin built on Metawney’s land, Galphin nurtured Lower Creek connections. When the American Revolution broke out, he threw his support behind the Americans, who misunderstood the nature of town politics and who sought his assistance to negotiate the neutrality of the entire Creek nation. After 1783, once the Spanish claimed both Floridas, their trade strategy with Creeks depended on a merchant whose traders were the men married to Creek women. In 1783 the Spanish recognized Creek women’s exogamy (though they failed to understand it) by describing traders as “white men married to Indian women and domiciled in said Nation.” On the Georgia-Florida border these men became known as Crackers. Through marriage, Creek townswomen opened their towns to their husbands, who then became honorary members of their wives’ clans and eligible to claim hospitality from kin when traveling. A mico whose close female relatives married white traders could expel fraudsters, monitor licenses, and kill rulebreakers. Creek women politicked, forged political networks, solicited business from clan relations, and served as interpreters. They benefited from favorable trade rates and gifts for their families.17

Key aspects of gender and leadership roles had started to change. More trade in raw deerskins occurred beyond a town’s boundaries and without the labor of women, or the mico’s consent. Demand for raw deerskins increased in European markets around midcentury, which devalued women’s prepared hides. Townspeople from Okfuskee preferred to sell undressed deerskins by the 1760s and 1770s. A shift in politics had also occurred, which deemphasized middle age as a measure of leadership ability. In the 1780s Spanish and American officials misconstrued the power of younger Beloved Men and their capacity to represent one nation constituted by unified towns. Officials’ perceptions in turn granted some of those men more actual power to obtain trade gifts for redistribution to their kin, and to change Spanish trade rules. While some Creek men became wealthy merchants, slavers, and planters, Creek women sought to enhance older and develop newer forms of economic power. Some began to grow, spin, and trade cotton, while those considered in this chapter sought from the Spanish the opportunity to continue trading dressed deerskins.18

When the Spanish applied comercio libre to Creek homelands in East and West Florida that they claimed on paper but did not control in practice, they first granted several key foreigners authorization to trade. The terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris required Britons in the Floridas to leave within eighteen months. William Panton and his partner, Frank Leslie—Scots merchants who had moved to East Florida as Loyalists during the war—avoided this obligation because the Creek women married to Panton’s traders demanded that they be allowed to stay. Spanish colonial governors pointed to Spain’s lack of manufactured goods and deerskin markets and argued for a savvy diplomatic policy change that permitted the continued residence of non-Spanish traders working for the British firm Panton, Leslie and Company. Thus British subjects secured permission—unusual at the time because officials granted it explicitly, rather than ignoring illicit trade—to take over Atlantic-facing storehouses in San Agustín (Saint Augustine) and on Río San Juan (the St. Johns River) to work in the Indigenous territory that the Spanish claimed. The Spanish were used to trading at a loss to maintain what remained of Spain’s claims to land, and they increased their spending on Native American affairs from $4,000 in 1769 to $55,209 in 1794.19 By virtue of Creek intermarriage, the relaxations to comercio libre that followed allowed more trade between Spanish ports and select foreign ports; the next allowed for the reduction in duties; and the most generous changes allowed some people exemptions from import and export duties entirely. Creek townspeople fell into the last camp of duty exemptions because the Spanish lacked knowledge about two related, important topics.

The Spanish did not know what they needed to know about rivers in Florida, and they were ignorant of Indigenous trading preferences. Riverine knowledge was necessary to resolve boundary disputes with the United States. The Spanish described the Apalachicola, St. Marys, and St. Johns Rivers in Creek and Seminole homelands as so labyrinthine that they created problems claiming land and conducting trade. The Apalachicola led to Lower Creek towns on the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers and had been a recognized border between East and West Florida since 1763. The St. Marys was significant because since 1763 (but not for the first time) it had served as a north-south boundary between Georgia and East Florida, but it was also a Seminole and Cracker waterway settled by families and their free-ranging cattle. After 1782 when the Spanish claimed the Floridas, the Americans claimed a boundary further south, on the St. Johns, which Seminoles also controlled. A confidential 1788 report complained about the lack of any boundary “between East Florida and the Americans” other than the St. Marys, and observed that neither this river nor the Apalachicola had “their courses” established with any “degree of precision.”20

Spanish struggles to map and to monitor waterways allowed nonstate actors to attempt to claim territory and to offer better trading terms to Creeks and Seminoles. From towns on the Flint River, the Seminole leaders Okaiegigie (Thomas Perryman) and Kenhagee (William or Billy Perryman) forged relationships with the adventurer William Augustus Bowles that sought to address Lower Creek and Seminole townspeople’s disillusionment with Spain and the United States. The Spanish interrogated Bowles’s associates, whom they suspected of trading with Creeks, reminding them that foreign boats were prohibited from trading on the Gulf coast. In 1799 Bowles was said to be at the mouth of the Apalachicola River. In 1801 rumors placed him at the mouth of the Manatee River on Tampa Bay with Kinache, the mico of the town of Mikasuki (or Miccosukee), “with the intent” to establish “a house of commerce.” The last governor of Spanish Louisiana asserted that Bowles had aspired to open trade on the entire coast from Panzacola to San Agustín. Bowles issued numerous proclamations declaring open ports at the mouths of the Apalachicola and Duck Rivers and Tampa Bay, and in a 1799 proclamation he introduced import duties for revenue only on liquor and all foreign goods. He is probably the sole non-Indigenous person in this chapter whose trade policies aligned with free trade as people understood it at the time. His proclamations responded to Creek and Seminole repulsion at export tariffs levied on their deerskins.21

In addition to seeking optimal trade conditions, Creeks and Seminoles also scuttled American and Spanish attempts to demarcate their homelands. During the joint Florida boundary survey of 1798 to 1800 to map boundaries agreed in the 1795 Spanish-American Treaty of San Lorenzo, astronomers serving both countries faltered in the face of imagined and real interference. Various advisors recommended that the surveyors avoid Native American paths and instead enter the Pearl, Mobile, and Apalachicola Rivers from the sea. In 1799 it took the surveyors three days to find “the real and navigable channel” of the Chattahoochee River with the help of a pilot who, it transpired, “knew no more of the coast” than the surveyors. In the end the surveyors fixed one boundary marker in the Okefenokee Swamp, abandoned the survey line further west, sailed around the Florida peninsula, and tried again from the east. These difficulties arose when Creeks from “the shore of taukelaukene”—possibly townspeople of Toccogulegau on the Flint River—stole the surveyors’ domesticated animals and baggage, and when others set fire to trees in the swamp.22

As a result of these ongoing gaps in geographical knowledge, the Spanish liberalized their trade regulations in Creek territory. The Scots-Creek leader Alexander McGillivray—also known as Hoboi-Hili-Miko, or the Good Child King—sent letters educating Spanish governors and officials about Creek trading preferences and river travel. In 1801 Juan Ventura Morales misremembered the then-deceased McGillivray as the principal headman of the Upper Creeks, Lower Creeks, and Seminoles, but in reality he represented only some Abeika, Tallapoosa, and Alabama towns. McGillivray, like his mother, Sehoy Marchand, belonged to the influential Wind Clan—as his father, the Scots trader Lachlan McGillivray, would have belonged when traveling to trade. He was part of the new generation of Beloved Men who drew their authority from their matrilineal clan, but also from their youth and unprecedented property-holding.23

At least in 1784, McGillivray needed help communicating his ideas to Spanish officials. He had learned Greek and Latin at school in Charleston.24 He admitted, however, that he spoke “no Spanish nor French.” Instead, he relied on interpreters. In 1788 over “a matter of great Importance to us,” he requested translations of Spanish correspondence. In 1789 he worried to Panton about the shortage of interpreters, and the following year he complained to Leslie that the Spanish considered him only “worth the miserable pay of an interpreter.”25 He needed translators, acknowledged that their pay was low, but also felt that he served a higher calling. One of his sisters, Sophia Durant, was known to speak for him during Creek council meetings, and there is at least one mention in McGillivray’s correspondence of his sending a letter “by my Sister.” Sophia Durant’s work in this role suggests both the continuing importance of women interpreters in Creek diplomacy, as well as some of their male relatives’ dismissal of their talents.26

Through Sophia and other linguists, beginning in 1784 Alexander McGillivray promoted Gulf trade locations, explaining to the Spanish that his townspeople preferred trading in West Florida over trade with the Americans. He proposed that the Spanish bring trade goods to Mobile, from whence he would “Supply my People by Water Carriage,” which was “preferable to pack Horses.” The fall lines on the Tallapoosa, Coosa, and Alabama Rivers posed no impediment to his plans to redistribute goods to his townspeople. In 1785 he expressed his hope on behalf of the Creeks, Chickasaws, and Cherokees that trade would be “established on the most permanent footing as the Spanish had promised them” at a treaty.27

During the lead-up to and negotiations during the 1784 Treaty of Pensacola, McGillivray advocated for better trading conditions. Mentions of dressed deerskins are evident in the treaty documents. He claimed in January 1784, “As for Raw & drest deer Skins, I can purchase any Quantity whatever, if they would turn to good account.”28 The treaty’s first article established a defensive alliance in which Creek and other Indigenous signatories agreed to defend Spanish territory west of Creek homelands, and the Spanish pledged protection against Georgians’ encroachment. The treaty also lifted restrictions on where British traders working for the Spanish could live, work, sail, and import, and provides scholars with evidence of Indigenous women’s continued interest in selling peletería pasada (dressed deerskins), in addition to men’s work selling raw deerskins in the hair, or al pelo. The treaty’s eleventh article stated that traders were not permitted to trade secretly “in the woods and other private places” and had to trade in towns. Earlier scholarship averring that the Spanish did not distinguish between dressed and raw deerskins at the treaty does not consider the tariff documentation produced, which contains price schedules for goods exchangeable for both types of hides. Peletería pasada is listed in the price schedule (tarifa) as exchangeable for stroud and duffel blankets, ruffled shirts, binding, and trading guns, but not specified as exchangeable for plain or check shirts, calico, cotton, silk handkerchiefs, powder, balls, flints, hatchets, or looking glasses. John Walton Caughey, who published many of McGillivray’s letters as well as a version of the price schedule, translated this latter document from Spanish to English by referring to “dress Skins” rather than “dressed,” which has likely contributed to scholars’ confusion.29 Of course it is possible that McGillivray overstated his abilities to supply dressed deerskins, and it is important to acknowledge that treaties were notoriously difficult to fulfill and enforce. There is nevertheless more evidence of dressed deerskins in Creek and Spanish trading spaces than scholars have appreciated.

By 1785 Panton, Leslie and Company, which the Spanish came to call La Casa de Panton (Panton’s house), had opened or taken over trading factories in San Agustín, on Río San Juan, in St. Marks (which became known as San Marcos de Apalache) at the confluence of the St. Marks and Wakulla rivers, and trading with “los Indios Talapuches” in Pensacola. The Spanish further liberalized trade by permitting the company’s vessels to trade with foreign ports, including the Caribbean, the United States, and London. Then, the Spanish began to grant the company exemptions from import and export duties, as comercio libre permitted in exceptional circumstances.30

Those duty exemptions resulted from McGillivray’s antitariff arguments, which he contextualized with Indigenous trading preferences. In 1785 McGillivray asked in a letter what good it would do to “venerate the present duties imposed . . . especially those of the export of skins” and urged the adoption of “the most comfortable terms possible,” including the removal of “dutys on the export of skins.” In 1787 he reminded the Spanish that San Marcos had been established “upon the Condition” that the Spanish commandant at the fort did not interfere with Native Americans’ trade—a provision that explicitly mentioned “dutys or Imposition or restrictions . . . laid on our Imports & exports here” as examples of interference. A year later McGillivray said that San Marcos was a Creek port that should be freed from Spanish duties because the British had restored the district to the Creeks before Spain regained the Floridas. In 1789 he acknowledged that the Spanish viewed duties as a “counterweight” to trade gifts and spending on diplomacy, but insisted, “This in reality is too much to load on a Poor Indian, whose constitution is such that he is always in need of favors rather than in a state to pay duties.” This last letter, which Caughey excerpted in his collection of McGillivray’s correspondence, excludes the previous sentence. On March 23 of that year, a response to McGillivray’s advocacy arrived as a royal order that granted La Casa de Panton an exemption from import and export duties on articles “of the Indian trade.” In September these exemptions were explicitly applied to the company’s trading houses in Panzacola and Movila, and to San Marcos in 1790. Panton received retroactive exemptions from duties for the year 1788, because this was the year in which he submitted his request. Historians and some Spanish officials interpret the company’s trading rights as a monopoly. However, the Spanish court never granted Panton this exclusive privilege, and dubbing the arrangement a monopoly fails to center Creeks’ expectations that they would trade simultaneously across imperial borders.31

Additional Creek intervention in trade practices is evident in their use of price schedules. Anglo-Europeans published price schedules for trade goods throughout the colonial period in response to Native Americans’ complaints about trade abuses. Issues with the 1784 tarifa indicate that Spanish price schedules similarly failed to eliminate corruption. After 1789 Panton refused to commit to Spanish price schedules agreed during the treaty, stating that he would seek to sell as cheap as or cheaper than American traders. Charleston merchants, meanwhile, sold blankets to Native Americans at a markup of 300 percent, and a 1790 observer estimated that Panton sold wares to Creeks at 500 percent of the cost. Creeks traded across non-Native borders by maintaining the ability to disregard price schedules, but so doing also resulted in higher prices on goods.32

US War Department officials knew that Creeks preferred Spanish trade, and the government accordingly adjusted its tariffs. Panton would claim that since the end of the American Revolution, his company had exported at least 124,000 deerskins per year, of which half to three-quarters probably came from Creek towns. At the 1790 Treaty of New York between the United States and the Creeks represented by McGillivray, the United States changed its tariffs. A secret article of the treaty—that required George Washington to seek Senate approval—designated people who could import up to $60,000 worth of duty-free goods for the Creek trade. It also offered McGillivray, Panton, and Leslie the opportunity to move their operations back to the United States. But though some Upper Creek micos and the US government agreed to the treaty on paper, Lower Creek and Seminole representatives were not invited to the treaty, and Bowles was still at large. The US government’s Creek factory—once it was established on the St. Marys River at Colerain in 1796—exported just 25,000 deerskins annually.33

By 1794 Spain’s First Secretary of State would explain that comercio libre was “the only way to preserve Louisiana, and to limit the advances and inordinate ambition of the United States.” The Spanish Crown introduced the cédula of 1793 and extended comercio libre to Spanish Florida within this context, having failed to do so explicitly when it introduced comercio libre to New Spain in 1789.34 The new cédula permitted Spanish residents in Louisiana and the Floridas to trade with people in Europe and America, but still required them to pay tariffs. For Creeks, very little about trade relationships changed with the cédula. In January 1794 Panton received reassurance that the new rules did not apply to his company. Because of their waterways and their exploitation of comercio libre’s exemptions, Creeks increased their capacity to trade on the Gulf, enjoyed the lowest duties and then duty-free trading, maintained a steady supply of goods, and retained their abilities to trade across fictional non-Native borders.35

*  *  *

This essay conveys the complexity of comercio libre by explaining with greater precision how it worked along Creek and Seminole trade networks on the rivers of their homelands. Creek townspeople not only received tariff exemptions made available through comercio libre: they also protected some women’s production of dressed deerskins and negotiated flexible price schedules that maintained international trade. It is true that the demand for deerskins al pelo and a shift toward more centralized, patriarchal governance had pushed many women out of their role in the deerskin trade. It is also clear, however, that in the Gulf spaces that Spain claimed, intermarriage with Creek women still secured and informed trade. Comercio libre, which was not free trade, was instead a more flexible trade policy that allowed tariff exemptions in limited circumstances. The best and freest trade conditions for Creeks in riverine towns emerged because they could opt out of comercio libre’s tariffs and trade with multiple nations.

It should now be possible for readers to visualize in space the places where comercio libre applied. In July 1789 Vicente Folch said that according to his “way of thinking,” McGillivray hoped “to obtain a seaport in order to escape the tariffs.”36 In reality, McGillivray needed no seaport because Creek townspeople escaped tariffs via rivers. Duty exemptions took effect above the fall line on waterways that flowed south into the Gulf and the Atlantic. These exemptions manifested at the storehouses that Panton and Leslie opened before and after changes to the policy: on the St. Johns River, the Wakulla River near San Marcos, and in San Agustín (1783); in Panzacola (1785); Movila (1790); New Orleans and Havana (1790); and on the Mississippi at Las Barrancas, or Chickasaw Bluffs (1795).37 To see the deerskin trade’s borders and the people who crossed them requires an act of imagination. Readers should picture deerskin factories in ports claimed by Spain, Britain, and the United States, traders with Muscogee wives circulating between towns, and Beloved Men and their translated letters on the move between towns and Gulf nodes working to obtain tariff exemptions. Such acts of imagination become more feasible after comparing archival sources with older collections of published letters.

Although Creeks won some of the best trading concessions at the time and were able to maximize the trade benefits of comercio libre from 1784 to the century’s end, they still lost their land. The people with whom they traded started charging interest on debts around the same time that they won the tariff exemptions, and there was a disruption to how credit and debt worked to maintain relationships. From the 1780s to the 1790s, Creek leaders used trade to preserve their homelands, but as townspeople’s debts to traders increased, so did the pressure to cede land. Ultimately, the pressure came from people who worked for Spain but were not Spanish. Officials had started to allow Panton’s traders to extend lines of credit in 1784, the same year that the Treaty of Pensacola pledged protection against land-hungry Georgians. Panton, Leslie and Company also started charging 6 percent interest on Creeks’ debts without their knowledge. The nature of debt changed to make long-term credit unviable.38 Continuing the practice that the British promulgated with the New Purchase of 1773, Scots traders working for the Spanish south of the border and government officials working for the United States would demand land when Muscogees proved unable to settle the debts that had increased without their knowledge.

As Spanish and US negotiators finalized riverine boundaries, they claimed more Creek homelands. The 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo fixed the US-Spanish northern border of Florida. It agreed that trade with Indigenous peoples should be mutually beneficial to Spain and the United States, which is when representatives from both nations began working together to survey Creek waterways. The merchant John Forbes, who took over when Panton died in 1801, formed good relationships with US officials. When Forbes claimed that Lower Creeks and Seminoles owed him money, Benjamin Hawkins, US agent to the Creeks, suggested land cessions as a solution. The 1804 Forbes Purchase extracted from Lower Creeks and Seminoles 1.4 million acres in West Florida between the Wakulla and Apalachicola Rivers. That year, the US Congress passed the Mobile Act, declaring that all navigable rivers that emptied into the Gulf of Mexico were rivers in US territory.39 As readers know, a country’s ability to claim riverine space did not confer the ability to control it. US Indian Department officials had opened a factory on the St. Marys River, but their knowledge of the waterway remained incomplete because its source was the swamp that surveyors had abandoned. Their hunger for knowledge about Indigenous waterways remained insatiable.

Notes

1. For comments the author thanks Alejandra Dubcovsky, Rebecca Earle, Kim Gruenwald, Jessica Choppin Roney, Marc-William Palen, David Silkenat, and attendees at the American History seminar at Edinburgh University and the British Group of Early American Historians’ conference at Cardiff University. The Leverhulme Trust funded the research in Seville on which this chapter is based (Grant ref: RF-20202-150\).
2. 1.  Arthur Preston Whitaker, “Historical Introduction,” in Arthur Preston Whitaker, trans. and ed., Documents Relating to the Commercial Policy of Spain in the Floridas, With Incidental Reference to Louisiana (DeLand, 1931), i–lix, esp. xix.
3. 2.  Jack D. L. Holmes, “Some Economic Problems of Spanish Governors of Louisiana,” Hispanic American Historical Review 42, no. 4 (1962): 521–43, esp. 529n43; Whitaker, “Historical Introduction,” xxiin4, xxiii; Reglamento y aranceles reales para el comercio libre de España a Indias de 12. de octubre de 1778 (Madrid, 1778).
4. 3.  Fernando Aguerre Core, “Comercio libre y redes transatlánticas: la emigración española a Montevideo—de 1790 a 1810—y el tránsito de la autonomía a la independencia,” Colonial Latin American Review 27, no. 2 (2018): 243–60, esp. 243; Ernesto Bassi, An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Duke University Press, 2016), 29–30; Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, Apogee of Empire: Spain and New Spain in the Age of Charles III, 1759–1789 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 58; Janice Borton Miller, “The Struggle for Free Trade in East Florida and the Cédula of 1793,” Florida Historical Quarterly 55, no. 1 (July 1976): 48–59. For a similar point about the amorphousness of free trade in the American context, see Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 35, 337. For the Anglo-American context see Marc-William Palen, The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846–1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016); Palen, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (Princeton University Press, 2024), esp. 5.
5. 4.  David Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico: Negotiating Allegiance in the Spanish and Southern Indian Borderlands, 1783–1801,” Florida Historical Quarterly 96, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 135–73, esp. 152 (“commercial door”); David Narrett, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762–1803 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 117; Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 131; Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 192, 252, 295; Adrian Finucane, The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
6. 5.  José Antonio Armillas Vicente, “La Gran Confederación India: Interacción Hispano-Angloamericana con las naciones indias del Sudeste norteamericano a fines del S. XVIII,” in Estudios Sobre Politica Indigenista Española en América, vol. II, ed. Seminario de Historia de America (Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid, 1976), 249–66, esp. 251; William S. Coker and Thomas D. Watson, Indian Traders of the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands: Panton, Leslie & Company and John Forbes & Company, 1783–1847 (University of West Florida Press, 1986); Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico,” 135–73; Narrett, Adventurism and Empire; James L. Hill, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 2, 14, 69 (quotes).
7. 6.  Thomas Wickman, “Our Best Places: Gender, Food Sovereignty, and Miantonomi’s Kin on the Connecticut River,” Early American Studies 19, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 215–63, esp. 218 (“sustenant”); Lissa K. Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea (University of Washington Press, 2012); Andrew Lipman, The Saltwater Frontier: Indians and the Contest for the American Coast (Yale University Press, 2015); Renaud Morieux, “Anglo-French Fishing Disputes and Maritime Boundaries in the North Atlantic, 1700–1850,” in Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era: Essays in Honor of Robert C. Ritchie, ed. Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas (Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2015), 41–75; Joshua L. Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs, an Indigenous Borderlands People (Yale University Press, 2015); Bassi, An Aqueous Territory; Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indigenous Prosperity and American Conquest: Indian Women of the Ohio River Valley, 1690–1792 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2018), esp. 6; Michelle Currie Navakas, Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Steven C. Hahn, “The Cussita Migration Legend: History, Ideology, and the Politics of Mythmaking,” in Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians, ed. Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge (University of Alabama Press, 2006), 57–93, esp. 62; Joshua A. Piker, “‘White & Clean’ & Contested: Creek Towns and Trading Paths in the Aftermath of the Seven Years’ War,” Ethnohistory 50, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 315–47; James Taylor Carson, Making an Atlantic World: Circles, Paths, and Stories for the Colonial South (University of Tennessee Press, 2007); Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 121–23; Charlotte Biggs, “Aspirational Designs, Interdependency, and Borders: An Analysis of Muscogee Border-Policy (1764–1790)” (Master’s diss., Cardiff University, 2022); Alejandra Dubcovsky, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (Harvard University Press, 2016), 15; Steven Peach, Rivers of Power: Creek Political Culture in the Native South, 1750–1815 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).
8. 7.  Kathryn E. Holland Braund, Deerskins & Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685–1815, 2nd ed. (University of Nebraska Press, 2008 [1993]), xix, 11–12, 58, 71, 178; Joshua Aaron Piker, Okfuskee: A Creek Indian Town in Colonial America (Harvard University Press, 2004); Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Claudio Saunt, “‘Domestick . . . Quiet being broke’: Gender Conflict Among Creek Indians in the Eighteenth Century,” in Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830, ed. Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 151–74, esp. 161.
9. 8.  Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 11; S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America Before Independence (Harvard University Press, 2017), 5 (“corridors”), 87, 96, 168; Finucane, The Temptations of Trade, 153; Narrett, Adventurism and Empire, 16, 24; Thomas D. Watson, “Strivings for Sovereignty: Alexander McGillivray, Creek Warfare and Diplomacy, 1783–1790,” Florida Historical Quarterly 58, no. 4 (April 1980): 400–14, esp. 400–401.
10. 9.  “A Talk from the Kings, Chiefs & Warriors of the Lower Creek Nation to Captn Pedro Olivier Comisario Español, July 3, 1792,” in John Walton Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 2nd ed. (University of Oklahoma Press, 1959 [1938]), 314.
11. 10.  Hill, Creek Internationalism, 25; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 3; Edelson, The New Map of Empire, 87, 93, 96, 168.
12. 11.  Steven C. Hahn, The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670–1763 (University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Elizabeth N. Ellis, The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 5, 12, 126, 236; Hill, Creek Internationalism, xv, 9, 216n9; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 6–7, 27; [Spanish interrogation of William Young, Juan Mincer, Josef Weaver, Fort San Marcos de Apalache, 4 March 1793], Papeles de Cuba, 1447, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter PC, AGI); Jennifer Monroe McCutchen, “‘More Advantageous to Be with Spaniards’: Gunpowder and Creek-Spanish Encounters in Cuba, 1763–1783,” Terrae Incognitae 52, no. 3 (2020): 245–60, esp. 251; [Spanish translation and extract of a letter from William Panton, sent by Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet to the Conde de Aranda, New Orleans, 8 January 1793], PC, 1447, AGI; Brent R. Weisman, “The Plantation System of the Florida Seminole Indians and Black Seminoles During the Colonial Era,” in Colonial Plantations and Economy in Florida, ed. Jane Landers (University Press of Florida, 2000), 136–49, esp. 138, 142.
13. 12.  Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 38; James L. Hill, “‘Bring them what they lack’: Spanish-Creek Exchange and Alliance Making in a Maritime Borderland, 1763–1783,” Early American Studies 12, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 36–67, esp. 39; McCutchen, “‘More Advantageous to Be with Spaniards,’” 255 (“land-for-debt”); Chad McCutchen and Jennifer Monroe McCutchen in this volume, “‘Playing the Old Game of Double’: Navigating Creek and Spanish Geopolitics in the Post-Revolutionary Gulf South,” 215–41; Edelson, The New Map of Empire, 283; Bryan Rindfleisch, “The ‘Owner of the Town Ground, Who Overrules All When on the Spot’: Escotchaby of Coweta and the Politics of Personal Networking in Creek Country, 1740–1780,” Native South 9, no. 1 (2016): 54–88; “Don Rafael de la Luz, Interim Senior Assistant to the Plaza of Havana, 2 May 1775,” and “Don Rafael de la Luz, rank of Infantry Captain of the Royal Armies and senior Assistant of the Plaza of Havana; Havana, 14 January 1776,” in “Official Spanish Correspondence Pertaining to Relations with the Uchiz Indians: Section 1 Letters from 1771–1776,” Florida History Online, https://history.domains.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/projects-proj-b-p-html/projects-uchize-index-html/correspondence-pertaining-to-relations-with-the-uchiz-indians/#2-May-1775 and https://history.domains.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/projects-proj-b-p-html/projects-uchize-index-html/correspondence-pertaining-to-relations-with-the-uchiz-indians/#14-January-1776 [accessed 16 December 2024]; Piker, “‘White & Clean’ & Contested,” 327; J. Leitch Wright Jr., “Foreword,” in Coker and Watson, Indian Traders of the Southeastern Spanish Borderlands, ix–xiii, esp. x.
14. 13.  “Confidential instructions given by the King to the Suprema Junta de Estado,” the Palace, July 8, 1787, in Whitaker, Documents, 63 (“a barrier”); David J. Weber, “Bourbons and Bárbaros: Center and Periphery in the Reshaping of Spanish Indian Policy,” in Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820, ed. Christine Daniels and Michael V. Kennedy (Routledge, 2002), 79–103, esp. 81; Armillas Vicente, “La Gran Confederación India,” 249; Whitaker, “Historical Introduction,” in Whitaker, Documents, xix, xxii; Carmen de la Guardia Herrero, “The Experience of a Loss: Spain, Florida, and the United States (1783–1833),” in La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence, ed. Viviana Díaz Balsera and Rachel A. May (University Press of Florida, 2014), 141–64, esp. 143; Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 119–20; Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 337.
15. 14.  Barbara H. Stein and Stanley J. Stein, Edge of Crisis: War and Trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 1789–1808 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 131; Schneider, The Occupation of Havana, 252, 271, 279; Holmes, “Some Economic Problems of Spanish Governors of Louisiana,” 527, 532–33.
16. 15.  Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico,” 152; Holmes, “Some Economic Problems of Spanish Governors of Louisiana,” 533; Thomas Jefferson, “Report on Negotiations with Spain, 18 March 1792,” Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-23-02-0259 [accessed October 26, 2022]; Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 131; Kim M. Gruenwald, “When a River Is a Border: Rivalries and Commercial Networks in the Riverine West,” 151–52.
17. 16.  Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 7, 53–54, 61, 171; Piker, Okfuskee, 156.
18. 17.  Bryan C. Rindfleisch, George Galphin’s Intimate Empire: The Creek Indians, Family, and Colonialism in Early America (University of Alabama Press, 2019), 117; Rindfleisch, “The ‘Owner of the Town Ground,’” 54–88; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 46; Rachel B. Herrmann, No Useless Mouth: Waging War and Fighting Hunger in the American Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2019), 100; [Arturo O’Neill to Bernardo de Gálvez], Pensacola, 24 March 1783, 326r, PC 36, ED_143_R_081, AGI (“Hombres blancos casados con Indias”; translation mine); “Report by Don Vicente Zéspedes, St. Augustine, Florida, June 20, 1790—duplicate,” in James A. Lewis, “Cracker, Spanish Florida Style,” Florida Historical Quarterly 63 (October 1984): 184–204; Megan Kate Nelson, Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp (University of Georgia Press, 2005), 46–7, 119; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 75, 78, 83; Theda Perdue, “‘A Sprightly Lover Is the Most Prevailing Missionary’: Intermarriage Between Europeans and Indians in the Eighteenth-Century South,” in Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians, ed. Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge (University of Alabama Press, 2006), 165–78, esp. 170; Andrew K. Frank, “Taking the State Out: Seminoles and Creeks in Late Eighteenth-Century Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 84, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 10–27, esp. 23; Hill, Creek Internationalism, 56.
19. 18.  Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 21; Saunt, “‘Domestick . . . Quiet being broke,’” 153, 157, 163; Piker, Okfuskee, 154.
20. 19.  “Summary of a representation by Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent relative to the commerce of West Florida and Louisiana,” October 4, 1781, and “Summary of a representation of 1778 by Manuel de las Heras relative to the decay of commerce, El Pardo, January 9, 1779 [to Count Floridablanca],” in Whitaker, Documents, 3–10, 23–29; Holmes, “Spanish Treaties with West Florida Indians, 1784–1802,” Florida Historical Quarterly 48, no. 2 (October 1969): 140–54, esp. 149; Frank, “Taking the State Out,” 24; Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico,” 136; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 56.
21. 20.  Lawrence Shaw Mayo, The St. Mary’s River: A Boundary (Privately printed, 1914), 24; “Vicente Manuel de Céspedes, Governor of East Florida, to the Marqués de Sonora enclosing a description of East Florida,” St. Augustine, May 12, 1787, and “Discourse by José Salcedo relative to the cession of East Florida to the English,” San Ildefonso, August 20, 1788, in Whitaker, Documents, 49–61, 75–99 (quotes, 59, 95–97).
22. 21.  Cameron B. Strang, Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 2–3; Hill, Creek Internationalism, 78–9, 84–5, 231n3, 233n16; [Spanish Interrogation of William Young, Juan Mincer, Josef Weaver, Fort San Marcos de Apalache, 4 March 1793], PC, 1447, AGI; [Vicente Folch to the Marques de Casa Calvo], Pensacola, 21 November 1799, ff. 200v–201r, PC, 2355, AGI; Jacob DuBreuil to the Marqués de Casa Calvo, San Marcos de Apalache, 29 March 1801, f. 14r, PC, 2355, AGI (“con el yntento de Formar alli casa de Comercio”); William Augustus Bowles, “Proclamation,” Apalachicola, 26 November 1799, f. 431r, PC, 2366, ED_145_R_048; [Juan Manuel de Salcedo to the Marques de Someruelo], [n.p.], 9 July 1803, f. 491rv, PC, 2355, AGI.
23. 22.  Strang, Frontiers of Science, 130; [Stephen Minor to Manuel Gayoso de Lemos], Chiscotosa Camp, Chattahoochee, 5 August 1799, f. 651v, PC, 2355, AGI; [Information from Manuel Gayoso de Lemos sent to Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet], to Luis de Las Casas, New Orleans, 13 September 1796, PC, 1447, AGI; [Stephen Minor to Manuel Gayoso de Lemos], Chiscotosa Camp, Chattahoochee, 5 August 1799, f. 651r (“knew no more”), PC, 2355, AGI; Estevan Minor, Andrew Ellicott, Thomas Power, and David Gillespie, Cumberland Island, 9 April 1800, ff. 676r, 689r, PC, 2355, AGI; Nelson, Trembling Earth, 72; Estevan Minor and Nicholas D[aunoy?] to Vicente Folch, Flint River, 24 September 1799, 639v, PC, 2355 (“the shore of”); Steven C. Hahn, “‘They Look upon the Yuchis as Their Vassals’: An Early History of Yuchi-Creek Political Relations,” in Yuchi Indian Histories Before the Removal Era, ed. Jason Baird Jackson (University of Nebraska Press, 2012), 123–53, esp. 116.
24. 23.  Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 3; [Juan Ventura Morales to the Secretary of State, New Orleans, 31 December 1801], Santo Domingo, 2670 (hereafter SD), C_02634, f. 168r, AGI; “O’Neill to Ezpeleta, October 19, 1783,” in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 62; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 67–89; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 21, 45–46.
25. 24.  Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 15.
26. 25.  “McGillivray to O’Neill, February 5, 1784,” in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 70 (“no Spanish); “McGillivray to Miró, June 12, 1788,” in ibid., 83 (“a matter”); “McGillivray to Panton, August 10, 1789,” in ibid., 249; “McGillivray to Leslie, May 20, 1790,” in ibid., 263 (“worth the”).
27. 26.  “McGillivray to O’Neill, January 3, 1784,” in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 67 (“by my”); Albert James Pickett, History of Alabama and Incidentally of Georgia and Mississippi, from the Earliest Period (Robert C. Randolph, 1896), 419; Felicity Donohoe, “‘Decoying Them Within’: Creek Gender Identities and the Subversion of Civilization,” in Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas, ed. Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 187–205, esp. 204n27.
28. 27.  “McGillivray to O’Neill, January 1, 1784,” in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 65 (“Supply my”); [Spanish translation, Alexander McGillivray to Arturo O’Neill], Pensacola, 24 July 1785, f. 1rv, PC, 2352 (“sea establecido en el pie mas permanente como de les prometio”).
29. 28.  “McGillivray to O’Neill, January 3, 1784,” in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 67.
30. 29.  Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico,” 139; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 173. For earlier scholarship on the treaty and tariffs see Holmes, “Spanish Treaties with West Florida Indians,” 142; Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 59, 59n27; Saunt, “Domestick . . . Quiet being broke,’” 157. For the treaty documents see “Spanish Treaty with Talapuche Indians, May 31, 1784, Articles of Convention Signed at Fort of Pensacola, Florida,” Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib000919 [accessed February 16, 2023]; “Tarifa para el comercio de la nacion Crick, ó Talapouche en el Congreso general celebrado en Panzacola los días treinta, y uno de Mayo y primo. de Junio de este año de mil setecientos ochenta y quatro,” [after 1 June 1784], ff. 590rv, PC 117C, ED_144_032, AGI; John Walton Caughey, “Alexander McGillivray and the Creek Crisis, 1783–1784,” in New Spain and the Anglo-American West: Historical Contributions Presented to Herbert Eugene Bolton, vol. 2, ed. William C. Binkley, Cardinal Goodwin, and J. Fred Rippy (1932), 263–88, esp. 285–86.
31. 30.  Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico,” 139; [Martin Navarro], Pensacola, 16 September 1785, 290v, SD 2670, C_02635, AGI; [Juan Francisco Arnaud de Courville, index of royal orders and papers related to permissions granted to Panton and Leslie], Pensacola, 23 December 1809, ff. 276rv (“los Indios Talapuches”), 283v, SD, 2670, C_02635. All changes to Panton and Leslie’s trading rights are indexed and summarized in SD, 2670, C_02635, ff. 276–89, AGI.
32. 31.  [Spanish translation, Alexander McGillivray to Arturo O’Neill], Pensacola, 24 July 1785, f. 1rv, PC, 2352, AGI (“venerar los derechos puestos . . . especialm^te. los de la exportacion de pieles” and “los terminos mas comodas”); “McGillivray to O’Neill, July 24, 1785,” in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 94; Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 128–9; “McGillivray to O’Neill, November 20, 1787,” in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 163–65 (“upon the” and “dutys or”); [Translation of a letter from Alexander McGillivray to Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes, Little Tallassee, 6 February 1789, sent by Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes to José Manuel de Ezpeleta, San Agustín, 3 April 1789], PC, 1395, AGI (“para contrapesar los regalos, y demas gastos” and “Esto en realidad es demasiado cargar sobre un Pobre Indio, cuya constitucion es tal, que se halla siempre mas bien necesitado de favores, que no en estado de pagar derechos”); Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 221; [Juan Francisco Arnaud de Courville, index of royal orders and papers related to permissions granted to Panton and Leslie], Pensacola, 23 December 1809, f. 280v (“articulos del Comercio de Indios”); McCutchen and McCutchen, “‘Playing the Old Game of Double,’” 232; Whitaker, “Historical Introduction,” xxxii; Miller, “The Struggle for Free Trade in East Florida,” 50–51, 129; Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico,” 166.
33. 32.  Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 99, 112–116, 163, 190; Miller, “The Struggle for Free Trade in East Florida,” 49; Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico,” 154–55.
34. 33.  [James Seagrove] to [Henry Knox], Rock Landing on the Oconee, 24 May 1792 and [Information delivered by James Leonard to James Seagrove, Rock Landing on the Oconee, 24 July 1792], American State Papers, Class II, Indian Affairs, ed. Walter Lowrie and Matthew St. Clair Clarke (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832), 1:296, 308; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 72, 98, 175–77; Watson, “Strivings for Sovereignty,” 412–13.
35. 34.  Miller, “The Struggle for Free Trade in East Florida,” 55–56; John Fisher, “Imperial ‘Free Trade’ and the Hispanic Economy, 1778–1796,” Journal of Latin American Studies 13, no. 1 (May 1981): 21–56, esp. 23; John B. Stetson, J. Franklin Jameson, Charles B. Reynolds, and George Parker Winship, “Foreword,” in Whitaker, Documents, vii.
36. 35.  [Duque of Alcudia to Francisco Luis Héctor de Carondelet, New Orleans, 18 August 1794], PC, 1447, AGI (“el único medio de conservar la Luisiana”); Miller, “The Struggle for Free Trade in East Florida,” 55–56; [Juan Francisco Arnaud de Courville, index of royal orders and papers related to permissions granted to Panton and Leslie], Pensacola, 23 December 1809, f. 283v, SD, 2670, C_02635 (Panton and the cédula). On fictional borders see Edward G. Gray, “Toward a Pre-History of Territory: Thomas Hobbes, the Maryland Palatinate, and the Colonial Boundary Problem,” and Christian J. Koot, “Things to Think With: The Use of Borders on a Seventeenth-Century Map of New England,” both in this volume.
37. 36.  “Folch to Miró, July 2, 1789,” in Caughey, McGillivray of the Creeks, 242.
38. 37.  [Juan Francisco Arnaud de Courville, index of royal orders and papers related to permissions granted to Panton and Leslie], Pensacola, 23 December 1809, f. 283v, SD, 2670, C_02635; Whitaker, “Historical Introduction,” xxxiv; Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico,” 136.
39. 38.  Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 186–87; Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico,” 155; Hill, Creek Internationalism, 142, 243–44n21.
40. 39.  Coker and Watson, Indian Traders, 201, 235; Narrett, “William Panton, British Merchant and Politico,” 137; Narrett, Adventurism and Empire, 159; Braund, Deerskins & Duffels, 177; Whitaker, “Historical Introduction,” xxxvii; Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights, 131, 133.