In many ways, the Peace of Paris in 1783 signaled the death knell of European colonialism in North America. The British proved incapable of preventing the loss of a sizeable portion of their original colonies, holding on to Canada and a few lucrative Caribbean islands. The French, having already abandoned most of their claims in the region, ended the Revolutionary War on the verge of bankruptcy, with little to show for their efforts beyond the satisfaction of playing a part in the misfortune of a rival. The independence gained by the former colonies seemed to be more ominous than atypical, and the Spanish indeed soon followed suit, losing most of their empire in the Americas. Within four decades, the bulk of this territory would be free of European colonial rule.

Yet the outlook among Spanish officials in the Indies at the close of the war was hardly bleak. Compared to its European counterparts, Spain emerged from the American Revolution well positioned to reassert its dominance in the region. Unable to achieve a primary goal of reclaiming the island of Gibraltar from the British in the Mediterranean, Spain fared much better in the Americas as the British ceded control of East and West Florida. Coupled with their existing colonies in Cuba and Louisiana, the Spanish were now strategically prepared to control the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. And unlike their allies in France, they had not completely voided themselves of their financial resources to accomplish these objectives. But the region’s Native populations also remained politically and militarily powerful. The Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks (Muscogees), and Seminoles found themselves in a familiar position, wedged between competing factions intent on realizing their own designs. Experience had revealed the necessity of adjusting community-based diplomacy and local-level sociopolitical structures to meet new challenges to the members of the towns, clans, and coalitions known to Euro-Americans as the Creek Confederacy. Consequently, Muscogee Creeks drew from adaptive approaches that they utilized, first, to undermine British influence after the Seven Years’ War, and then to preserve autonomy and independence in their interactions with the Spanish and the Americans after the Revolution.1

This chapter recenters Spain as a major political power in the region immediately following the American Revolution and analyzes the Creeks and other Native peoples as prominent political and economic agents rather than passive observers. It argues that actions and events during this time were representative of a transitional phase in which the above-mentioned groups crafted diplomatic strategies based on both colonial experience and emerging sociopolitical ideologies. Yet, while both sought to achieve relative regional sovereignty through diplomatic means, the ways in which each interpreted the meaning and outcome of that sovereignty depended on their own cultural and historical understandings in addition to their present and future designs. Enlightenment thought and Bourbon economic reforms ushered in a shift in Spanish policy over the course of the eighteenth century that emphasized trade and diplomatic alliances over the conquest of the Natives in the Gulf South. The Creeks’ noncentralized, consensus-based sociopolitical structure, with its emphasis on tension and opposition, allowed them to replicate the conditions of imperial rivalry that served as a fundamental piece of their Indigenous identity earlier in the century, applying it to a new era during which neither Spain nor the fledgling United States were powerful enough to impose their will. As new political pressures arose, such as the potential of a now-unchecked US appetite for westward expansion, Spanish and Creek designs unexpectedly came to overlap, with territorial claims, access to coastlines, and control over interior waterways becoming increasingly important to Spanish officials and Indigenous community leaders.

Recent scholarship largely examines the decades that follow the American Revolution within either a broad transatlantic context by tracing the spread of liberal thought and revolutionary movements or a national perspective that emphasizes the emergence of the United States. In the North American southeast, these earlier works focused largely on US efforts to “civilize” Native Americans for assimilation into white American society, followed by campaigns to dispossess Native peoples of their lands to facilitate territorial expansion and the growth of the “cotton kingdom.”2 Such arguments gave rise to the traditional, westward-facing narrative of US history, which highlights white American exceptionalism, democracy, and progress. But some works, like Kathleen DuVal’s Independence Lost, explore the post-Revolutionary period through a continental lens. This approach expands historical understandings of nation-building beyond that of the United States to include Indigenous projects occurring in the same period. Alan Taylor’s American Revolutions also takes a continental approach. It incorporates the perspectives and experiences of North America’s diverse populations and uses the plural “Revolutions” to underscore that these groups all pursued their own vision of revolution and nationhood during the United States’ formative years. Colin Calloway’s The Indian World of George Washington builds upon these narratives by examining the complexities of American nation-building in relation to Native peoples and Washington’s efforts to acquire Indigenous lands following the Revolution.3

Others have focused on Native peoples as active agents in international diplomacy, challenging the longstanding historical argument that Indigenous societies lacked a formalized foreign policy, remained largely disconnected from global events, and served no substantial role in larger narratives of US imperialism. Brian DeLay, in a historiographical essay, details these oversights, arguing that traditional concerns of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history are “in fact deeply, intricately entangled with Indian history.”4 DeLay urges scholars to investigate local-level power and diplomatic relationships, as well as formal diplomacy, and pushes the field toward “engage[ment] with Indian polities and individuals as historical actors, rather than mere objects of state and settler aggression.”5 James Hill’s Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution responds to DeLay’s call by centering Muscogee Creek, Seminole, and Miccosukee communities within the diplomatic history of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Hill demonstrates that these peoples, despite divergent views on the future sociopolitical structure of their societies, understood the necessity of building extensive, international diplomatic networks and deploying European legal and political concepts to preserve their autonomy in the eyes of the United States. Indigenous leaders strategically advanced their diplomatic goals through travel and communication across vast maritime spaces and overland routes, while also building alliances and gaining access to important foreign trade goods.6 But the United States’ appetite for westward expansion rendered this period of internationalism short lived. As Deborah Rosen argues in Border Law, the first Seminole War (1818) ushered in a “sharp, racially inflected line between ‘savage’ and ‘civilized’ people” that allowed the United States to reject the universal application of international law to all populations within the nation, regardless of racial or cultural background. Moving forward, Rosen argues, US law would only fully protect peoples of European descent, removing Native Americans as equal participants in international diplomacy.7

Furthermore, only a few scholars have explored this period through a regional lens that equally considers the Indigenous, Spanish, and US perspectives. In Bárbaros, David J. Weber builds off earlier work on the Spanish borderlands, including his own The Spanish Frontier in North America, to investigate how the Bourbon reforms impacted a wide array of “independent Indians.”8 Weber highlights the Spanish perception of Native Americans as “bárbaros,” or savages, and Spanish descriptions of independent Indians as unconquerable peoples living on the fringes of the Spanish empire. He argues that the failure of eighteenth-century Spanish Indian policy was its pragmatism, or its inability to consolidate a single approach. Sometimes the Spanish used the “modern” approach of trade and gift-giving to foster diplomacy; other times they relied on their traditional method of warfare and violence to try to subdue Native populations.9 DuVal’s aforementioned work also focuses on the Gulf South during this period, exploring the intersecting lives of Natives, Spaniards, Loyalists, and enslaved peoples. Her research illuminates the uniqueness of the Gulf, emphasizing that its inhabitants were largely disconnected from people in the northeast or mid-Atlantic regions, developing a distinct give-and-take culture that shaped interactions and behaviors. DuVal defines this culture as one of “advantageous interdependence” and uses it as a jumping-off point to consider the changing nature of dependence and independence throughout the course of the Revolution. She argues that independence was not always ideal, as it signified isolation, fostered a lack of diplomatic or exchange relationships, and potentially rendered populations vulnerable.10

This chapter builds upon this research by offering a nuanced historical analysis of the pivotal years following the independence of the British colonies in North America. It considers diverse cultural perspectives, local-level needs, ideological shifts, economic demands, and regional geopolitics, revealing that European and Native American groups adjusted to the changes that followed the American Revolution in ways that combined previous knowledge with new ideologies. Experience taught both Spanish officials and Native peoples that a cohesive, single economic or political policy was unrealistic, as the Gulf South’s diverse Indigenous societies functioned through local-level diplomacy that ebbed and flowed according to individual needs and interests. In 1783 neither the prominence of the United States nor the independence of Spain’s colonies was a forgone conclusion. In no way resigned to accept the dissolution of their cultural and political sovereignty, Creeks and many of their Indigenous neighbors looked to the nearby Spanish, as well as the burgeoning United States, to shape both the preservation of their own sovereignty and the contours of nation-building in the larger Atlantic world.11 Following trends in recent scholarship, this chapter utilizes concepts of nation-building and territorial sovereignty to recenter Spain as a major political power in the region after the American Revolution and analyze the Creeks, and other Native groups, as prominent political and economic agents rather than passive observers.

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The fear of rapid US expansion from the Appalachian region to the Mississippi River seemingly made the Spanish and the Creeks natural allies, but the latter were apprehensive of fickle European diplomacy. Scattered through modern-day Georgia, Alabama, and northern Florida, Creek towns functioned as autonomous political entities through the majority of the eighteenth century. This measure of political decentralization allowed Creek micos, or village headmen, to independently sign treaties with Euro-American outsiders without approval from the Confederacy as a whole. Consequently, many Creek headmen viewed the end of the American Revolution as the beginning of a new epoch requiring innovative methods of adaptation to protect their independence in ways that were reminiscent of the diplomatic strategies they employed in earlier decades. But the persistence of community-level authority and coalition-based politics within the Creek Confederacy threatened the efforts of Indigenous leaders who sought to delineate Creek nationhood in ways that Euro-Americans could understand. European and American outsiders commonly viewed these differing approaches to sovereignty as divisive and incorrectly assumed these activities spread chaos among Creek peoples. These views prompted some, like US Indian agent Richard Thomas, to lament that “the [Creek] Indians appear to me to be playing the old game of double, promising and never performing.”12

From an Indigenous perspective, however, the Creeks were performing. They were successfully adapting and executing the local, decentralized, balance of power diplomacy that had served their interests earlier in the eighteenth century and had afforded the larger Confederacy flexibility during the American Revolution. Yet, Thomas was not the first to incorrectly interpret Creek sociopolitical strategies. His words—“playing double”—echo those of observers from earlier decades, who often lamented the Creeks’ commitment to diplomatic neutrality, a formal, protective policy that forced Europeans to negotiate with individual town leaders and protected the Confederacy from committing to a strict alliance with any single empire. In 1766, for example, Governor Johnstone of British West Florida complained that the Mortar, an Upper Creek headman with French proclivities, provoked indignation among his people by entertaining “idle talks” about the British following their occupation of former French land claims. The Mortar, Johnstone complained, was only concerned with “his own power, which depends on confusion among his people from whence all kinds of disorders has spread through his country.”13 At the onset of the American Revolution, Britain’s deputy superintendent of Indian affairs to the Creeks, David Taitt, complained of the Lower Creeks’ refusal to commit to a Loyalist alliance. “The Creeks,” he wrote in 1776, “would much rather wish to enjoy the advantages of a neutrality by being paid from both parties.”14

In other words, competing national and coalition interests preserved the important political divisions that had safeguarded Creek autonomy in an earlier era, fortuitously mimicking the diplomatic neutrality of previous decades.15 Many Creek headmen simply regarded the American victory as the beginning of a new era that would require the adaptation of existing sociopolitical and diplomatic strategies. Spanish officials shared this view, particularly in their diplomacy with Gulf South Native populations. The Spanish approach toward the Creeks was an adaptation of a strategy that had been evolving for some time as part of the larger reforms implemented by the Bourbons, beginning in 1714 with the conclusion of the War of Spanish Succession and confirmation of Bourbon rule in Spain. Early attempts at sociopolitical reform on the Peninsula had ended in mass riots, effectively shifting focus to the condition of the colonies by the 1760s.16 There was little doubt at this time that Spain was wholly reliant on the colonies to generate revenue.17 The general goals of the Crown’s new policies in the Americas centered on increasing royal administrative control over the colonies while maximizing the revenue they generated for Spain.

Indigenous populations figured prominently in the Bourbon monarch’s new imperial designs. Under Habsburg rule, the Spanish had focused on conquest, both physical and spiritual. But the influence of the Enlightenment and the growing preference for rationalism rendered reliance on conflict a relic of Habsburg inefficiency. Within the larger context of the Bourbon fiscal reforms, the Spanish considered Native peoples outside of their direct control an untapped resource. Rather than subjugating and exploiting them for labor, they sought to incorporate Indigenous populations into their economic system.18 By exchanging hostility for friendship, the Spanish could “conquer” through commerce. Trade, not conquest or conversion, would be the bond that tied Native Americans to the Spanish. The influence of Enlightenment ideology on these new policies was, however, never substantial enough to be politically liberal. Charles III was a staunch absolutist, and he geared his reformist tendencies toward tightening control to strengthen peninsular Spain both politically and economically. Bourbon Indigenous policy, while perhaps more benevolent on the surface, was still exploitative. The Bourbons based their policies on a transitional socioeconomic philosophy that bridged Habsburg paternalism with more modern Bourbon ideologies in an attempt to align Spanish colonialism with the successful policies of Spain’s European counterparts with shared economic interests in the Americas.

This transitional approach in Bourbon economic thinking in conjunction with Spanish–Indigenous diplomacy was best outlined in a treatise attributed to reformer and Spanish official José del Campillo y Cosío titled Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América (New System of Economic Government for America).19 Campillo felt that it was only natural that a “warrior spirit” prevailed throughout the sixteenth century, when Charles I was charged with “having to subdue millions of Indians and their caciques,” who in turn “defended their liberty with ferocity.” Now, through better policy, he argued, the Natives could be “encouraged” to work through better treatment and the introduction of trade, so they could become “useful Spanish vassals” rather than remaining oppressed and having “their character looked down upon, as it has been and is to date.”20

The main issue for Campillo regarding Spain’s Indigenous policy was the continual insistence on territorial hegemony requiring the subjugation of Native peoples. He advocated that Spanish officials should follow the lead of the French, who “do not intend to subdue the natives, but rather obtain their friendship and trade.”21 Indigenous groups could be encouraged through trade to provide a diverse range of products for the empire to supplement the wealth of the mines. Yet while the recommended strategy advocated better treatment of Native Americans, the exploitation and inherent paternalism of the Habsburgs remained; Campillo advised incorporating Indigenous groups into his New System “to civilize them,” that they might become “powerful and indispensable auxiliaries . . . for themselves, for commerce, for [Spanish] policy, and for the augmentation of the Royal Treasury.”22

* * *

Implementing a single economic or political policy for Native peoples in the Americas was unfeasible, as Spain’s empire was vast and its Indigenous populations diverse.23 Significant disparity existed between the territory Spain claimed and that which it controlled. The Spanish alleged dominion over all lands beyond 270 leagues from the coast of Africa dating back to the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. And unlike their European counterparts, the Spanish had declared that all Native inhabitants within these claims were subjects of the Crown, limiting the political and diplomatic options available to them in their interactions with Indigenous people.

Yet in practice, Spanish officials understood these claims were dubious, and other European powers had long ignored them. The scarcity of Spaniards inhabiting the Gulf South greatly weakened their claims. Participation in the Seven Years’ War resulted in the forfeiture of Florida to the British in exchange for Havana, which was quickly captured after Spain entered the conflict.24 British possession of land along the Gulf of Mexico was perilous to Spanish designs, as it posed a potential disruption of their supply lines to and from New Spain. Were it not for the French cession of the Louisiana territory in 1762, Spanish claims to any continental territory east of the Mississippi would have been nonexistent.

Recognizing the strategic value of the region, Charles III remained undaunted by the failures of the French, but the transfer of power in New Orleans moved slowly.25 The newly appointed Spanish governor of Louisiana, Antonio de Ulloa, nevertheless wasted little time attempting to establish control of the Mississippi. He sent an expedition up the river to establish a fort in the Illinois Country, with explicit instructions on how to deal with the Natives.26 The directives reflected the policies outlined in the New System, with certain adaptations indicative of the policies local Spanish officials later applied east of the Mississippi. Ulloa ensured that the expedition was heavily stocked with gifts for the Indigenous population. He also advised his officials to dispel them judiciously, so as to be sure to have more gifts to give when the Natives returned.27 Gift-giving reflected the governor’s desire to avoid conflict at all costs. Ulloa regularly reminded his subordinates of the professed emotional nature of the Natives, and he feared that Indian groups in the Mississippi region would turn to war at the slightest affront to their pride.28 His apprehension over the potential conflicts that frequently arose between Natives and Europeans was so profound that Spaniards were ordered to wait and seek redress through the headmen and never attempt to resolve the problem themselves, even in disagreements between individuals where the Natives were deemed to be entirely in the wrong.29

The importance of gift-giving also demonstrates that establishing a Spanish presence in the Gulf South was only achievable with the consent of the local Indigenous communities. Colonists were to tread carefully with Natives in the Mississippi region, understanding that courting these ethnically, politically, and linguistically diverse peoples would require a different approach than those used with larger Indigenous polities. Forts were to be established, not as a means of aggression or even defense, but rather as a foundation to solidify claims and establish inroads for future endeavors. As Ulloa advised, “It must be inferred that at the same time one sets about the founding of a fort, that he is aiming also at the creation of a settlement; for a settlement will be of great aid and help in maintaining a fort.”30 In order to carry out Spanish designs along the Mississippi, these forts were to serve as fledgling communities and trading centers that encouraged future settlement while establishing and maintaining ties with resident Indigenous groups.

The governor sent secret instructions to establish two forts at the mouth of the Missouri River at the confluence of the Mississippi solely to deter British encroachment, which had begun in the area in the hopes of securing alliances with the Natives since the Spanish had “not had any settlement or defense hitherto.”31 The Spanish were invariably clear about their boundaries and their claims to all lands west of the Mississippi. They naively tried to force local populations to respect these boundaries in the hope of deterring them from seeking trade with the British to the east. As the governor pointed out, “each nation has its territory and its savage tribes with whom to trade.”32 In what was going to become a fundamental aspect of Spanish policy moving forward, the diplomatic and commercial relationships with Native groups served as a proxy for territorial hegemony, with the overall goal of rerouting Indian trade goods through New Orleans. Attempts to control the Mississippi River far inland from the ocean show the strategic importance of the waterway both commercially and politically, which were becoming increasingly intertwined in Spanish Indigenous policy.

Unlike the populations west of the Mississippi, large Indian confederations east of the Mississippi were well versed in dealing with European administrators.33 For the majority of the eighteenth century, these peoples, particularly the Creeks, had maintained authority in the region by remaining neutral in their dealings with neighboring Euro-Americans.34 This strategy encouraged Creek headmen to act according to community-level interests, ensuring access to numerous sources of trade goods and guaranteeing that the larger society did not wholly align with one foreign power.35 The end of the Seven Years’ War, however, threatened Creek neutrality as the Peace of Paris effectively removed the French from the region and relegated the Spanish to New Orleans and Cuba. Upper Creeks believed these shifts might prove beneficial, as the British occupation of Pensacola could bring greater quantities of goods at better prices closer to their communities.36 Lower Creeks viewed British expansion as a threat, fearing a rapid expansion of Anglo-American settlement. Thus, through the 1760s and 1770s, many Muscogee and Hitchiti-speaking peoples shifted their focus southward, maintaining ties to the Spanish through voyages to Cuba.37 Travels to Cuba ensured that Creeks could mimic the play-off system of earlier decades, despite the European geopolitical reconfigurations that resulted from the Seven Years’ War. This strategy directly benefited those who made the journey, while also protecting the sovereignty of the Confederacy as a whole.38

Spain also had something to gain from this relationship. Having been completely caught off guard by the rapid attack that led to the loss of Havana in the previous conflict, officials in Cuba were determined not to let it happen twice. Since the British had forced the exchange of Florida in return for the vital port city in Havana, the Spanish often lacked information from the continent. Cuban merchants and fishermen were always in close contact with Indigenous groups, engaging in frequent trading along the coast. This network became Spain’s continental eyes and ears, offering knowledge of British naval movements, sightings of pirates and corsairs, and invaluable information on the changing sociopolitical contexts in North America.39 Indigenous groups astutely used this to their advantage, often working their way onto Cuban ships with the pretext that they had “grave matters” to address with the Cuban governor.40

The outbreak of the American Revolution forced Spanish and Indigenous groups into difficult decisions. According to José de Gálvez, Spain’s minister of the Indies, the British presence in the Mississippi region threatened Spanish commerce and “the security of our richest possessions.” Gálvez also expressed a desire to quickly take back Florida, Mobile, and Pensacola, which were “the keys to the Gulf of Mexico,” and to “cleanse the English from the shores of the Mississippi, which ought to be viewed as the wall which guards the vast empire of New Spain.”41 The American rebellion likewise threatened Indian territory, as Natives across the continent understood that a US victory would bring a flood of land-hungry settlers onto their lands. But the conflict also provided new opportunities for Native Americans to preserve their independence. In a sense, the Creeks and their Indigenous neighbors had been preparing for this moment since 1763, adjusting to the geopolitical shifts that followed the Seven Years’ War in ways that allowed for the maintenance of their power and autonomy through neutrality.

* * *

After the French and Spanish entry into the conflict and the American victory at Yorktown, the British grew wary of fighting a global war and entered negotiations for peace. Unsurprisingly, the European powers disregarded the Native groups who had been integral to their designs. There were no Indigenous representatives present at the Peace of Paris, nor were any Native groups mentioned in the terms of the Treaty of Paris. Creek headmen were furious upon learning their allies had disseminated lands still firmly under Indigenous control. The French, on the verge of bankruptcy, had paid dearly for their involvement in the war and abandoned most of their promises to Spain in search of an easy exit. By sheer coincidence, Spanish designs most closely overlapped with those of the Creeks. The Spanish pushed hard, but unsuccessfully, to set the boundary of the United States in accordance with the Proclamation Line of 1763. The delegation from the United States, negotiating independently, proved more successful and was awarded with a westward boundary at the Mississippi River to the great trepidation of Spain and the Upper and Lower Creeks.

Despite setbacks in their Paris negotiations, the Spanish still found themselves well situated to continue their socioeconomic reforms and strengthen their grip on their colonies in the Americas. Spain’s major objectives in the region after the American Revolution were tied to the same economic and political goal: the protection of New Spain (Mexico). By holding Cuba and New Orleans and regaining their territories in Florida while removing competing European interests, the Spanish controlled most of the land adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico and therefore were even better suited to accomplish their goals in 1783 than two decades prior. Yet despite ending the war on good terms with the United States, they also knew peace would be fragile. The hurried geopolitical shifts caused Spanish officials to view the region east of the Mississippi as vital to their political and economic objectives.

Spanish officials’ attitudes about the Mississippi led to two significant regional goals within their postwar policies. The first was to impede, if not outright prevent, the westward expansion of the United States, as allowing the United States to assume control of the Mississippi River would pose an immediate threat to New Spain. The second was to control the region’s other Gulf-flowing waterways to maintain access to area resources, protect lines of commerce, and improve economic relations with the Creeks. While New Spain was the chief income producer, Spanish commerce in the Americas had always run through Cuba. Lower Creeks, whose towns were positioned along the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Ocmulgee rivers, hoped the renewed Spanish presence in the region would result in their reoccupation of San Marcos de Apalache, a fort and trade outpost at the junction of the Wakulla and St. Marks Rivers. This fort provided the Spanish with direct access to Lower Creek communities via the Apalachicola river system. The Spanish occupation of British outposts at Mobile and Pensacola also allowed for renewed Spanish connections with the Upper Creeks and Choctaws through the Tombigbee, Alabama, Coosa, and Escambia Rivers and their tributaries. New emphasis on commodities and agriculture had increased the value of plantations and cattle ranches in the Spanish Caribbean.42 This economic intensification was not lost on Spain’s enemies, which is why the Caribbean had lured buccaneers and privateers in the previous decades and why Havana remained a prime British target.

While the Treaty of Paris’s delineation of the Mississippi River as the western boundary of the United States tempered Spanish optimism, they were still dealt a good hand geographically to assist in accomplishing their goals. The Spanish could not assert authority over the entire river, but they were in possession of its mouth at New Orleans, offering them considerable control over its navigation. They also continued to benefit from their established relations with the Indigenous groups along the Mississippi River Valley. The Spanish postured as an empire in control of all continental territory in the Gulf of Mexico and the vast majority of the mainland in the Circum-Caribbean, but regardless of territorial claims, their objectives relied almost entirely on the sociopolitical leanings of the Creeks and other Indigenous groups in the continental interior. Just as they had in the decades before the American Revolution, Native peoples “shaped the contours of empire” in the late eighteenth-century Gulf. Though Spanish and American bureaucrats held distinctive visions for empire and nationhood in this region, the fulfillment of their respective goals was expressly connected to the actions and political decisions of Creek leadership.43

Spain’s policies in the region drew from a combination of colonial experience and an adaptation of their Indigenous policies within the Bourbon reforms. Now lacking direct competition from Britain and feeling confident that the United States was a weak and fragile state preoccupied with westward expansion, the Spanish quickly sought out Native alliances. They encountered willing partners eager to establish trade relations among the Upper Creeks. In March 1784, Alexander McGillivray, a biracial and bicultural Creek headman from the Upper town of Little Tallassee, informed Esteban Miró, Bernardo de Gálvez’s replacement as governor of Louisiana, in his capable Spanish that he desired an alliance, as “the protection of a great monarch is preferrd [sic] to that of a distracted Republic.”44 While McGillivray is often regarded as a shrewd, albeit controversial, diplomat, this was the second time in two decades that his people found themselves navigating Euro-American geopolitical shifts. The American weaknesses McGillivray mentioned, namely the lack of clear governmental direction and astronomical debts, were problems on which McGillivray knew the Spanish depended.45

The treaty that emerged between the Creeks and Spaniards at Pensacola in 1784 was less indicative of the “greatest harmony, union and good friendship” that existed between them, and more reflective of coinciding economic and political objectives. The Spanish achieved the peace necessary to maintain access to local resources, and both could claim to maintain their respective sovereignty as the Creeks promised “to obey the laws of the Great King of Spain, in those points which are compatible with our character and circumstances.”46 The Creeks locked in “permanent and unalterable” access to trade goods through commerce with Spain, and Spanish officials made clear that unlike the Americans, they “do not exact from the nations of Indians any lands.” In exchange, they secured Creek support against any encroachments in their claimed territories.47 Equally, the Creeks received Spanish support for their own territorial claims.

The Spanish moved quickly to follow their success in Pensacola and held a similar congress in Mobile. Spain established treaties with the Chickasaws, Alibamons, and the Choctaws, though the latter insisted on special supplies on their visits to Mobile and New Orleans.48 By supporting notions of Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw political and territorial autonomy and sovereignty, the Spanish undercut the claims of the United States and helped create the protective buffer zone they desired between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. They also maintained free access to the region’s waterways on the Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast. This allowed them to maintain commercial ties and trade with the Indigenous groups through the port towns of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola while retaining access to the fisheries vital to sustaining Cuba.49 To the Spanish, territorial hegemony in the continental interior, or even along the coastal regions they could legally claim, was unnecessary as long as the Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws remained allied sovereigns.50 The Spanish therefore were willing to engage in treaties, which by their nature recognized Indigenous sovereignty, something that would have been illogical under previous Habsburg models, which treated all Natives as either subjects or enemies of the Crown.51

The United States pursued treaties of their own with Native Americans in the region. The Hopewell Treaties of 1785 upheld the “perpetual friendship” of the Cherokees and Choctaws and the United States, and established US protection. The objectives of the United States differed from those of the Spanish, due mainly to their desire for land. When Spanish officials offered “protection,” it was intended to grant authority to Indigenous groups over their lands and justify political and commercial intrusion, especially in disputed regions along the northern boundary of West Florida where Spanish claims were weak. The United States, however, obtained title to land that the Natives had never relinquished. By asserting the authority to offer protection and to specify hunting rights and territorial boundaries, the United States was attempting to solidify the legitimacy of their own claims to territorial sovereignty over the lands in dispute.

Though treaties may have been beneficial to Spain, the United States, and the Natives who signed them, they reflected larger diplomatic problems within Indigenous communities. Through the American Revolution, most Native peoples east of the Mississippi existed within societies that allowed local leaders to pursue their own interests in relations with Europeans. In the towns that comprised the Creek Confederacy, individual headmen lived in competition with one another for authority and used sustained economic and political relationships with the British, French, and Spanish to influence what happened within their villages. Creek micos did not rely on force to create social and political order or administer justice, a practice that often became a point of contention between Native headmen and British officials following the Seven Years’ War. Rather, Indigenous leaders utilized persuasion and negotiation to gain the support of their people, ensuring that internal and external alliances remained both adaptable and flexible.52

Native responses to the official US victory often varied within larger tribal designations and are best understood on a coalition, clan, or town-by-town basis rather than a tribe-by-tribe one. While McGillivray’s desire for a Creek-Spanish alliance in the years following American independence appeared to benefit the whole, his efforts were largely self-serving, as this relationship would not only bolster the prominence of his town, but also increase his personal wealth and standing within Creek society. As someone raised in both the Creek world of his mother and the colonial world of his father, McGillivray saw the United States’ formative period as a chance to redefine his own society’s political identity in ways that aligned with Euro-American philosophies, essentially creating a centralized “Creek Nation.” To achieve this, McGillivray undermined the legitimacy of the Lower towns and their chiefs whenever possible. Writing to US treaty commissioner William Clark in April 1785, McGillivray asserted that Lower Creek headmen “will not be called to meetings by Traders or others.” In August 1786 he advised William Telfair, governor of Georgia, not to negotiate with the Tame King or the Fat King, rival micos of the Lower Creek towns of Great Tallassee and Cusseta, respectively.53 “Be not deceived by those men any longer,” McGillivray stated, “they have no authority to give away.”54

McGillivray’s effort to create a Creek nation relied upon “the drawing of territorial boundaries, the creation of institutions of national leadership, and the inventions of ideologies that legitimize the existence thereof.”55 McGillivray highlighted Creek sovereignty in communications with Spanish and American representatives, describing them as a “free nation” and often referencing their “natural rights” in relation to territory and property, despite agreements outlined in European treaties.56 In a 1785 letter to Miró, a frustrated Alexander McGillivray criticized Britain’s willingness to agree to the Treaty of Paris. “If the British nation has been compelled to withdraw its protection from us,” McGillivray stated, “She has no right to give up a Country she could never call her own.”57 McGillivray reiterated this point months later in an address to the Spanish, arguing that “it is a notorious fact known to the Americans . . . that his Brittanick Majesty was never possessed, either by session purchase or by right of conquest, of our Territorys and which the Said treaty gives away.”58 Writing to Andrew Pickens, a representative from South Carolina, McGillivray stressed that his people knew the exact bounds of their territory and “shall pay no regard to any limits that may prejudice our claims, that were drawn by an American and confirmed by a British negotiator. . . . They have been ours from the beginning of time and I trust that, with the assistance of our friends, we shall be able to maintain them against every attempt that may be made to take them from us.”59 Creeks recognized that US citizens unquestionably connected private property with freedom. By employing similar language in his correspondence with American officials, McGillivray demonstrated that Native peoples were also willing to equate land ownership with both individual and national independence.

The emergence of a nation-minded faction widened existing divisions within Creek society, threatened established coalition-based power structures, and adversely impacted sociopolitical relationships within the Confederacy as many micos resisted consolidation under the guise of a national identity. But while Creek elites debated the future political direction of their towns, life remained unchanged for nonelites who generally “carried on as they had for generations.”60 The fact that some Creeks would selectively adopt characteristics of Euro-American legal and political culture while others preserved the coalition-based sociopolitical structure of previous generations “demonstrated that while they were not entirely free of American influence, neither were they entirely at the mercy of it.”61

While the conflicting and transitional nature of nationalism and coalition-based diplomacy protected Creek autonomy, these contrasting approaches to Creek sovereignty simultaneously exposed the limits in American and Spanish Indigenous policy. For the Americans, the goal was to establish trade relationships and acquire new territory, either through land-for-debt agreements or gradual settlement. But competing interests often undermined these objectives. On one hand, the states frequently entered into their own negotiations with Indigenous groups, usually with local headmen who held limited authority. It is no surprise, then, that boundary disputes continued to be the main source of conflict between Indigenous peoples and US citizens during the 1780s, while also negatively impacting relationships within Native communities. Three treaties in particular—Augusta in 1783, Galphinton in 1785, and Shoulderbone in 1786—revealed the extent of these rifts, as each ended with cessions of Creek land to the state of Georgia without the consent of the entire Creek Confederacy. By 1787, escalating border violence as a result of contested land cessions forced US commissioners to implore that Indian agents “use the utmost care to ascertain who are the leading men among the several tribes—the real head-men and warriors.”62 By identifying these “real” headmen and placating them with presents, American officials hoped they could attach most of the region’s Natives to US interests and resolve the internal divisions that cast doubt on important territorial gains.63

Among the Creeks, internal divisions largely emerged over differing opinions of McGillivray. The Tame King and the Fat King, the same Lower Creek micos whose economic and diplomatic power McGillivray attempted to encumber in his correspondence, described him as duplicitous and “an Indian that has brought the nation to a grate [sic] disturbance.”64 They likewise took advantage of any opportunity to blame the Upper Creek towns for provoking their young men to act violently toward Georgians. In June 1787, Georgia’s governor, George Matthews, chastised these headmen for being negatively influenced by the Upper towns who “continue to create differences between you and us. . . .” “You ought not to think of making us accountable for any measures of the Upper towns, our brothers,” the Tame King and the Fat King replied, “. . . they can answer for themselves.”65

While this discord highlights the difficulties that resulted from diverging nation-minded and coalition-based interests among Creek leaders and autonomous towns, Spain found it advantageous to maintain a united Indigenous front against the United States, who in turn sought to cultivate Native conflict to facilitate their agenda. But while Spain sought to support Indigenous territorial sovereignty because “nations” with a defined territory helped solidify land claims and served to check American expansion, they did not specifically need unified Creek, Choctaw, or Chickasaw autonomy, as long as they all maintained their opposition to the United States.66 The problem for Spain, however, was that maintaining Indian opposition to the United States required a steady supply of goods. As had previously been the case in the Upper Mississippi region, Spanish officials knew that any possible alliance with Native nations was dependent on trade. The minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez, expressed to his governors that “the security and happiness of the said province was intimately linked to good harmony with the numerous savage Indian nations that circle it. And that harmony could only maintain itself through the opportunistic giving of gifts to the principal leaders and a trade of goods and effects suited to their needs and wants.” For this reason, he appointed a new lieutenant governor in Louisiana and West Florida due to “his contacts and circumstances necessary to acquire stockpiles of goods in Europe with the appropriate economy, proportion, and arrangements.” Gálvez also earmarked 80,000 pesos fuertes from New Orleans to provide gifts to the Natives and a sum of goods worth 200,000 pesos to be supplied to the traders. To ensure that Spanish supply lines could always maintain a steady stream of trade goods, the minister proposed to set aside an additional 100,000 pesos in reserve. The ultimate goal was for the Natives to understand “that His Majesty would give them the corresponding gifts and provide them with a Commerce so extensive and inalterable that it would fulfill all of their desires within eighteen months.”67

Meeting the trade demands of their Indigenous allies in the region proved more difficult than Spain had anticipated. Spanish settlements frequently lamented their limited supply and the potential “embarrassment” to Spain if they could not supply the Natives with the demanded goods. Spanish officials also understood that if the Natives could not get these supplies from Spain, they would turn to the Americans, as friendship and loyalty could “only be achieved by way of gifts and a trade well-sustained.”68 Thus, when McGillivray advocated for the Scottish merchant and British Loyalist William Panton to maintain his trade with the Creeks and Seminoles, the Spanish relented, granting Panton’s firm a monopoly on Indian trade in the region. They understood the influence Panton had among the Creeks and feared that rumors of American overtures to the merchant’s firms were true. Yet the Scottish merchants were a necessary risk, since the Americans would “not fail to devote all their energies to capturing this trade,” not only for economic purposes, but to “advance their political plans in the future.”69 Fortunately for the Spanish, Panton maintained a hatred for the United States.

While trade monopolies ensured a steady supply of goods at the broad level of society, they did not always meet the needs of local Indigenous communities. Additionally, seeking out trade and relationships of exchange held other sociopolitical ramifications for local headmen, as the monopoly system further limited the means by which they could secure goods. Creek leaders traditionally gained authority through access to foreign commodities, which they would redistribute within their communities in exchange for support. Presents “helped to promote peace and workable alliances between peoples who would otherwise remain strangers and potential enemies” and allowed Native leaders to gain authority and power through consensus.70 Thus, Creek parties continued to make voyages to Cuba throughout the 1780s and 1790s. While many Spanish officials in Havana lamented the practice, suggesting the Natives were “attracted by greed for the presents that by virtue of royal orders are given to them there,” they deemed it necessary to keep up appearances and achieve diplomatic goals.71 The Spanish provided room and board for their Creek guests and supplied customary gifts, such as cloth, vermillion, rum, gunpowder, and shot. They became so commonplace that Spanish officials usually attempted to expedite the visits, sending them home with their gifts “as quickly as possible.”72

Remarkably, Spain had been successful throughout the 1780s at using trade to maintain positive relations with the Creeks despite their own inability to uphold sufficient supply. Yet the growing threat of war with England and their amicable relations with the United States made Spain soften their stance to avoid outright conflict with the Americans, opening the door for both Upper and Lower Creeks to begin questioning whether Spain could continue to meet trade demands. McGillivray, potentially motivated by self-interest as much as his desire to create a Creek Nation, entered into a treaty with the United States in 1790. In the Treaty of New York, the Creeks gained greater recognition of their territorial sovereignty in exchange for ceding a large section of their lands to the United States.73 Taken aback by the amount of land ceded by McGillivray and the Creeks, Spanish officials scrambled to form a response, negotiating a new treaty in 1792 to reinforce the agreements established in the prior decade. McGillivray’s action tested the limits of a Euro-American-modeled “Creek Nation,” as many headmen never supported the ceding of lands and had long challenged the notion of McGillivray’s authority to speak collectively for the Creek Confederacy. For years McGillivray had steered local micos toward the Spanish. He was made a Spanish colonel and earned a yearly pension of six hundred dollars. Now, he stood to benefit financially from the new arrangement, earning a US military commission along with a substantial annual payment of twelve hundred dollars.74 McGillivray maintained a show of loyalty to Spain, though he henceforth referred to his pension as a trader’s pittance.

Both Spain and the United States supported the political sovereignty of the Creeks in part because it allowed both nations to continue to negotiate with them despite their respective alliances. Yet by the 1790s, Spain began to push even harder for Native unity to create a cohesive front in a last-ditch effort to curb American expansion. After securing the 1792 treaty with the Creeks, the Spanish negotiated with the Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees in an attempt to form a Pan-Indian alliance. On paper, the Spanish were successful, as all the major regional Indigenous groups agreed to such an alliance in 1793 through the Treaty of Nogales. The Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees even agreed to cede some land for the Spanish to construct a fort in the hope of protecting their interests on the Mississippi.

The harmony was short lived, however, as past conflicts quickly reemerged and fomented discord among the Natives. Spain’s position further weakened following Pinkney’s Treaty in 1795, where it relinquished claims in West Florida to the lands north of the 31st parallel. Additionally, the United States was officially granted free navigation of the Mississippi River. While Spain still maintained much of the coastline and the port cities of Mobile and Pensacola, they could no longer claim possession of significant portions of this territory, which in reality had always remained under Indigenous control.75 Spanish officials in the region continued to push for Native unity to maintain the buffer zone, though the empire’s economic and political situation was proving untenable. As late as 1800, around the same time Spain was secretly drawing up a treaty to return Louisiana to France, the recently appointed governor of the territory, the Marquis de Casa Calvo, continued to advocate for the traditional Spanish policy of establishing diplomacy through trade. This was even more imperative now, as “only a few depraved Seminoles” lived in the areas Spain could still claim. In contrast, “the nations of the Choctaws and Chickasaws are entirely included in the American territory . . . likewise the part of the Tallapoosas (Creeks), best, most numerous, and most friendly to Spain, and all the Cherokees, have remained in the Territory of the United States.”76 Since Spain lacked any territorial control over the region, it was only through the maintenance of trade through Panton, Leslie and Company that they could “gain and maintain a preponderancy and friendship among those tribes, in order to constitute them a barrier between the American and Spanish possessions, forming, as they must do, an intermediate country, which it is our interests to keep in our dependence.”77 Within a few years, the territory would pass again from French to American hands, thus undoing decades of Spanish policy in the area and officially ending any Spanish designs on controlling the Gulf South.

* * *

Spain’s conceptualization of national sovereignty in the Gulf South served two purposes. By claiming jurisdiction over the land along the coast and the Mississippi River, the Spanish were protecting their access to waterways and limiting American expansion into the Gulf. They also bolstered Indigenous land claims by asserting that Natives were under their protection. At the same time, as explicitly stated in the treaties, Spanish and Indigenous groups created a complementary relationship, with the Spanish exercising little hegemony in the interior while maintaining Native support through gifts and trade. Additionally, the Spanish recognized Indigenous territorial sovereignty, even though this acknowledgment could potentially weaken their own claims, in an attempt to undermine those of the United States.

Like Spain, the United States applied nationalism in distinct ways. Jeffersonian Republicans, who valued the individualism derived from private land ownership and agriculturalism, were perpetually interested in obtaining territory south and west of the Appalachians. The formation of both a national identity and recognition of the sovereignty over territories awarded in the Treaty of Paris, territory that the Native groups still firmly controlled, was vital to their objectives. The fledgling US government struggled to negotiate with Indian groups who were often involved in their own conflicts and compromises with individual states. Therefore, it served American interests to recognize Native national sovereignty, as this legitimized territorial acquisitions on a federal level. The United States also desired access to the Gulf through the Mississippi River and wanted to use trade to make diplomatic inroads to Indigenous groups. But where Spain had hoped to utilize trade to create Native buffer states and deter Indigenous peoples from seeking out exchange with Americans, the United States sought trade with the Natives to create a dependence on their goods. Unfortunately for Spain, the empire proved incapable of keeping up with Indigenous trade demands. They also proved unable to keep the United States from accessing the Mississippi and the Gulf. While US political elites were divided in their visions for the economic path that America should follow, both westward expansion and the rapid growth of trade were detrimental to Spanish and Indigenous designs.

Unsurprisingly, Indigenous groups again found themselves in the middle. Espousing nationhood worked well for leaders like McGillivray in that it afforded a level of power through unanimity that assisted in negotiations with other nation-states. It also allowed for such leaders to facilitate the supply of trade goods, which increased their authority and legitimacy. On the other hand, the creation of a Creek Nation implied a level of centralization that ran contrary to traditional Indigenous sociopolitical structures. The persistence of coalition-based diplomacy allowed for some headmen to improve their status, and the desires of opportunists like McGillivray did not always align with the needs of all the communities within their territory.

While the Creeks, Choctaws, Cherokees, and Chickasaws fiercely defended their borders for political reasons, diplomacy remained a largely economic endeavor. Ironically this served to both support and undermine Native nationhood. Treaties with Indigenous groups functioning as nation-states secured favorable conditions for trade and the acquisition of desired commodities. But they did little to curtail pragmatic policies at the local level. In the end it was Spain’s failure to profit from their land claims and protect their exclusive access to vital waterways that undercut Spanish and Indigenous designs in the region. A lucrative agricultural trade never developed in Louisiana, and Spain was continually forced to loosen its restricted monopoly and outsource its trade to maintain supplies. Most of the non-Native interior populations consisted of British remnants, French transplants, or American settlers. Spain’s inability to develop profits weakened its ability to meet Indigenous trade demands and opened the door for the British and the Americans to flourish in the region. Even last-ditch efforts at Pan-Indian alliances were weakened by Native disunity, fostered by decades of conflict. By 1800, Spain had all but given up its designs in the region, granting access of the Mississippi to the United States and returning Louisiana to the French. The coalition-based political structures and neutral diplomatic strategies long utilized by Indigenous groups collapsed, leaving the Creeks and their Indigenous neighbors to find new methods of adaptation and adjustment moving into the nineteenth century.

Notes

1. Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Penguin Random House, 2016), 30–31.
2. The American Association of Geographers defines the Southeastern United States as the present-day states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. Geographically, it is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the Mississippi River to the west, the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and the Ohio River to the north.
3. DuVal, Independence Lost; Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (W. W. Norton, 2016); Colin Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2018). See also Francis Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and American Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783–1812 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); David Andrew Nichols, Red Gentlemen and White Savages: Indians, Federalists, and the Search for Order on the American Frontier (University of Virginia Press, 2008); Jeffrey Washburn, “Directing Their Own Change: Chickasaw Economic Transformation and the Civilization Plan, 1750s–1830s,” Native South 13 (2020): 94–119.
4. Brian DeLay, “Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 5 (2015): 927–42, esp. 939.
5. DeLay, “Indian Polities,” 940.
6. James L. Hill, Creek Internationalism in an Age of Revolution, 1763–1818 (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). See also Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard University Press, 2012); Leonard Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (University of Virginia Press, 2009).
7. Deborah A. Rosen, Border Law: The First Seminole War and American Nationhood (Harvard University Press, 2015), 7–8.
8. Among the earliest advocates of a broad regional study over national histories was Herbert Bolton in his study of the Spanish borderlands. David J. Weber later built on this tradition while including the contributions of the Indigenous and ethnically mixed populations. See Herbert Eugene Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (Yale University Press, 1921); David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale University Press, 1992).
9. David J. Weber, Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 2005).
10. DuVal, Independence Lost.
11. Steven Peach, Rivers of Power: Creek Political Culture in the Native South 1750–1815 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2024).
12. “Richard Thomas to Benjamin Hawkins,” 1 July 1798, in Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796–1806, 485. https://archive.org/details/lettersofbenjami00hawk/.
13. Ibid., 523–26.
14. “David Taitt to John Stuart,” 1776, in Kenneth Gordon Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution, 1770–1783 (Irish University Press, 1972–1981), 12: 159.
15. Steven C. Hahn, The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670–1763 (University of Nebraska Press, 2004).
16. 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), 81–115. Charles III entrusted many of his domestic reforms to Sicilian Leopoldo di Gregorio, whose policies created unrest. Subsequent riots led to his removal, but not before his appointment of José de Gálvez in the Indies, which allowed for a concentration of Bourbon economic reforms in the colonies.
17. Barbara H. Stein and Stanley H. Stein, Edge of Crisis: War and Trade in the Spanish Atlantic, 1789–1808 (John Hopkins University Press, 2009), 4.
18. Weber, Bárbaros, 36.
19. There is debate regarding both the authorship of the manuscript and the extent of its influence on subsequent Bourbon policy. Scholars who support its influence suggest that it was likely circulated before its eventual publication in 1789. See Weber, Bárbaros, 181–82.
20. Joseph del Campillo y Cosío, Nuevo sistema de gobierno económico para la América (Imprenta de Benito Cano, 1789), 14–15.
21. Campillo y Cosío, Nuevo sistema, 16.
22. Campillo y Cosío, Nuevo sistema, 71.
23. Weber, Bárbaros, 8–11.
24. Elena A. Schneider, The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 210.
25. Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., “Spanish Commercial Policy in Louisiana, 1763–1803,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 44, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 143–45.
26. The Illinois Country was the general name for the territory encompassing the Mississippi River Valley. The Spanish continued to use the term after the French ceded Louisiana. It was also known at the time as Upper Louisiana. The area described here as part of Ulloa’s directives would be in the US state of Missouri today.
27. “Ulloa sends an expedition to the Illinois Country to Establish a Fort and Settlement and his rules for government of the same,” in Louis Houck, ed., The Spanish Regime in Missouri (R. R. Donnelley and Sons, 1909), I:6, 11.
28. “Ulloa sends an expedition to the Illinois Country,” 10.
29. “Ulloa sends an expedition to the Illinois Country,” 11.
30. “Ulloa sends an expedition to the Illinois Country,” 13.
31. “Secret instructions of Ulloa to Captain Rui, dated January 7, 1767, relating to the construction of two forts at the mouth of the Missouri,” in Houck, The Spanish Regime in Missouri, I:23.
32. “Ulloa sends an expedition to the Illinois Country,” 13.
33. Elizabeth Ellis, “Petite Nation with Powerful Networks: The Tunicas in the Eighteenth Century,” Louisiana History 58, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 133–78, esp. 136–37. See also Elizabeth Ellis, The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).
34. Comprised of approximately fifty-nine towns, Upper Creek villages were scattered along the Tallapoosa-Coosa-Alabama river system in what is today western Alabama. The twenty or so Lower Creek towns were positioned along the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Ocmulgee Rivers, east of the Upper Creeks on the modern-day Alabama-Georgia border. Creek influence extended across the flatlands of current-day Alabama and Georgia, east to the Atlantic Ocean, south to the Gulf coast of the present-day Florida panhandle, west to the Mississippi River, and north to the foothills of the Appalachian mountains near the Cumberland plateau. It is important to note that this general, bilateral division of “Upper” and “Lower” Creek can be problematic because it overlooks the nuances and complexities of Creek society. However, in keeping with the existing historiography, this chapter employs these terms when necessary.
35. Verner Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670–1732 (University of Alabama Press, 1928), 185.
36. The current path originated in Augusta, Georgia, passing through the Lower towns before reaching Upper Creek communities.
37. The Spanish did assume control over New Orleans after 1763, which was theoretically easier for Creeks to access than Cuba. However, it took a number of years for the transfer of power from the French to the Spanish to take hold, and the transition was difficult. Creeks additionally used travels to Havana as a way to try to access power, as recognized in both the spiritual and physical worlds.
38. John E. Worth, “A History of Southeastern Indians in Cuba” (working paper, University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL, October 2004), 1–16; John E. Worth, “Creolization in Southwest Florida: Cuban Fishermen and ‘Spanish Indians,’ ca. 1766–1841,” Historical Archaeology 46, no. 1 (2012): 142–60; Hill, Creek Internationalism, chapter 2; Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (W. W. Norton, 2014); Bryan C. 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 (2016): 54–88; Jennifer Monroe McCutchen, “‘More Advantageous to Be with Spaniards’: Gunpowder and Creek-Spanish Encounters in Cuba,” Terrae Incognitae 52, no. 3 (2020): 245–60.
39. Light Townsend Cummings, Spanish Observers and the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 199–200.
40. AGI Santo Domingo 1221, transcribed by John E. Worth, Randell Research Center, Florida Museum of Natural History.
41. “José de Gálvez to the Governor of Havana; San Ildefonso, 29 August 1779,” AGI Cuba 1290, translated and transcribed by James L. Hill. These sources are published online through the University of North Florida. Please see “Synopsis of Official Spanish Correspondence Pertaining to Relations with the Uchiz Indians, 1771–1783,” Florida History Online, https://history.domains.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/projects-proj-b-p-html/projects-uchize-index-html/; and “The Indian Frontier in British East Florida; Letters to Governor James Grant from British Soldiers and Indian Traders,” Florida History Online, https://history.domains.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/projects-proj-b-p-html/projects-grant-index-html/. For a description of the defensive and commercial significance of New Orleans and the Mississippi River region as a protective border and a conduit for trade, see also Kim M. Gruenwald in this volume, “When a River Is a Border: Rivalries and Commercial Networks in the Riverine West,” 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 151, 157, 159.
42. Stein and Stein, Edge of Crisis, 4.
43. Peach, Rivers of Power, 5.
44. Alexander McGillivray was part of a growing population of biracial Natives born to Indigenous mothers and European fathers in the mid-eighteenth century. McGillivray’s father, the prominent Scottish trader Lachlan McGillivray, supported his European-style education in Charleston, as well as a business apprenticeship in Savannah. But as the son of a Creek woman, Alexander’s Indigenous relatives viewed him as fully Creek and member of the powerful Wind Clan. Alexander’s lived experiences in the Indigenous world of his mother and the Euro-American world of his father allowed him to learn both “the unwritten rules and expectations” of Creek life, while also gaining knowledge that ensured he would be comfortable navigating the colonial world of his father. This knowledge and experience expertly prepared Alexander for a leadership role in the Creek Confederacy in the years following the American Revolution. John Walton Caughey, ed., McGillivray of the Creeks (University of Oklahoma Press, 1938), 74 (quote). McGillivray was fluent in English and near fluent in Spanish. See James L. Roark et al., The American Promise: A History of the United States, Ninth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2023), 1:247.
45. Caughey, McGillivray, 65.
46. Spanish Treaty with Talapuche Indians, Articles of Convention Signed at Fort of Pensacola, Florida. -05-31, 1784. Manuscript/Mixed Material, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib000919/.
47. Spanish Treaty with Talapuche Indians; DuVal, Independence Lost, 259.
48. Jack D. L. Holmes, “Spanish Treaties with West Florida Indians, 1784–1802,” Florida Historical Society 48, no. 2 (1969): 144.
49. AGI Santo Domingo 1210, transcribed by John E. Worth, Randell Research Center, Florida Museum of Natural History.
50. DuVal, Independence Lost, 259.
51. Weber, Bárbaros, 8.
52. 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. 11–12.
53. Alexander McGillivray to William Clark, 24 April 1785, accessed August 22, 2021, https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc902/fulltext.text.
54. Alexander McGillivray to William Telfair, 3 August 1786, accessed August 22, 2021, https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc904/fulltext.text.
55. Hahn, Invention, 8.
56. Caughey, McGillivray, 73, 92.
57. Caughey, McGillivray, 73.
58. Caughey, McGillivray, 91.
59. “McGillivray to Pickens (September 1785),” in John T. Juricek, ed., Georgia and Florida Treaties, 1763–1776, vol. 12, Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607–1789 (University Publications of America, 2002), 387.
60. Kevin Kokomoor, Of One Mind and of One Government: The Rise and Fall of the Creek Nation in the Early Republic (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 29.
61. Kokomoor, Of One Mind, 29.
62. George Washington and Henry Knox to Benjamin Lincoln, Cyrus Griffin, and David Humphreys, “Instructions to the Commissioners for Treating with the Southern Indians,” 29 August 1789, accessed 22 August 2021, https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage.
63. Letter, “Instructions to the Commissioners for Negotiating a Treaty with the Tribes of Indians in the Southern Department, for the Purposes of Establishing Peace Between the United States and the Said Tribes,” 26 October 1787, accessed 22 August 2021, https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage.
64. “Talk from the Lower Towns in the Creek Nation,” 11 August 1786, accessed 22 August 2021, https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc026.
65. “Talk of the Fat King to his honor Governor Matthews and the Council,” 27 July 1787, accessed 22 August 2021, https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwsp.html.
66. DuVal, Independence Lost, 256–59.
67. “José de Gálvez to the Intendant of Louisiana,” AGI Cuba 182A, f 639–644, Florida History Online, https://www.unf.edu/floridahistoryonline/.
68. “José de Gálvez to the Intendant of Louisiana.”
69. “Zéspedes to Gálvez,” AGI Santo Domingo 86-6-6 in Lawrence Kinnaird, ed., Spain in the Mississippi Valley, vol. III, Annual Report of the American Historical Association (United States Government Printing Office, 1945), pt. 2:111.
70. Steven J. Peach, “Creek Indian Globetrotter: Tomochichi’s Trans-Atlantic Quest for Traditional Power in the Colonial Southeast,” Ethnohistory 60, no. 4 (October 2013): 605–35, esp. 608.
71. “Las Casas to Alcudia,” AGI Estado, Santo Domingo leg. 14, in Kinnaird, Spain in the Mississippi, IV pt. 3:135.
72. Multiple documents express a similar sentiment; the Natives were “provided with their daily necessities and returned to their country as quickly as possible.” See the “Correspondence of the Captain General of Cuba, José de Ezpeleta,” AGI Cuba 1387 for examples.
73. “Proclamation, 14 August 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-06-02-0122.
74. Caughey, McGillivray, 290.
75. This included the influential region around Natchez.
76. J. M. White, M. de Manuel y Rodríquez, I. Jordán de Assó y del Río, I., Texas., Mexico., Spain., France., Great Britain. (1839). A new collection of laws, charters and local ordinances of the governments of Great Britain, France and Spain. Philadelphia [Pa.]: T. & J. W. Johnson. 324.
77. White, A new collection of laws, 324.

CHAPTER 10

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CHAPTER 9

“Playing the Old Game of Double”

Navigating Creek and Spanish Geopolitics in the Post-Revolutionary Gulf South

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