Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750-1860

4. The State of Muskogee, 1799-1803

127 4 THE STATE OF MUSKOGEE, 1799–1803 The short-lived State of Muskogee, in existence from 1799 to 1803, constituted a threat to the expansion of American plantation slavery. Members of the nation came primarily from the Seminoles in the Mikasuki towns situated along the Apalachee River, but also included a significant contingent of Indians from other towns as well as a sizable group of blacks and whites. They allied to resist expansion efforts by Spain and the United States and the growing centralization of power among the Creeks through the Creek national council.The State of Muskogee was a multiracial society where race played little role in defining internal hierarchies. Its racial system, then, deviated from the rest of Indian and Georgian society. Although the Muskogees did not express or adhere to an overtly ideological opposition to slavery, their opposition toAmerican and Spanish expansion nevertheless constituted a substantive challenge to the institution. It was a hybrid society in terms of both its racial policies and the basis of its economy . Because of these positions, the State of Muskogee became a rival for power with theAmericans and Spanish.Although the exact size of the State of Muskogee’s population remains unknown, its importance to the history of the Southeast at the turn of the nineteenth century is considerable. In its four years of existence, the nation profoundly shaped geopolitics in the region and left a legacy that extended well beyond its demise in 1803. When traveling through the Southeast in the mid-1770s, the naturalist William Bartram could scarcely believe the raw beauty and abundant 128 CULTIVATING RACE resources of the area near the present-day Georgia-Florida boundary.The “swampy, hommocky country,” he wrote, “furnishes such a plenty and variety of supplies for the nourishment of varieties of animals, that I can venture to assert, that no part of the globe so abounds with wild game or creatures fit for the food of man.”The land provided the perfect sanctuary as well.The land, he noted in his Travels, was “naturally cut and divided into thousands of islets, knolls, and eminences, by the innumerable rivers, lakes, swamps, vast savannas and ponds,” which “form so many secure retreats and temporary dwelling places, that effectually guard them from any sudden invasions or attacks from their enemies.” The inhabitants enjoyed “a superabundance of the necessaries and conveniences of life, with the security of person and property, the two great concerns of mankind.”The residents of the paradise “appear as blithe and free as the birds of the air, and like them as volatile and active, tuneful and vociferous. The visage, action, and deportment of the Siminoles, form the most striking picture of happiness in this life; joy, contentment, love and friendship, without guile or affectation, seem inherent in them, or predominant in their vital principle, for it leaves them but with the last breath of life.” The only threat to its existence, he noted, was the white man. “They seem to be free from want or desires. No cruel enemy to dread; nothing to give them disquietude, but the gradual encroachment of the white people.”1 The white man did disturb the serenity of the Seminoles in the twenty-five years following Bartram’s trip.The outbreak of the American Revolution and the rise of the new nation upset geopolitics in the region .The new conditions exacerbated political and economic differences among the Indians of the Southeast. Confronted by the new situation, some Seminoles chose to band together to form the State of Muskogee. In their opposition to the expansion of plantation slavery, Seminoles allied with whites like William Augustus Bowles and slaves who had escaped from Georgian plantations. The Muskogees created a hybrid nation not only in population and culture but also in economy, all of which posed a threat to white Georgian society. The Seminole Indians whom Bartram described were recent arrivals to Florida. They moved from Creek towns located in central and southern Georgia beginning in the 1720s following theYamasee War.They replaced the former inhabitants, the Apalachee and Timucua Indians, who were killed or taken prisoner by raiding parties of Creek and Yamasee warriors and, later, by settlers from Carolina. The Seminoles’ numbers The State of Muskogee 129 grew in the second half of the century and their villages spread in clusters across the panhandle of Florida and into the eastern prairies.2...