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Introduction
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Introduction Kathryn E. Holland Braund as the corn was ripening in July 1813, the Creek people were engulfed by what Benjamin hawkins termed a “rage of Frenzy.”1 hawkins, who served as the United States’ representative to the Creeks, might better have described it as a frenzy of rage, and a good deal of it was of his own making. hawkins seemed oblivious to the intense strains that his efforts to transform Creek society and economy had imposed on the Creek psyche—not to mention the strains his relentless demands for land cessions, right-of-way, free navigation of rivers, and micromanagement of Creek internal affairs had wrought. hawkins’s efforts, known as the “plan of civilization,” were meant to transform Indians from hunters to farmers and “reform” aspects of Indian culture to conform to american norms, particularly in regard to kinship practices and notions of property. of course, the Creeks had always been farmers, but hawkins envisioned a time when Creeks would abandon communal fields designed for basic subsistence and embrace private landholdings devoted to commercial agriculture.The plan was as broad as it was intrusive. It sought to transform Creek men into tillers of the soil, the traditional role of women. It denigrated clan membership and responsibilities and elevated the nuclear family, under the leadership of the dominant male, working on private land plots for profit. It meant new roles for women, who were to take up spinning and weaving. It encouraged citizens to abandon towns where communal values and hospitality were prized in return for rugged individualism and acquisitiveness in widely dispersed farmsteads, ranches, ferries, and taverns. It also meant, so the missionaries hoped, a conversion to Christianity. and it brought mounting pressures for the loosely organized government of the Creek towns, the National Council, to take on sweeping new responsibilities, including the very old problem of how to deal with de- 2 Braund mands for satisfaction by the United States when Creeks broke american laws or took american lives.2 While the Creek country roiled over these attempts at “reform,” the world around it—both temporal and spiritual—churned with agitation and aggression . In the early fall of 1811, Tecumseh, a Shawnee diplomat and war leader, accompanied by sixteen other Shawnees and a number of Choctaws and Cherokees, visited the Creeks. No doubt,Tecumseh’s message was grim, although hawkins had a difficult time detailing exactly what the message was, for the Indian diplomats refused to speak freely in the presence of americans. There is widespread agreement that he urged peaceful relations between all Indian peoples, warned of the rapacious american expansion, talked of the tensions in his homeland, and likely pointed to the cavalier way in which americans demanded access through the Creek country and continued to encroach on Creek land and then claim it as their own.Most likely, he also invited widespread Creek participation in a pan-Indian alliance against US expansion.3 By June of 1812—less than a year afterTecumseh’s visit—the United States was openly at war with the Shawnee and their British allies. as things went from bad to worse in the north for the Shawnee, things were not going well for the Creeks’ Spanish neighbors in Florida either. By the spring of 1812, US citizens openly moved into the Mobile delta, claiming it was theirs under the terms of the Louisiana purchase.The Spanish disputed the claim but didn’t have the muscle to force them out and remained tenuously ensconced in Fort Charlotte. By april of 1813, General James Wilkinson seized Fort Charlotte, and the Spanish garrison evacuated to pensacola. Meanwhile , american “patriots” from Georgia had invaded east Florida with a goal of extending US sovereignty there. Fighting between the americans, whose ranks quickly included US regulars, and the Seminoles, who rightly viewed the action as hostile to their interests, continued through 1812 and well into 1813.4 The spectacle of americans invading Spanish and Seminole territory likely did not surprise the Creek people, for their own lands had been subjected to american advances. and as they watched workers enlarge the Federal Road that ran through their territory over their objections and when told by hawkins that americans should now be allowed to travel freely down the Coosa River, it is hard to believe that a sense of foreboding did not engulf them. and, at some point, that foreboding turned to rage, particularly after the National Council, at hawkins’s insistence, had a number of Creek...