The Terrain of Factionalism: How Upper Creek Communities Negotiated the Recourse of Gulf Coast Trade, 1763-1780

The arrival of the british on the gulf coast in the late eighteenth century challenged the trade and diplomatic advantages Upper Creek towns enjoyed since the arrival of the French and Spanish. The Catholic powers’ departure redirected factional competition among an Upper Creek leadership eager to define and direct the balance of power in the region in ways that enhanced the statuses of their communities and personal prestige. A recurrent few of these Upper Creek headmen continually appear in the colonial records of British West Florida in the years immediately preceding the American Revolution. Their discussions with colonial administrators reveal not only the saliency of the community in Creek life, but also how they subordinated market principles to social arrangements and responsibilities. Discourses relative to the geographic location of towns (whether European or Creek) and those communities relation to one another, prove that trade and diplomatic networks were multi-dimensional and situational. This reality complicated British merchants’, traders’, and administrators’ labors to instill order across the colonial Southeast.

Both Europeans and Creeks understood the importance of the geography of trade. For Europeans seeking an advantage over their imperial rivals in the North American Southeast, commercial and diplomatic access to indigenous allies was critical. On his diplomatic errand to the Lower Creeks in 1728, South Carolinian Charlesworth Glover remarked: “I hear there is a French man coming with a talk

Emanuel Brown’s “A New Map of Georgia with Part of Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana,” found in John Harris’ Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels (1748). This was one of the earliest maps of the colony of Georgia and additionally showcases many of the more prominent towns and forts located across the region’s coasts and backcountry around mid-century.

Image scan courtesy of the author.

to you, I wou’d have you take no notice of anything he says. If it was a talk from their great men it would have come from the French path.”¹ Encouraging healthy competition from multiple directions was an intrinsic Creek objective. British Superintendent of Indian Affairs, John Stuart, observed in 1768: “some amongst them [the Creeks] wish to see that competition for their friendship renewed, which subsisted when the French and Spaniards had footing near them, and from which they reaped great advantages.”² During much of the colonial period, this play-off strategy succeeded, using a confusing array of individual town or factional interests.

Competing factions among the Creeks were certainly not unknown prior to 1763. Spanish, French, and British colonial administrators long recognized the fractious nature of coalescent societies such as the Creeks and labored to reward loyal or manageable leaders with special presents. “Medal chiefs” (named for the silver medals given native leaders or “headmen”) received a disproportionate number of presents to assure their continued cooperation. These headmen could then distribute gifts among their favorites, thus increasing their own influence through a dependency on the good graces of a colonial governor. Colonial leaders sought to aid efforts that concentrated leadership in one or several men as potential mouthpieces to their own particular agenda. Gifts in this system also buttressed influence among potential Indian allies. Larger and more lucrative gifts, in terms both of their immediate value (e.g. medals) and longer-term accretions of wealth and power (e.g. titles) were given to more influential headmen. Less prestigious headmen received less prestigious gifts as did those who had shown unusual acts of loyalty or military prowess. In this sense, factionalism flourished from 1717–1763 with neither the French nor the British (both representing the major colonizing influences in the Southeast during the first half of the eighteenth century) commanding a monopoly of trade over the Creek towns. Yet while these headmen might serve a particular administrative purpose for colonial policymakers, they were not universally recognized as legitimate authority figures among their own communities where statuses were achieved, and not simply awarded, from or by an outside source.³

The practices of trade...