"A Man's Children Have No Claim to His Property": Creek Matrilineal Property Relations and Gendered Conflict at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

The General [Alexander McGillivray Sr.] left behind him a considerable property in negros, horses, and cattle, little of which went to his children. According to the custom of this nation a man's children have no claim to his property, it belongs to his relations on the maternal line, and they seize upon it, as was the case in this instance. Mrs. Durand and Mrs. Weatherford, the first a sister and the other a maternal sister only, took possession of the greatest part of the property. . . .

—Benjamin Hawkins, 1809

In 1809 the United States of America's Southern Indian agent, Benjamin Hawkins, wrote the above description of what occurred to the property of Creek headman Alexander McGillivray Sr. aft er he died in Pensacola in 1793. Writing sixteen years aft er the events occurred, Hawkins demonstrated that during his career among the Creeks, he had come to understand and appreciate the importance and power of matrilineages to the Creek people and other southeastern Native groups.¹ Evidence shows that both Creeks and Euro-Americans understood some of the differences in how each organized their societies—including property inheritance and gender norms. Fueled by disputes over property that began within Creek families and expanded to include the involvement of Euro-Americans, changes within Creek property relations began to challenge the place of women and matrilineages in Creek society at the turn of the nineteenth century.

At the time of his death, McGillivray owned extensive lands, "sixty negroes, three hundred head of cattle, with a large stock of horses."² He attempted to leave this property to his own children, but his matrilineal kin asserted their Creek rights to his property instead.³ Six years later, in 1799, McGillivray's sisters Sophia (Durant), Sehoy (Weatherford), and Jeannette (Milfort/Crook) also struggled to take possession of the property of another brother, Malcolm McPherson Sr., from McPherson's son. Both disputes were part of a new phenomenon that had only recently come to Creek country, in present-day Alabama and Georgia, with the colonial introduction of patrilineal property inheritance among the Creek peoples. Euro-Americans introduced these differently gendered property relations slowly over centuries of contact and intermarriage, which occurred in southeastern North America mostly aft er the middle of the seventeenth century.⁴ However, by the turn of the nineteenth century patrilineal property inheritance had become widespread enough to inspire conflicts and violence between Creeks following the deaths of family members. This violence exacerbated other tensions in Creek society—tensions that further attracted the participation of Euro-Americans in Creek affairs—and eventually exploded in the Creek Civil War of 1813–14.⁵

By the late eighteenth century the loose affiliation of Native groups that became known to the British and Americans as the Creek Confederacy was home to people from a multitude of Native ethnic groups that spoke several Native languages, including (but not limited to) Muskogee, Alabama, Uchee, Natchez, Koasati, and Hitchiti.⁶ Aft er first contact with Europeans in the sixteenth century, Native populations in southeastern North America were decimated by waves of disease and the Native slave trade. The peoples who would form the confederacy known as the Creeks responded to the subsequent demographic collapse by coalescing into loose alliances built on the incorporation of outsiders into towns and clans.⁷ At the turn of the nineteenth century, geography placed the Creeks in close proximity to expansionist Americans from Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, to whom they had ceded lands in several previous treaties. The ceded territories were supposed to alleviate the desires for land of expansionist Americans, quash violence on the colonial periphery, and settle massive debts that Creeks incurred to British, American, and Spanish traders.⁸ As Tennessee was granted statehood in 1796, the Mississippi Territory was incorporated in 1798, and the Louisiana Territory was purchased in 1803, American expansion south, east, and westward into Creek country became a near certainty. Furthermore, the location of the Creeks, who were being surrounded by American and Spanish...