The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing Frontier

Epilogue: The Legacy of the Second Creek War

417 The fight against the Creeks and their Seminole cousins was a costly affair in terms of both money and lives. Between the years 1835 and 1843, Congress appropriated between thirty and forty million dollars for the suppression of Indian hostilities in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. It is hard to draw the line between Creek and Seminole war expenditures because the appropriation bills made no designations, but chasing and fighting Creeks in three different states must have demanded a healthy portion of the total sum. Furthermore, both the federal government and the state of Florida continued to expend funds in tracking down Creeks well after 1843. Worse, the Creek and Seminole wars caused untold numbers of whites and Indians to die in the war, most from hardship and disease rather than from direct combat. In fact, the Creek fugitives may have lost all of their children during the years of their flight from Alabama to Middle Florida. When, for example, Col. Ethan Allen Hitchcock finally rounded up Pascofar’s band at Ochlockonee Bay, he noted that the group included no children between the ages of four and fifteen years of age.1 Still, the Indian conflict, waged at national expense, benefited southern planters and an economic system based on slavery. First of all, the war resulted in the forced removal of the large majority of Creeks, ending the existence of a Creek Nation in the Southeast. Their absence, in turn, contributed to the whites’ sense of security and Epilogue The Legacy of the Second Creek War epilogue 418 bolstered economic development in Georgia, Florida, and Alabama. As more settlers moved onto land vacated by the Indians, Alabama’s nonNative population doubled in the decade of the 1830s. Moreover, the state’s cotton production more than tripled, largely because the famed Black Belt opened to plantation agriculture. Consequently, economic and political power shifted toward the southern part of Alabama, and Montgomery became the state’s capitol and most influential city in the decade of the 1840s. Simultaneously, Mobile grew in importance. After nearly burning to the ground in 1827, that town rose from the ashes in the 1830s to experience one of the greatest boom periods in its history. In fact, Mobile became one of the leading cotton ports in the South, owing not only to Creek removal but to that of the Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws as well. Sitting near the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Alabama-Tombigbee river drainage system, Mobile handled the cotton coming from millions of acres of land once owned and occupied by these Native peoples. Already by 1837 the Mobile branch of the Second Bank of the United States had more money on deposit than any other branch in the whole country, and the city did so much business that its warehouses proved inadequate to house all the cotton and other produce it gathered in from the hinterlands by raft and steamboat. Conversely, though, some New Alabama towns—Tallassee, for example—declined with Creek removal because they had grown dependent on Indian trade and especially the “Indian business.”2 Creek removal also facilitated the economic growth of the Chattahoochee -Apalachicola river system. This system, which includes the Flint and Chipola rivers and numerous other tributary streams, traverses thousands of acres of good farmland. With the end of the Creek war, plantations and new towns sprang up all along the system , particularly in southwestern Georgia, where roaming Creeks and Seminoles had caused white settlers problems for decades. The city of Columbus, located at the fall line of this river system, became an even more important commercial center, just as its residents had hoped when they set out to grab the Creek lands in New Alabama. Columbus merchants prospered from the buying and selling of cotton from all the new fields in Georgia and Alabama, and they used the epilogue 419 money to make Columbus a manufacturing hub. In fact, Columbus would become, along with Richmond, Virginia, one of the two leading textile manufacturing centers in the South. Furthermore, the city acquired ironworks, steamboat factories, and other establishments that produced steam engines, cotton gins, firearms, and iron railing. The Columbusmerchants,alongwiththoseofIrwinton,Albany,Bainbridge, Marianna, and other inland ports on the Chattahoochee-Apalachicola system, shipped all the cotton they collected downriver to the town of Apalachicola, located at the mouth of the waterway on the Gulf of Mexico. There other...