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

2. The Cusseta Treaty of 1832

47 On March 24, 1832, the delegation of Upper and Lower Creek headmen , advised by the Creek agent, John Crowell, and an Indian country trader and planter, John Brodnax, met with War Department officials in Washington and put their marks and signatures to a document known to Alabamians and Georgians as the Cusseta Treaty of 1832. Under the terms of the agreement, the Creeks ceded all 5,200,000 acres of their tribal lands in Alabama to the United States. The federal government then promised to survey the cession and allot approximately 2,187,000 acresofittoindividualchiefsandheadsofCreekhouseholdsinseveralty. The remaining acres of the Creek country would be open to settlement by whites. The treaty also gave the individual Creek landholders an option: they could sell their allotments to whites and move west to land reserved for them in the Western Territory or they could hold on to their property and remain in Alabama as independent freeholders and state citizens. Once the allotments were made, the Creeks had a five-year period to make their decisions. Finally, the government promised to protect the Indians’ tribal domain from encroachment by whites from the time of the cession to the end of the decision period.1 On the face of it, the Cusseta Treaty seemed like a clever bargain for the Creek delegates. They meant for their tribespeople to take their individual land allotments in blocks, clustered about their old town sites, and thus maintain some semblance of communal life and town 2. The Cusseta Treaty of 1832 the cusseta treaty of 1832 48 integrity despite a much-reduced land base. Furthermore, the federal government would protect the allotments until the individual chiefs and heads of families gained deeds to their holdings. These Creek landowners then could use those deeds to guarantee their property rights under Alabama law and in the Alabama courts. In short, it appeared that the Creek delegates, at the price of giving up half of their national territory, could use the Cusseta Treaty to manipulate federal power and state law to their own best advantage in protecting the rest of their domain.2 However, the whites had other ideas. During 1832 many citizens of the southern states were hard at work shifting the center of cotton production from the Atlantic Coast region into the Old Southwest. These people saw the Cusseta Treaty as a great boon, for it would open three million acres of new public land to white settlement and agricultural production. Moreover, the treaty would free the other two million acres of Creek allotment land from the control of a tribal government. That fact would allow aggressive whites to purchase the finest lands in the Old Creek Nation directly from relatively unsophisticated Native landholders. In fact, President Jackson counted on this happening. He and his colleagues in the War Department saw the Cusseta accord merely as a market-based removal treaty. They believed that once the government sold all the land surrounding the Creek allotments to settlers , Alabama’s white population would press the Natives to sell their landholdings. Then the Creeks would realize they lacked both the means and the desire to compete economically with their white neighbors. Consequently, the Indians would sell their allotments for substantial sums and use the money to finance new starts for themselves in the West. Thus, Jackson hoped to bring the forces of the marketplace to bear on the Creeks and finally compel their removal, something government negotiators had been unable to do for years.3 Ultimately, both Jackson and the Creeks would be disappointed with the Cusseta Treaty. Turning the Creeks over to the tender mercies of the marketplace during the flush times of the 1830s cotton boom was a mistake. Rather than restricting white intrusion and protecting their land,theCreekswouldseetheCussetaTreatybecomeanenteringwedge the cusseta treaty of 1832 49 for whites into the last stronghold of the Creek Nation. These whites found ways not only to strip the Creeks of their land allotments but to dispossess them of all their money and disposable property as well. This was not what Jackson wanted. While he meant to exert enough economic pressure to compel removal, he never sought to impoverish the Creeks. Furthermore, Creek land and Creek possessions fell into the hands of speculators, not the respectable independent farmers and planters the president said he wanted to serve. Even worse, the Cusseta Treaty actually retarded Creek removal rather than stimulated it. Speculators...