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MORE THAN A THOUSAND MILES south of Quebec City, another Native leader who had fought for the British responded to the new American borders with a more aggressive strategy. Like Brant, Alexander McGillivray was the product of a prewar world of trade and imperial alliances. He was the son of Lachlan McGillivray, a Scottish trader, and Sehoy Marchand, the daughter of a French officer and a Creek woman from that tribe’s prominent wind clan. Like William Johnson, Lachlan McGillivray was a newcomer to North America who gained access to the Indian trade by allying himself with a prominent Native family. Because the Creeks were matrilineal (tracing their ancestry through mothers) Lachlan’s son Alexander was accepted as a member of the tribe and spent his early childhood among his mother’s kinsmen along the Coosa River in modern Alabama. Lachlan McGillivray did not remain on the frontier, however, and in 1760—when he was ten—Alexander moved to Savannah with his family. There he was educated by tutors and introduced to the trading business by both Lachlan and his Creek relatives. When the American rebellion began, young McGillivray, like Brant, was eager to use his family and business connections to rally Indian leaders to the crown’s defense.12 Native war parties drawn from the Creeks and Cherokees were fiercely loyal. They helped secure Savannah for the British in the summer of 1779 and stayed on after their victory to repel a combined French and rebel assault on the city late the same year. When Charleston, the largest city in the southern colonies, fell to the British in 1780, McGillivray believed the region had been secured. He returned to his headquarters on the Coosa River. Unfortunately for the British, the Americans strengthened their resistance in the Carolina backcountry later in the year and the Spanish and French challenged the crown’s defenses in East Florida and along the Mississippi. Creek warriors fought alongside the redcoats on both fronts, with McGillivray commanding a contingent that ultimately surrendered Pensacola to the Spanish in the spring of 1781.
By year’s end Florida had fallen to Spain and the Americans had captured General Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown. The situation grew increasingly desperate. American rebels seized the southern upcountry, and the Spanish occupied all the major trading posts in both East and West Florida. As in the North, Native forces nevertheless remained in command of most of the interior farmland and trade networks. Their leaders were no less incredulous about the outcome of the Paris negotiations than their counterparts at Fort Niagara. In a report on his meeting with “the chiefs of the nation” assembled at St. Augustine, the British commander reported that the Indians “lamented extremely” this unfortunate turn of events and had attacked their former allies for betraying their own standards of conduct. “Their fathers told them,” he reported, “that an Englishman in the hour of misfortune or danger was a man who would die rather than forsake his friends.”13
Like Brant, McGillivray had seen his family’s prosperous prewar life torn apart by the American rebellion. He was forced to abandon his home, and his father surrendered much of his Georgia property to the rebels. Lachlan McGillivray returned to Scotland at war’s end, while his son and other relatives remained in Upper Creek tribal towns along the Coosa River. As Alexander McGillivray and his supporters considered their next move, Lower Creek settlements situated near the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers decided to open talks with the former rebels now in charge in Georgia. At the end of 1783, seeing no alternative, this increasingly pro-American segment of the tribe signed a treaty ceding thousands of acres to the Americans.
McGillivray faced a crucial decision. Should he follow the Lower Creeks and make peace with the Americans, or should he seek a new alliance with the Spanish, ignoring their reputation for brutality and tightfistedness? McGillivray, who had recently been named “Head warrior of the Nation” by the Upper Creeks, barely hesitated. Charging that the British had “most shamefully deserted” his family, the Creek leader moved quickly to establish a relationship with the Spanish commander at Pensacola. Like the chiefs who had met with the British commander at St. Augustine, he believed his former allies had acted without honor, “unless,” he wrote, “[s]pilling our blood in the Service of his Nation can be deemed so.”14
In March 1783, at about the time Joseph Brant met with his fellow chiefs at Fort Niagara, McGillivray wrote to Arturo O’Neil, the Dublin-born Spanish commander at Pensacola, identifying himself as “Chief of the Creek Nations.” He urged O’Neil to release a trader friendly to the Creeks who recently had been imprisoned on suspicion of spying. “’Tis without foundation,” he wrote. Moreover, refusing to let the trader go would only endanger “the tranquility” that currently existed between their two communities. Six months later McGillivray appeared in person at the Spanish post to open talks. O’Neil later reported to his superiors in Havana that the Creek leader had told him that even though his former English allies would soon evacuate St. Augustine, they had urged McGillivray to “hold the Indians in readiness to recommence the war.” Not only could the Creeks promise O’Neil a steady flow of deerskins, but, he reported, they would also “refuse” the peace overtures coming their way from Georgia. The commander was convinced that the Indians were “strongly opposed” to the Americans.15
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BRANT AND MCGILLIVRAY were puzzled by Britain’s decision to abandon their Native allies. How could the crown’s loyal auxiliaries, whose villages spread across every corner of King George’s North American empire, have gone unmentioned in the international agreements that ended the American rebellion and created a new nation with a western border on the Mississippi River? How had a squabbling band of rebel leaders, who had almost no ability to project military power into the continent’s interior, managed to win international recognition for a vast territory they could neither occupy nor rule? Why had the French and Spanish allowed this to occur? And most upsetting to them personally, how could sophisticated and loyal commanders like Brant and McGillivray, men treated as officers by the British, be so completely dismissed? Perhaps this was but a momentary aberration.
It was not. The 1783 Paris agreements changed how Mohawks, Creeks, and all other Native groups within the official boundaries of the United States would henceforth deal with outsiders. The accords accomplished the double trick of erasing Native people from the international diplomatic arena, while placing them under the authority of a nation that took no formal notice of their existence.16 For major tribes, like the Iroquois and Creeks, who were accustomed to diplomacy, trade, and treaty making involving multiple European adversaries, a new world was coming dimly into view. A single power now claimed sovereignty over them but did not recognize their leaders or territorial borders. This predicament pitted tribal leaders like Brant and McGillivray against the deepest ambitions of a young nation intent on becoming a continental power. How had this happened?
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND THE GREAT POWERS
From the outset, the American rebellion had required its leaders to wage a complex three-front struggle that was made all the more different by their ever-changing relationship with Indian tribes. Their most immediate concern was the imposing army of British and mercenary troops that swarmed across the Atlantic in the summer of 1776, but the Revolution’s leaders also knew that popular support for their rebellion was thin. At least a third of their countrymen were either opposed or indifferent to the war for independence.17 American leaders might condemn British Loyalists and malcontents as “cut throats and deserters,” but they could not ignore their sizable presence.18 Help from overseas was essential if the Americans had any chance of winning enough victories over the redcoats to rally their divided followers to the cause.
This calculation led the Americans to the court of Louis XVI, Britain’s chief international rival. Members of the Continental Congress corresponded with French agents during the winter of 1775–76 and began debating a proposed model commercial treaty with the French within days of approving their Declaration of Independence. They counted on Paris’s eagerness to avenge the loss of thei
r North American colonies in 1763, and they were not disappointed. Shortly after July 4, 1776, Minister of Foreign Affairs Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, wrote that “providence [has] marked this moment for the humiliation of England . . . it is time to take revenge . . . for the evil it has done since the beginning of the century to those who had the misfortune to be its neighbors or its rivals.”19
The French began supplying the Americans with covert aid, but the Continental Congress wanted a public commitment. With formal recognition from France the rebels believed they would be better able to cultivate additional military allies and financial supporters. To press their case, the rebel government dispatched its most experienced diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, to the French court. The seventy-year-old scientist was soon lobbying his hosts by holding receptions at his suburban residence and appearing regularly in Paris salons sporting a beaver hat, homespun clothes, and shoulder-length hair. The American victory at Saratoga, New York, in October 1777 (won by American troops firing French munitions) provided the reassurance the French required. A formal treaty was approved in early 1778. The agreement contained all the Americans had wished for with one caveat. Minister Vergennes had insisted that “the first and most essential” element in the new treaty “is that neither of the two parties shall make either peace or truce without the consent of the other.”20
With Franklin now recognized as the ambassador of the United States to France, the Americans’ attention shifted to Spain. The American diplomat Arthur Lee had visited Madrid in March 1777 to deliver a memorial warning the Spanish court that an English victory in North America would allow King George to reign as “the irresistible though hated arbiter of Europe.” Aid to the Americans could prevent that outcome. “This,” he declared, “is the moment in which Spain and France may clip her wings and pinion her forever.” The Spanish demurred, but the Americans persisted. Both the Americans and their French allies offered to help King Charles III retake Florida (lost in the Seven Years’ War) and capture the British West Indies. They also hinted that a new alliance might enable the two Catholic powers to retake Gibraltar for Spain (the English had held that strategic spot for the past seventy years). The Spanish were receptive but noncommittal.21
The conclusion of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 had coincided with the ascension of Charles III to the Spanish throne. A former ruler of Naples, Charles was a member of the house of Bourbon and thereby related to Louis XVI. Charles was a forceful administrator. He had promoted prosperity in Naples by adopting liberal trade policies and appointing competent ministers to regulate the kingdom. He came to power in Spain at a moment when the rise of urban merchant houses and the beginnings of industrialization had enabled Britain and France to expand the reach of their international trade. But the Spanish crown had continued to trudge along the old mercantilist path. It tightly controlled commerce between its colonies and the Iberian Peninsula and relied heavily on the extraction of mineral and agricultural wealth to enrich the mother country. As a consequence, as much as 80 percent of the goods shipped from Cádiz to the Americas in the 1760s were manufactured outside Spain. At the onset of the American rebellion the Spanish were therefore as eager to “clip” the wings of Great Britain’s burgeoning economic juggernaut as they were to stymie its military ambitions.
The principal instrument of Spanish imperial policy during the American Revolution was José de Gálvez, a career bureaucrat who had risen from the post of inspector general in New Spain to become colonial secretary in 1775. Gálvez advocated loosening Spain’s traditional restrictions on its American colonies. His most important achievement was persuading the king to increase the number of ports that were permitted to import and export goods between the Americas and the mother country. This reform produced a surge in traffic, particularly with Mexico City and the surrounding territories of New Spain.22 Despite his willingness to innovate, Gálvez remained committed to the mercantile ideal of a self-contained empire. As Charles declared, “Only a free and protected commerce . . . can restore agriculture, industry and population in my dominions to their proper vigor.”23
Spain, then, was of two minds. On the one hand, Spanish officials understood the power of free trade and manufacturing to produce new wealth. On the other, an alliance with the Americans could draw this collection of upstart traders (and smugglers) dangerously close to the empire’s borders. In the end their fear of Britain prevailed over their fear of the unruly Americans. Following the French lead, Charles III declared war on Britain in the summer of 1779. Immediately after Spain had entered the war, Minister Gálvez wrote the governor of Louisiana to remind him of their objectives. The “principal object” of the king’s American campaign during the coming war, he said, would be “to drive the [English] from the Mexican Gulf and the neighborhood of Louisiana.”24
While the Americans were waging their international campaign for recognition in the royal courts of Europe, they were also acutely aware of the extent to which their rebellion had divided powerful political interests in Great Britain. The Tory prime minister Frederick North held firm to the goal of defeating the American insurrection, but the number of rivals within his own party, as well as the leaders of his Whig opposition, grew as the conflict wore on. John Adams reported from Paris in 1780, for example, that the Irish-born Lord Shelburne, one of North’s fiercest critics, had recently declared in Parliament that “such is the situation in which we now find ourselves: not a single ally! . . . Such are the fruits of the prudence of our ministers,” he added. “They have lost America, the most beautiful half of the empire, and against the half that remains to us they have excited all the powers of Europe.”25 Shelburne and others sympathized with the Americans’ democratic ideals; many of them wanted to see similar electoral reforms enacted in Britain. Critics of the war also included a rising generation of free traders who insisted that once independent, the American colonies could become active trading partners and attractive customers for British manufacturers and banks.26
As the war stretched into its fifth year, a growing chorus of British politicians urged the government to cut its losses by recognizing American independence and negotiating a peace agreement with France and Spain. The king and his supporters in Parliament stuck to their guns, but when news of Lord Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown reached London in November 1781, their support collapsed. Lord North exclaimed, “Oh God, Oh God, It’s All Over.” Though the king’s advocates maneuvered for three more months, on March 20, 1782, North’s cabinet, in power since 1770, finally resigned.27
In the wake of North’s departure, George III reluctantly turned to the loyal opposition, inviting the aging Lord Rockingham, who had led the government during the Stamp Act crisis two decades earlier, to form a new cabinet. Rockingham managed to exclude the strongest antiwar voices from his government, but he served for less than four months; he died in July during an influenza epidemic. The king then turned to Rockingham’s home secretary, Lord Shelburne, an idiosyncratic Anglo-Irishman who had served in the House of Commons for twenty years but who was selected primarily because the king detested his chief rival, Charles James Fox, an outspoken young advocate of American independence.
French and Spanish officials celebrated Britain’s plummeting resolve. It seemed their diplomatic calculations had paid off. British power would now be reduced while the influence of the king’s domestic critics would expand. But these celebrations were short-lived. The rebellion had united the Americans and their European allies, but once Cornwallis’s sword had been handed to General Washington and the North government had fallen, the victors began to mistrust one another. The French and Spanish were eager to continue the alliance to ensure the “clipping” of Britain’s wings, but the Americans, with a bankrupt treasury and a domestic population weary of war, were far less enthusiastic.
Acutely aware of their military weakness (the British, after all, continued to occupy New York and Charleston), the Americans could not survive wit
hout European arms and credit. On the other hand, France and Spain worried that Franklin and company might cut a quick conciliatory deal with their former rulers, ignore the interests of the continent’s tribes, and sail for home. Spain’s chief minister summarized those worries in early 1782, when he told the French ambassador in Madrid that “the Americans would always be English at heart. . . .”28
NEGOTIATING THE PEACE
The principal issue separating the rebels and their French and Spanish allies in the spring of 1782 was the size of the nation about to be created on the North American continent. The Americans sympathized with their partners’ geographical concerns. They agreed, for example, that the French should be allowed to reclaim some portion of the rich North Atlantic fisheries they had harvested prior to 1763 and that the Spanish should be allowed to keep Louisiana and the Florida territories they had captured from the British in 1781. Franklin and his colleagues also sympathized with France’s overseas ambitions in India and Africa. But the Americans had no interest in the Mohawks or Creeks or other tribes whose territories encroached on their own. From the first days of the war the Americans had declared their intention to claim all of Canada as part of their new country and to extend their western boundary to the Mississippi River. The French and Spanish quickly rejected those ambitious claims, but their opposition had been moot so long as British troops (and their Indian allies) occupied Detroit and Mackinac and dominated the North American interior from the Ohio Valley to New Orleans. In the spring of 1782, however, when the news from Yorktown and London reached Paris, the moment to resolve this disagreement had suddenly arrived.
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