CHAPTER 7

War Captives of the Creek People

In the two decades after the Revolution, Black people on the Georgia coast came to harbor a more nuanced feeling toward the Creeks on the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers than they did for the Spanish. Slaves on the coast were well aware of the range of possibilities once they crossed the St. Marys River, whether becoming freemen and freewomen in St. Augustine, contract labor or maroons in a lightly populated region, or even as unfree people in a society where Spanish law offered easier if unevenly applied conditions. Coastal communities still contained members who had been in East Florida during the Revolution, many individuals knew or at least had heard of someone who had fled to Florida, and a few were able to communicate with acquaintances there.¹ Some and perhaps many were aware that a Black militia had faced up to American aggressors in the 1795 rebellion.

If Spanish Florida excited hopes and sometimes dreams, the Creek townships that stretched along the rivers offered a less certain and less predictable future to enslaved people.² The nearest Indigenous settlements were the Lower Towns of the Creek Confederacy that extended along the Chattahoochee River valley, the banks of the Flint River, and even below the fork where the two streams flowed together to form the Apalachicola River. Approximately twenty-five talwas or towns and their related villages dotted the landscape, embracing as many as 6,400 Indians in 1793 according to one report; dozens of white men, many of whom were traders with stores; a residue of slaves from other Native groups; and a growing number of Black people who were primarily enslaved servants of deerskin traders or slaves of chieftains.³ The Lower Towns had fewer inhabitants than the Upper Towns, with their 8,715 inhabitants in forty-eight talwas along the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers in today’s Alabama. They spoke a wider variety of dialects than did those in the Upper Towns, and they were settled in more widely dispersed communities that weakened the role of the traditional town councils.⁴

The two hundred miles between the coast and the Lower Towns had few settlements as such but, in that contested space, there was constant movement through the grassland and longleaf-pine ecosystem. Hunting parties seeking deer and other game moved systematically through the pinelands during winter. Black slaves from Native settlements shepherded strings of horses and herds of cattle to the coast, often without supervision. At the western end of Camden County, Trader’s Hill emerged as a major trading post on the St. Marys River for those Creeks located south of the “mother towns” of Coweta and Cussita, site of present-day Columbus, Georgia.⁵ The Muskogean-speaking towns of Coweta and Cussita continued to trade with Augusta as they had before the war, while those on the lower Chattahoochee, where Hitchiti, Yuchi, and even Yamassee were spoken, depended heavily on Trader’s Hill for their supplies.

A small trading post of a Scots-Creek mestizo, Jack Kinnard, on Kinchafoonee Creek, and that of Timothy Barnard, an English-born trader with a Yuchi wife, on the Flint River, tied the Native country to Trader’s Hill in multiple ways. Trains of packhorses moved continuously between the coast and the interior. The white traders carried goods and information (if sometimes rumor) from place to place, moving through Indigenous towns and occasionally attempting to ransom captives for their slaveholders. Black couriers as well as Black cowboys or herdsmen in Creek communities made occasional appearances in white communities on the coast and found themselves in a position to pick up vital information.⁶ For Native Americans, that space had been their hunting ground over the centuries, all the more important because the Okefenokee Swamp rendered so much of the territory unproductive.⁷

Black people on the coast were realists who well knew that the Creek people had functioned as slave catchers before the war, seized war captives time and again during and after the Revolution, regularly traded Black slaves among themselves or with the Spanish, and continued to hold most of their peers in some form of captivity.⁸ They were now having to rethink their attitudes. They were aware that their counterparts in the Lower Towns often enjoyed a better life in terms of the labor required, the autonomy granted, and the possibility of being adopted into a family or even becoming free.⁹ They understood that agriculture for Indigenous people, whose main commodity was easy-to-grow corn rather than cotton or rice, was not about creating an ever-increasing surplus with an ever-increasing demand for forced labor.

What they did not understand was that many Creek chieftains were moving away from Native conceptions of slavery toward a racially based conception rooted in the commodification of Black people. The older idea of captives who stood outside a well-defined system of kinship (clans) was fading away. African men and women worked in the fields growing crops as did Creek women but lacked the rights, obligations, and status that came with clan membership.¹⁰ As perpetual outsiders, they were vulnerable. However, in this traditional culture, slavery was not necessarily a permanent condition but could end with the death of the mother, the freeing of her children once they were grown, and their incorporation into a family and a clan. Intergenerational slavery was a new phenomenon.

A central figure in this evolution was Jack Kinnard, the son of a Hitchiti-speaking mother and a Scots trader who had established Trader’s Hill many decades before. Although Kinnard had made most of his fortune as a rancher with over a thousand head of cattle, he possessed a sufficient number of enslaved people to have qualified as a major planter, traded goods and slaves with aplomb, and showed himself a skillful diplomat in the tangled web of Native, Spanish, and American intrigue.¹¹ Considered fully Creek in a matrilineal society, he embraced his Celtic heritage with pride, boasted of his white blood, and negotiated with the Spanish in Pensacola and the Americans as a social equal.¹² As a fluent speaker of the Hitchiti language, Kinnard occupied a special space in the Creek world of the southernmost towns since Hitchiti rather than Muskogean was the most common dialect.

His activities shed precious light on several related questions about the type of enslaved person Creek warriors seized in their raids on coastal plantations during the 1780s, the reaction of Black people to attacks that were psychologically terrifying, the need to distinguish between war captives and genuine freedom seekers, the degree of success of slaveholders in recovering their captives, and the extent to which the Lower Towns were eventually integrated into the slave trade along the Georgia coast. Kinnard’s flamboyant life was pivotal, nowhere more so than in deciding the fate of the recently negotiated Treaty of New York.

In September 1790, Maj. Caleb Swan, an American military officer, sailed from New York to St. Marys to travel through Creek towns and report on “the state of manners and arts in the Creek, or Muscogee Nation.” His was a mission to ensure the success of the treaty and to end the many years of raids and counter-raids between Natives and Georgians known as the Oconee War. Negotiated between Alexander McGillivray, a dominant leader in the Upper Towns, son of the deerskin merchant Lachlan McGillivray and a Creek woman of the powerful Wind Clan, and Henry Knox, secretary of war, the treaty made the federal government rather than individual states responsible for Indian affairs.¹³ By the terms of the treaty, the Creeks received a federal guarantee of their sovereignty over the vast interior of the South in return for ceding most of the land between the Oconee and Ogeechee Rivers, parts of which were already overrun by American settlers and cattle herders.

For most Creeks, the treaty was viewed as a disaster, a giving away of the treasured lands between the Ogeechee and Oconee and the shifting of Creek interests from the supportive Spanish to the hated Americans. Especially infuriating to all levels of Native society was the stipulation in Article 3 that stated, “The Creek Nation shall deliver as soon as practicable to the commanding officer of the troops of the United States, stationed at the Rock-Landing on the Oconee River, all citizens of the United States, white inhabitants or negroes, who are now prisoners in any part of the said nation.”¹⁴ For one brief moment, “Negroes” were identified as citizens of the United States. Article 3 was a red flag that touched as much on the Native sense of honor—for those were captives won in fair contests in their eyes— as any other provision. The Lower Towns had no intention of giving up their war captives or freedom seekers who had escaped from coastal plantations.

Swan hoped to test Creeks’ willingness to return both war captives and fugitives. He and his party landed at the small town of St. Marys and made their way along “Kinnard’s path,” a well-known trail to the Creek towns along the lower parts of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers. After many days, the major and his companions arrived at the house of Jack Kinnard on a tributary of the Flint River near present-day Albany, a geographic point that permitted its owner considerable influence in both the Creek and Seminole worlds. “Kinnard is a noted trader, farmer, and herdsman,” Swan dryly commented. “He has two wives, about forty valuable negroes, and some Indian slaves. He has from 1200 to 1500 head of cattle and horses, and commonly from 5000 to 6000 Spanish dollars at home, which are the produce of cattle he sells.” In a few words, the major captured the nature of the new generation of leadership emerging in Creek country.¹⁵

The forty-odd “Negroes” under Kinnard’s rough hand placed him in a unique spot in the Lower Towns. He had gained many of these Africans as a noted warrior, unlike so many of the mestizos in the Upper Towns who did so by inheritance from their fathers or by purchase. “He accumulated his property,” Major Swan commented, “entirely by plunder and freebooting, during the American war and the late Georgia quarrel.”¹⁶ “Plunder” and “freebooting” were relative terms, at least during the Revolution. Responding to Governor Patrick Tonyn’s call on behalf of the hard-pressed British, the young Kinnard joined other Seminoles and Creeks in patrolling the border along the St. Marys River and conducting raids into Georgia that reached as far as the Altamaha and into Liberty County. The strikes were highly effective. The war parties became an essential part of the extensive pipeline that drained Black people out of Georgia and into Florida and the Creek Nation.¹⁷ As an effective war leader, Kinnard received his due from British officials in the form of slaves presented as “king’s gifts” in recognition of his service.¹⁸ As a war chief during the late 1780s, he had participated in raids along the Georgia coast that brought dozens of enslaved people into the Lower Towns of the Creeks.

Those raids came in retaliation for the continuing push into Creek lands framed by the fraudulent treaties of Augusta, Galphinton, and Shoulder-bone, negotiated in 1783, 1785, and 1786. Millions of acres passed from Native to white hands through the complicity of a handful of chieftains.¹⁹ Over the three years from 1786 to 1789, Kinnard took part in what historian Joshua Haynes calls “border patrolling,” the discrete use of violence along the frontier to push back the offending settlers.²⁰ The many towns of the Creek confederacy, both Upper and Lower, agreed to send out parties of warriors along the three-hundred-mile frontier to harass and intimidate settlers. They stole horses and cattle, burned crops and outbuildings, and occasionally kidnapped enslaved people along the coast. Young warriors rode out in small parties to carry out these limited aims, but in the excitement of the moment, and as a warrior culture came into play, matters could take a different turn, especially along the coast where sizeable plantations presented greater opportunity.

Of the over three hundred raids that occurred between 1786 and 1789, seventy-eight were in coastal counties. If the majority were aimed at Wilkes, Greene, and Washington Counties because of their proximity to the Oconee lands, raiders in the coastal counties of Liberty, Glynn, and Camden made a particular point of stealing slaves from plantations or helping them to escape.²¹ Over a period of almost two years, Creeks made off with 110 slaves, 55 from Liberty County alone, and killed 10 others. By way of contrast, they put to death 72 whites, wounded 29, and took only 30 as prisoners. Clearly, Black individuals held more value than whites, but the raids themselves were more about the taking of livestock than people. During that short time, 984 head of cattle and 643 horses were stolen and hundreds of hogs destroyed in Camden, Glynn, and Liberty Counties.²²

The strategy was a success, at least in the short term. Whites abandoned their plantations along the coast in panic and headed for safety on the Sea Islands. The foreman of a grand jury in Glynn County, the old Scotsman James Spalding, sent a chilling description to authorities. “[Inhabitants] have been drove from their plantations and homes,” he said, “robbed and plundered of their property; several of our citizens murdered and others carried into captivity; their homes burnt and themselves and their families confined to the sea islands.”²³ A planter in Liberty County warned that two large Indian parties were in the vicinity and that four or five plantations had already ceased operation: “People in general appear so discouraged that unless some [military] support is immediately offered then I am persuaded the County will break up.”²⁴

Attacks by Indians were a terrifying experience for Black people, whether they were in the field or around their huts or cabins or walking a distance from their settlements. The attacks happened unexpectedly and with dire consequences. If the raids were about taking cattle and horses, the witnesses were helpless spectators. If the raids included slaves, those taken represented a more or less random choice. An armed guard standing over a field may have deterred some attacks, but the guard often headed for the main house to alert others and put himself out of harm’s way, abandoning the field hands. Small farmers resorted to taking their families and enslaved people to one of the two or three forts along the Altamaha or other rivers and sometimes wrote of how they had “forted” their own property.²⁵

Working in the fields, Black Georgians were more at risk than the planter who was lodged in his house in relative safety or in distant Savannah. Most were horrified at the thought of being spirited away from family and friends and delivered into a strange world where the outcome could result in a new form of slavery. James Smith of Liberty County witnessed this panic when he set out to inspect his rice plantation on a warm day in May. “While approaching his people who were then at labor,” it was stated in a deposition, “he discovered them running in all directions, and several approached . . . with [the] overseer Mr. Solomon Harper (now dead) and requested to know what they should do.” About two hundred yards away, Smith and Harper helplessly watched as twelve Natives took thirteen slaves—seven men and six women.²⁶

The fighting could be brutal. Of the people on John Burnett’s plantation, two of four whites were wounded, an enslaved person killed, a second one scalped, and five others taken and carried off.²⁷ When they tried to capture bondsmen at work, the enslaved ran: “[They] run and hollowed out to the Guard, which run immediately to their relief.” As a warrior seized one enslaved man and tried to tie his hands, “he made so much resistance that [the Creeks] found the guard would be upon them. [The warriors] shott a ball through him and cut his throat and Scalped him and run off.”²⁸ Even the makeshift forts or stockades were vulnerable. Natives picked off people who wandered too far beyond the walls. At Fort Williams on the Altamaha River, Creeks seized an unsuspecting white man named McAphee, a Black man named Byron, and two Black women, one of whom was heading to a nearby fort to pick up a sack of potatoes to feed the sheltering families.²⁹

Most Black people resisted capture, and some fought back. In 1789, three small Creek war parties crossed the frontier in Liberty County, coalesced into a larger fighting force, and laid siege to Woodmanston, the plantation of Dr. John Eatton LeConte, a prominent person who had married into the tight-knit families of Midway whose lives revolved around their Congregational church. LeConte had concentrated his Black families behind a stockade next to the main house. When the first hands left to go into the fields the next morning, the Creeks tried to seize them, but the men and women ran back into the makeshift fort. Six Black men came out with guns and positioned themselves to fight, while several others in the “fort” began firing, together with LeConte. After the shooting began, the warriors retreated to a fence where they rallied and commenced a heavy fire of their own for some time. The plantation house and slave quarters were successfully defended, but three of the six men outside the stockade were taken, and two others were seized elsewhere in the quarters, for a total of five Black people—Jimmy, about forty years old; his wife, Phiana, about forty-five; Tomboy, twenty-five; Samson, eighteen; and Peggy, fourteen.³⁰

During the periods of danger, Black Americans became the effective managers of most threatened plantations. White families typically retired to Savannah or Darien or one of the Sea Islands until the danger passed. When an attack was imminent, even the overseers departed. Militia commander John Berrien reported that the “latest Indian alarm” had thrown a lightly populated corner of Chatham County into a panic: “[Thus] we are obliged to abandon our fields to the management of our Negroes.”³¹ In exposed areas where whites were relatively few, enslaved people found that they exercised considerable authority.

Not all Blacks were fearful. Some saw the arrival of warriors as an opportunity to break out of their oppressive condition and join the Natives in a new life free of the arbitrary violence to which they were subjected. When a party of Creeks attacked the plantation of Andrew Walthour in Liberty County, they killed three enslaved people—January, “a prime fellow”; Miley, “a valuable wench”; and Miley’s four-year-old child. They carried away another five people, Cooper, Rachel and her two children, and Sary, a girl of five. But in his claim for compensation, Walthour mentions that three “Negroes” had run away seven weeks before—Pearce, Isaac, and Orange—and were present on the night of the attack. Presumably, they led the Natives to the settlement and guided their efforts. Rachel and Cooper may have been husband and wife and fled as a family with their friends and companions.³² On a second Liberty County plantation, Creeks seized five women and a boy and three days later came back to take seven “Negroe Fellows,” perhaps with encouragement from the women.³³

The evidence is circumstantial but suggestive. We are dependent on letters asking for compensation from the state government by planters and other slaveholders who had every interest in establishing that their “property” had been seized by marauding Indians. It is probable that a number of war captives were in fact freedom seekers, and it is highly likely that many freedom seekers never found their way into the written records.

The people carried into Creek country represented a broad cross-section of the bondsmen in coastal Georgia, a mixture of African-born and “country-born” or creole, field hands, and semiskilled and skilled people. One planter reported that of the four people he lost on two separate occasions, the first pair were creole, the second from “the Calabar country” and Angola.³⁴ Of the five taken from Woodmanston, LeConte noted that three were African men and two were creole.³⁵ At the Girardeau plantation, four of the eight people carried off were African, two from Angola, one from Gambia, and the last from “Kessy Country.”³⁶

The majority of those seized along the coast were field hands, but Andrew Maybank reported having lost several good boatmen, prime house “wenches” and cooks, washers, ironers, and spinners. Enslaved women on his enterprise were spinning cotton, an activity usually reserved for white women.³⁷ From the plantation of John Girardeau, a raiding party took hold of Pompey, a waterman and tradesman; Cate, Pompey’s wife, noted as a good cook; Agrippa, a “good house servant”; and Rose, “a valuable house wench,” and her two sons, adolescents.³⁸ Later another party captured “London, a boatman, trader, sawyer, and a valuable manager on the plantation” as well as Sam, a boatman and sawyer. The Creeks seemed to have grabbed Black captives as opportunity presented and rarely hesitated to take children.³⁹

Age-wise there was no pattern. At the Maybank plantation, the thirteen kidnapped people were in their teens, twenties, thirties, and forties. Two were listed as “fifty,” a euphemism for men and women well past their prime. For the most part, the Creeks seized Black people on the fly, snatching whomever was found nearby. Most Natives placed their captives on horseback and rode into woods in fear that a posse of white men might follow.

The year 1790 brought an end, albeit temporarily, to the travails along the borders of Georgia and the leverage that Spain had enjoyed with the Creeks. In a stunning reversal of positions, the forty-year old Alexander McGillivray, a mestizo who was the closest approximation of a leader in a loosely constructed alliance of Creek towns, turned to George Washington to negotiate a treaty that achieved the reconfiguring of the geopolitical framework of the entire Southeast to the manifest disadvantage of the Creeks and Spanish.⁴⁰

There was a deeper reason for his reversal of positions than the miscalculation of the ability of the federal government to halt settler colonialism. The historian Claudio Saunt details how McGillivray, son of a Scottish deerskin merchant and Creek mother, emerged after the Revolution as the embodiment of a new and controversial economic order in the Creek nation all while playing the leading role in the fight against American expansion. Familiar with the intricacies of plantation management and Atlantic commerce, he modeled himself as best he could after the planters he had known in Augusta and Savannah working for his father before the Revolution. Always rich in land, livestock, and slaves, he represented the emergence of an elite in Creek society determined to embrace the values of a slave-holding society while defending Creek autonomy and setting sharp limits on the degree of cultural assimilation. He had two plantations, one at Little River near Mobile and a larger one at a site called Little Tallassee, up the Coosa River near its junction with the Tallapoosa, with cabins for sixty enslaved people. Across the river, he had a cowpen with large stocks of horses, hogs, and horned cattle and retained two or three white men to superintend the livestock while employing a white overseer to supervise his plantation on the Little River.⁴¹ John Kinnard was a lesser version of McGillivray but with one critical difference. He remained in touch with local headmen and was more skilled in negotiating his way through the maze of loyalties and sentiments.

The newly named commissioner for southeastern Indians, James Sea-grove, a resident of St. Marys and the agent responsible for federal relations with Spanish Florida, needed allies to help secure acceptance of the treaty’s unpopular provisions. It was only natural that he turned to Kinnard, one of the most pro-American chiefs among the Lower Towns, particularly with the more militant Hitchiti and Chehaw towns to the south. From Seagrove’s perspective, it was a devil’s choice. Kinnard was a known figure who was guilty of the very practice that the commissioner was to end.

Major Swan had found Kinnard to be temperamental, egotistical, and prone to outrageous behavior. “He is a despot,” the officer remarked, “shoots his negroes when he pleases, and has cut off the ears of one of his favorite wives, with his own hands, in a drunken fit of suspicion.”⁴² The cutting off of the ears of an unfaithful spouse was an older form of Muskogean punishment. Virtually illiterate, the entrepreneur employed an ever-changing repertoire of “secretaries” who took down his dictations. In the handwritings of his surviving letters, one sees the varying levels of education of his many amanuenses, but one never misses his energy and imprint.⁴³ Despite his seemingly arbitrary ways, he never wavered in struggling to preserve the political autonomy of the Creek people while being quick to find new ways to survive economically in the face of a declining deerskin trade.

In his new role as an arbiter of a treaty despised by Creeks, Kinnard began modestly by collecting stolen horses and sent twelve of the valuable animals to Trader’s Hill to be delivered to their owners “on proof being made.”⁴⁴ For a fee, he brokered the return of enslaved people, but it was contingent on his good humor. When a dispute broke out with his factor in St. Marys, the mestizo wrote to a correspondent, “My friends need not to write to me anymore to get their Negroes and horses that is strayed or stolen in this country. . . . As you know I have always done everything in my power for white people and now my things is taken from me.”⁴⁵ Nevertheless, he had cast his lot with the Americans. An itinerant trader reported that during the difficult months following an attack on an American trading post, Kinnard still had “the United States standard flying in his yard,” and Kinnard himself reported, “I have talked until I was exhausted [in an effort to maintain peace].” Timothy Barnard, a white trader living on the Flint River, noted that, although headmen from most Lower Towns were opposed to the Treaty of New York, “John Kinnard and his people have left no stone unturned [in its support].”⁴⁶

The patch of borderland that stood at the juncture of Creek, Seminole, Georgian, and Spanish lands exploded in violence in March 1793, less than two years after the signing of the Treaty of New York. Raiding parties that included Black warriors set out from several Chehaw villages on the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers to strike Trader’s Hill, gateway to coveted goods on the St. Marys River and a humiliating symbol of Creek dependence on the Anglo world. On the upper reaches of the river where Kinnard’s trail began, the store effectively tied together the economic and physical geography of the region while providing important access to the Atlantic economy for the Natives of the Southeast. On March 11, a party of Chehaws entered the store to trade deerskin for dry goods. After a seemingly amiable transaction, they roughly shoved the storekeeper, Captain Fleming, against the counter and scalped him as well as another white man who had the misfortune of being present. The warriors spent several hours plundering the store of some two thousand pounds sterling of goods, an unprecedented sum.⁴⁷

In the final moments of that desperate scene, a Black fugitive stepped out of the nearby woods, where he had been patiently waiting for a chance to make himself known. About thirty years old and speaking “plain English,” he was described as “country-born” or creole, thick-set, short, and with the initial “N” on one cheek and a “W” on the other. In an unusually cruel form of torture, his original enslaver had branded him with a red-hot iron that left scars an inch long. The victim was no field hand but a sawyer, cooper, and tanner by trade, a skilled craftsman, victim of a succession of inhumane planters. He had fled the farm of Nathan Atkinson, a man known for his violence and willingness to push the boundaries of the law. The Chehaw warriors carried him back to their town.⁴⁸

The two leaders of the raiding party, John Galphin and the Black Factor, were well known on the frontier. The hot-headed, mixed-race Galphin, whose parents were George Galphin, the largest deerskin merchant in pre-revolutionary Georgia, and Metawney, the daughter of “the Great Warrior of Coweta,” was angered by a succession of slights by white authorities. Echoing pan-Native arguments that were gaining currency among southern Indians, he renounced his earlier loyalty to the United States and became one of the chief advocates of war on the frontier to unite Native Americans east of the Mississippi.⁴⁹

“The Black Factor,” whose Creek name was Philatouche, was even more of an enigma than Galphin. Historian J. Leitch Wright identifies fleeting references to him that imply he was indeed a Zambo but speculates he may have been fully Black, a supposition that at least one contemporary believed to be true.⁵⁰ He had fought with the British at the final military engagements around Savannah during the Revolution and was now the mico of a settlement called Chiaja, located among the network of Hitchiti towns at the confluence of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers.⁵¹ John Forrester, a white trader, reported to the governor of East Florida, “A black half-breed by the name of Black Factor is, it seems, the chief of this town, as big a pirate as Galphin.”⁵² According to an interpreter for the Spanish governor of Pensacola, Julian Carballo, the small settlement consisted of around 110 “free and maroon negroes,” most from Georgia although a few from Pensacola, in essence a collection of former war captives and fugitives.⁵³ The story of Chiaja remains wrapped in mystery, but that there was an outpost of maroons and war captives near Kinnard’s settlement seems likely.

Additional groups struck along the frontier, one from a Chehaw town that attacked a family moving to East Florida in a single wagon, killing four of its seven occupants, and another hitting farms and plantations on the Spanish side of the St. Marys River.⁵⁴ That second party included Black warriors as well as Indians, a testimony to the acceptance of Blacks as equals within the structure of a raid.⁵⁵ Kinnard confirmed for the governor in St. Augustine that it was led by “the Little Black Factor,” a Zambo (person of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry) whose Indian name was Ninny-wageechee.⁵⁶ In explaining that the Black Factor himself was not on this raid, a trader described Ninnywageechee as “the half breed negro who lives low down on Flint River.”⁵⁷ The Indians swooped in on a planter plowing his field, ransacked his house, and carried off an enslaved family: Isaac, his wife Sarah, and their four children.⁵⁸ Other farms were hit and more than one hundred cattle taken. Over the next two months, other raids carried off two dozen enslaved people from the Georgia Lowcountry. The lost workers of James Smith were said to have been “as prime a parcel as he ever saw, young, healthy, and orderly,” a formulaic phrasing meant to obtain the highest possible compensation from the state government if their return could not be secured.⁵⁹

In the traumatic series of incidents in 1793, Black warriors were visible in at least one other major event. In October 1793, 130 mounted Americans crossed the Oconee River and proceeded toward a Chehaw town on the Flint River to recapture lost slaves and livestock. “They expected a large body of negroes and property,” Seagrove told the secretary of war. Instead, as they were fording the river opposite the town, Creeks counterattacked, killed two of the militia, and wounded two others. The militia lost their taste for a fight, abandoned the dead, and rode back to the safety of their stockade. Seagrove made a point of informing Henry Knox, secretary of defense, that the enemy consisted of sixteen Creeks and four “negroes.”⁶⁰ Militia general James Jackson voiced the opinion of many when he speculated that there might be a “Negro rising” on the coast but added that the proof had not yet come in.⁶¹ Anger was at such a fever pitch along the St. Marys that Natives who ventured too far down the river risked their lives. When four Creeks came with talk of peace, residents along the St. Marys River killed two and badly wounded the others, who barely managed to turn around their horses and make it to safety.⁶²

The attack on Trader’s Hill exposed a Creek land that was in shambles. The killings represented years of disruption inflamed by the failed treaty. Despite the discouraging reality, Kinnard and Seagrove worked tirelessly to restore a semblance of peace and, at great personal risk, prevent the war party from gaining the upper hand.⁶³ Over the next two years, a token number of Black people were returned and delivered at designated strong points on the frontier, but even here the process was fraught with difficulty. At his trading post on the Flint River, Timothy Barnard warned James Jackson that “a large Body of Indians were prepared to set out for the Frontiers to take back the Negroes they had given up; that they would first hunt about the Saw Mills, from thence on the head of the Canoochie & from thence go for the rice Plantations.” A level-headed Englishman, Barnard surmised that this was not the Creek Nation generally but “the Cheehaws & others of the old Gang & which Kinnard wished punished some Years since.”⁶⁴ Not surprisingly, the Chehaws had been a powerful pillar of support for the British during the Revolution.⁶⁵

In June 1796, a delegation of 147 headmen, warriors, and even women gathered at Colerain, along the St. Marys River not far from Trader’s Hill, to meet with commissioners for the United States and the State of Georgia. Unavoidable pressures had forced the Creeks to the negotiating table: the backing off of diplomatic and military support by Spain, the irreversible decline of the deerskin trade, and the continuing trespassing of Americans on Native lands. John Kinnard played a significant role in persuading his peers in the Lower Towns to attend the gathering with representatives from the United States. Present in the crowded encampment were all-too-eager planters who came in hopes of recovering their lost “possessions.”⁶⁶

The resulting Treaty of Colerain did no more than reaffirm the provisions of the Treaty of New York six years before, but the landscape had changed so dramatically that this drew grudging approval from the assembled Creeks. Tucked away in the text was Article 7, a verbatim repetition of one of the most hated articles in the Treaty of New York. All white citizens, Negroes, and property taken before 1790 were to be restored, as were those taken after that date.

In early 1798, Benjamin Hawkins, U.S. senator from North Carolina, replaced James Seagrove as federal agent to the southeastern Indians. He promptly submitted his first report to the governor of Georgia from the newly established Creek Agency on the Ocmulgee River. Fluent in the Muskogean language, the former delegate to the Continental Congress dared take their side even more forcibly than had his predecessor.

The report echoed what Kinnard had been saying to James Seagrove. The former commissioner had already called on the Creeks to return war captives, Hawkins noted, “and they delivered all the horses and negroes they could get except such as were deemed legally their property, according to the Rules of War, and which they had rec’d from the British for their services, or such negros as had fled to them and which they were not bound to restore.” With that, he touched the key points: the British “gifts” to the Indians as part of cultivating their support during the Revolution, the belief of many warriors that the Black people seized during the border wars of the 1780s were theirs by dint of the “Rules of War”; and their repugnance at returning those brave souls who had made their way to Creek territory to secure their freedom. In all three instances, the return represented a violation of deep-seated cultural norms based on their warrior ethic.⁶⁷

A new game emerged, with Georgians loudly demanding the satisfaction of the clause on war captives and the Creeks sidestepping and insisting that they had only agreed to return those taken after the signing of the treaty, not before, an interpretive twist that infuriated Americans.⁶⁸ Kinnard personified the conundrum. As an influential chief, he was acting as a broker for slaveholders in the search for former slaves located somewhere in the scattered network of the Lower Towns and had just enough success that he earned their respect while benefiting from the fee paid. Yet ultimately he did little to shake the tree. He was a war profiteer who had no intention of surrendering his own captives gained over the years, some of whom he claimed as “gifts” from the British and some of whom came directly to him as a leading warrior on the Georgia frontier during the Revolution. Major Swan thought Kinnard had done equally well in the border wars of the late 1780s when he again led raiding parties against settlers moving into Camden and Glynn Counties.⁶⁹ When it came to his own holdings, the mestizo defended the Creek position that these Black men and women had been taken under the “Rules of War” and were not subject to be returned despite the clear meaning of Article 3 of the Treaty of New York.

In the push to gain war captives, Georgia planters found themselves plunged into a labyrinthine world where cultural dissonance confounded the traditional byways of negotiation between whites and Native Americans. “The negroes cause great dispute among us in our land with respect to returning them,” a chieftain explained, “as some are sold or bartered from one to another and property paid for them consumed by those who got it.”⁷⁰ With no legal titles, each change of master dimmed the claim of the Georgia planter. An Indian trader hired to tease out the fate of five people taken from the plantation of John Whitehead discovered that one person, a woman, had been sold to Panton, Leslie & Company at its store on the Apalachicola River and was now out of reach in Spanish territory. He reported that Hector and an unnamed woman belonged to Jumalathluychee or “Big Eater,” who refused to part with them.

The biggest problem Whitehead encountered was Kinnard himself. The Scots-Creek had purchased two of the women, Cloe and Dido, from Jumalathluychee, who in turn had purchased them from a white trader.⁷¹ The women proved their value by giving birth to six children. Kinnard refused to part with either the mothers or the children, pointing out that they had been sold and resold in the Creek Nation and hence could not be considered as “owned” by the white planter.⁷² His statement reflected the reality that most of the captives, like the stolen horses, had been sold by their captors shortly after their return from the Georgia Lowcountry. Such sales helped offset the decline of the deerskin trade. In effect, they became trade goods for Creeks who had no interest or ability in handling a slave. It was a quick way to generate the means of purchasing household goods, tools, and rum. The market was brisk. Buyers were typically chiefs or traders. Nor was it unusual for Indian enslavers to resell slaves casually and quickly when they needed to pay debts or obtain cash. For all Creeks, the internal exchange of money or livestock for enslaved people obliterated any claim of ownership by a Georgian. Offspring belonged to the current master.

Andrew Maybank of Liberty County hired a trader, “a prudent and discrete person,” to go into the Creek Nation and offer a generous reward for several slaves who had escaped. The trader found the men and women in the possession of Kinnard, but the Hitchiti chief refused to hand them over. It was a potentially awkward situation since he functioned as the point person for the federal government. “If [Kinnard] is not made to give up the property in question,” Col. Daniel Steward sternly warned Governor John Milledge, “will it not ultimately invite all artful slaves to leave their owners, just as a whim capricious or fancy may take them[?] I am of opinion that a precedent of this nature . . . will be attended with serious consequences.”⁷³ The irony was especially poignant. The governor to whom he wrote was married to John Galphin’s half-sister, Martha Galphin Milledge, daughter of George Galphin’s white wife. The leader of the war party that sacked Trader’s Hill and rode into Spanish Florida had a half-sister at the very center of the state capital.⁷⁴

The process of negotiating for the return of formerly enslaved people became a complex maze that frustrated the most determined planters. Creeks from one town returned to Andrew Walthour two of the three Africans that they held but kept back the third person for unknown reasons.⁷⁵ When James Smith of Liberty County lost thirteen enslaved people from his rice plantation during the course of two attacks in 1791, he secured the return of Sarah within a matter of weeks by working through an Indian trader and paying $63 for her. He had to wait another four years until James Seagrove arranged for “talks” with a party of Creeks at Beard’s Bluff on the Altamaha but was disappointed when only three more people were recovered. After the Treaty of Colerain, the ever hopeful Smith secured a passport for traveling in Native lands, hired an interpreter, and visited several towns. The expedition was a failure. In one last effort in 1807, he secured the return of four more people, including Mary, sixteen years after the event. In the negotiations, he demanded the return of all four of her children, not just one. Kinnard refused on the grounds that they had been born in his town and were hence his property. American civil law rooted in the belief that the offspring of the mother belonged to her master did not translate into an Indigenous setting. Three of the children—Rachel, Eley, and Fanny—were not returned.⁷⁶

White traders who lived in Native towns proved a serious obstacle to recovering enslaved people. They typically purchased captives from warriors anxious to monetize their gain, or, more simply, they acted as more-or-less honest brokers between Creeks. When John Girardeau attempted to recover the people taken from his plantation, he discovered that a trader named Lucas had carried Prince, Rose, and her children to the “Notichies” to exchange for livestock and returned with several horses in tow.⁷⁷ A trader hired by Girardeau discovered that a seven-year-old boy, Billy, had been sold to a mestizo family, the Marshalls, who later traded him to a white man named Thomas Martial, with a small store in a distant Native town, and was eventually carried to Cuba in exchange for goods.⁷⁸ The dry accounting language involved in the loss of property covered up the trauma and horror that a young boy experienced as he was handed off to unknown parties, white and Black, speaking multiple languages, to become a child slave in Havana. Many traders kept their own enslaved people, providing shelter and food in return for work in the store and cultivating a patch of ground, a typically loose arrangement.⁷⁹

Mestizos like Jack Kinnard held by far the greatest number of enslaved people and were pushing the Creek Nation toward an economic model loosely based on American practices. The forty or so slaves that belonged to the Scots-Creek were primarily engaged in raising livestock and enjoyed a degree of freedom in tending cattle and managing a stock of valuable horses, altogether some twelve hundred to fifteen hundred animals, according to Swan. On making his way from the St. Marys River toward Creek country, the major noted, “Supplied ourselves with fifteen fresh horses, taken from J. Kinnard’s negroes, whom we met in the woods, bound to St. Mary’s with a drove for sale.”⁸⁰ Those “negroes” were apparently unsupervised and enjoyed considerable freedom in setting the pace of travel. But they were met in town by an Indian trader turned merchant, David Garvin, who held them to strict account.

Many Creeks did raise cattle and hogs, not for their own consumption but for sale. Garvin was a regular buyer of Kinnard’s livestock and came to act as a factor for his commercial involvement along the Atlantic coast. Livestock was driven to markets in St. Marys, Savannah, St. Augustine, and Pensacola and then sold on the hoof. Natives in the Lower Towns adjusted to this new way of life by separating from their talwas or towns and dispersing their settlements in outlying villages of twenty to fifty families over the countryside. On Kinchafoonee Creek, Kinnard’s estate was spread out rather than concentrated in the traditional Creek square. The town of Eufala spread down the Chattahoochee to its confluence with the Flint River. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that towns along the Flint were a response to the demands of free-range ranching, which benefited from the large limestone plain underneath the lower Flint and the large stretches of river cane and reed that made the area valuable for herding.⁸¹

Investment in lands in Spanish Florida was a critical part of the strategy of the Kinnard family. Together with his brother William, Jack had continued to spread his holdings into Florida and created a sizable farm at the head of the Wakulla River that emptied into the Apalachicola. Enslaved people worked in relatively unsupervised conditions, producing corn for a nearby Spanish fort as well as for the Seminoles in Mikasuki. They enjoyed considerable free time since corn did not require the intensive labor of rice or cotton. It was a cat-and-mouse game between enslaver and enslaved. Always anxious to increase their wealth, the Kinnards rented out Africans for work at the fort, an assignment that placed them in difficult work conditions.⁸² The several farms in Creek territory and Spanish Florida helped feed their large number of dependents but generated only a modest surplus from a vast enterprise.

The question remains of estimating how many enslaved people made a break for freedom on their own and found a measure of breathing space in Indigenous society. The chance to find greater autonomy and independence as well as a better life convinced many to make the attempt to escape the indignities and mortality of planation culture on the Georgia coast even if they knew the conditions in Native society were dubious. The determination of those who chose to do so was astounding.⁸³

A skilled craftsman who escaped from Nathan Atkinson made his way to Trader’s Hill as the surest way to link up with the Creeks. To his astonishment, he found himself in the company of a war party that pillaged the store and set off fears of a coming war. A free man for a few precious days or weeks, he told a member of a party of white people who came to settle a dispute with that town about how he fled the “ill-usage” of Atkinson, been carried to a Chehaw town by the warriors, and sold to a warrior who in turn sold him to Hoopawnee, a headman of some influence. When Atkinson learned of his location, he swore the man was worth $500 and commissioned traders to offer $100 for him, an above-average rate. When the Black craftsman learned of the price put on his head, a trader recalled, “he confessed that he belonged to the said Atkinson but he would not go back if he could help it.”⁸⁴ His spirit of resistance refused to dim even in the face of a web of Native and white ownership.⁸⁵

When Atkinson learned that Hoopawnee had come to St. Marys on business, he took advantage of this seeming good fortune and arranged for a meeting in the presence of a trusted interpreter. The headman pointed out that he had purchased this craftsman from another Creek and would only consider selling him if he received the money that he had originally paid, six hundred chalks, or the equivalent of many dozens of deerskins measured out by the number of chalk marks on the trader’s account book, a significant sum by the prevailing standards. Atkinson agreed to the terms, but Hoopawnee, using a technique favored by Natives placed in an untenable situation, agreed to the deal and then vanished, never to reappear. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Atkinson made one last attempt, then filed a depredation claim for five hundred dollars. The unnamed creole preferred life as a slave in an Indigenous society than returning to the rigors of plantation slavery. It was an easy choice.

Few accounts of flights to the Creeks exist, primarily because farmers and planters could not claim compensation for their losses and had little reason to document the outward flow of people. The stories that are extant point to the continuing hemorrhaging of the labor force on Georgia Lowcountry plantations. In the first years of the nineteenth century, four individuals escaped by their own means from the Maybank plantation in Liberty County, two men and two women, presumably husbands and wives. Andrew May-bank had lost over a dozen people to a raiding party in the early 1790s and recovered only a small number despite repeated offers. It may well be that the four who fled were motivated by news coming from their long-lost com-patriots among the Creeks of a life that was better than on a rice plantation. The governor of Georgia confirmed as much when he wrote the “Chehaw King”: “[Slaves who fled] will very probably be concealed by some negro fellows who are in the nation and run away some years ago.”⁸⁶

In 1799, another family of four slipped away from a white planter “low down” on the Altamaha River. They crossed the river and, to their misfortune, encountered a party of Creeks “who acted very honestly and carried them to Fort James,” apparently preferring a cash reward to the task of carrying them back to their town and attempting to commodify them there. Fort James was a stockade recently erected on the banks of the Oconee River as a result of the Treaty of Colerain. As described by Gen. James Jackson, the father in the family was an African, thirty years old, with a yellow complexion and country marks, or decorative scars made on his face, and scars from whipping on his thighs (“as he is a great villain,” Jackson wrote). Was the father willing to abandon his family, or did he have some other plan? It was clear that life among Indigenous people was preferable to the alternative of repeated whippings and other forms of torture. And it was clear that the man could count on protection from Black refugees among the Creeks. In his letter to the “Chehaw King,” Jackson’s point was clear: “harboring runaway blacks breeds ill-blood and makes the chain [of friendship] rusty.”⁸⁷

Large groups could organize themselves in attempting long-distance flight. From South Carolina, “a horrid band of Negroes” fled the Low-country heading west toward Creek territory when they were sighted not far from Saunders Swamp in Liberty County. Members of the state militia were alerted and rushed to intercept them. An African American was killed; two more were wounded, but another five escaped. The soldiers recovered their arms, “thirteen weight of powder,” and their supplies for the journey. This was no ordinary flight but a carefully planned journey that showed the ability of Africans and African Americans to secure weapons and think through what it would take to cross a large territory that was hostile.⁸⁸ Coming shortly after the incident at Trader’s Hill, the event deepened the sense of unease in the Georgia Lowcountry.

By the turn of the century, Jack Kinnard symbolized the way that mestizo planters were embracing slavery in the American style, with bondage as a transgenerational phenomenon. Unlike earlier times, the descendants of captured slaves were now bound to a lifetime of servitude, but Black slaves, like Indian captives, still found themselves living and working under a range of conditions. Captivity under the Creeks was evolving away from a spectrum of loose practices to more rigid and fixed forms that reflected a growing acceptance of white attitudes and practices toward African Americans. Racial attitudes were beginning to percolate into the fabric of the Indigenous world. Where once the offspring of slaves had been considered free, now they remained enslaved. The children and grandchildren of Black people taken during from the Revolutionary era remained in captivity.⁸⁹ An Indian might make a captive a part of his or her family or as a servant or extra labor but still be willing to sell him or her if needed. A chief needed multiple laborers to help him maintain political power and high status in the way that Kinnard achieved a singular position in his large neighborhood.

By 1800, the Lower Towns were active participants in the slave trade along the Georgia coast. The demand for Black herdsmen and laborers, combined with the rapidly declining ability to seize slaves by surprise raids, drove the process.⁹⁰ The entrepreneurial Kinnard regularly imported slaves who could not be sold in Savannah because of their foreign origin. In the spring of 1798, he traveled to Savannah to purchase five “French Negroes” who had been shipwrecked en route from Grenada to Cuba and captured by a privateer that took them to Savannah to be auctioned. Three were masons, one a cooper, and one a carpenter. Their protestations that they were freemen earned them little credit with their new “master,” who used them to pay off debt to the Panton store at San Marcos on the Apalachicola River.⁹¹ Again and again, Kinnard served as a distribution point for “French Negroes” whose presence aroused deep fears that they would prove carriers of the ideologies motivating revolutionaries in Saint-Domingue, soon to be Haiti. When thirty-six Africans were picked up on a sinking vessel at sea and brought to Savannah in 1801, the city council had them lodged in the jail on the assumption that they were brigands. The aldermen passed an ordinance permitting their sale to David Garvin, a trader who had lived in the Creek Nation but now used his contacts to sell cattle and horses coming out of the Lower Towns. He disposed of six of them with Kinnard.⁹²

Occasionally, African Americans refused to go quietly into Creek country. Garvin sent up seven men from St. Marys to Kinchafoonee Creek, escorted by two whites, to be sold by Kinnard. The market was active. “When the negroes came, the red people wanted to buy,” Kinnard told Garvin in explaining the curious circumstances of why the sale did not go through. The men had little relish for the prospect of being consigned to headmen and warriors in distant towns and villages. When buyers looked them over, the men gave out the same line of talk, which the Indians readily grasped. Kinnard explained, “The negroes said they did not know how to work but give them guns and they would go to war. They knowed how to do that.” Whether it was a ruse or a genuine desire to fight, it worked, or so it appeared. The chief had to provide their food and that of the two white slavers who had accompanied them at his own expense for two months. “Nobody would buy them,” Kinnard explained to Garvin, “so I bought four at 300 dollars and so I paid Aiken and Smart [the slavers] 1200 in cattle and horses.” James Aiken and his companion returned to St. Marys with the three unsold slaves.⁹³

Black slaves in Creek country fled to Florida in search of freedom but encountered the same long hand reaching across the border to re-enslave them as did those running from white enslavers. When the white traders who sold Kinnard the men were returning to St. Marys with the other three, one called “mulatto Lucy” slipped away and headed southward to the Spanish fort of St. Mark’s. The Scots-Creek sent word to the commandant of the fort, who jailed Lucy without asking questions. Kinnard travelled to the fort, paid twenty dollars for his release, and sold him to one of the partners in Panton, Leslie.⁹⁴ More typically, John Galphin, the mestizo who had led the attack on Trader’s Hill and the farms on the Spanish side of the St. Marys River, dared write the governor of East Florida in an effort to reclaim one of his own slaves, Simon, who now called himself a free man in Florida.⁹⁵

Lucy’s flight underscores an essential change. The direction of those fleeing through the borderland was increasingly southward towards a people who only then were coalescing into a coherent polity with their own customs and ways of looking at outsiders. The Seminoles were former Creeks who had broken away from the Lower Towns during the mid-eighteenth century in search of greater autonomy as well as the open spaces of Florida that favored the grazing of cattle. Creek headmen referred to them contemptuously as wanderers, even outlaws, people who had moved beyond the reach of recognized traditions. Those wanderers were willing to accord Black people considerably more freedom and allow them to create their own villages adjacent to Native towns.

Yet the Seminoles remained intimately connected to the Creek towns along the lower part of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers. They spoke Hitchiti in common; they engaged in trading relationships; hunters and warriors routinely ignored the boundaries; and many presumed Seminole headmen signed treaties as Creeks.⁹⁶ It was indicative that the raiding parties led by “the Black Factor” and the mercurial John Galphin contained Natives from both Chehaw and Seminole towns. The vast region where the Chattahoochee and Flint combined to form the Apalachicola was evolving into a remarkable frontier in which the chief actors were Creeks who were moving toward a more centralized system of governance and former Creeks who treasured their autonomy and saw their relationship with people of African descent in starkly different terms. Maj. Caleb Swan wrote, “The Seminolies are said to be principally under the influence of Jack Kinnard, a rich Scotch half-breed, living on the neck of land between Flint and the Chattahoosee rivers.” The reference to Kinnard may have been an exaggeration, but it hinted at the ties that bound Hitchiti speakers along the waterways of the Chattahoochee-Apalachicola River system.⁹⁷