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1 / Founding Networks, 1740–1765
In 1756, Attakullakulla, a Cherokee headman known to the British as “Little Carpenter,” described his understanding of the relationship between Anglo-American kinship and the Anglo-Indian trade in his speech to Capt. Raymond Demere, the commanding officer at Fort Prince George near Keowee Town on the border of South Carolina. Little Carpenter argued that a trader named Elliott “imposed upon [the Cherokees] in a most barbarous Manner” and monopolized the trade. He had “heard that Elliott was related to [South Carolina’s] Governor [James] Glen and that he was concerned in the Trade with him which has surprised [Little Carpenter] very much.”1 Little Carpenter expected Anglo-American family members to be involved in business dealings with one another, but he also thought that those business relationships obligated Glen to provide oversight ensuring the quality of his relative’s relationships with trade partners like Little Carpenter.
Within Cherokee society, individuals were responsible to, and responsible for, their matrilineal clan members. Honor or dishonor and retaliation would accrue to the clan because of the actions of its members. The accountability was so thorough, in fact, that if a kinsman committed a crime that required punishment, he was to be found and delivered for justice by his kinsmen to the wronged party. Failure to hold the guilty party accountable meant that the wronged party could, and would, exact revenge upon one of the other clan members, who would voluntarily or involuntarily be punished in his place.2
However, while Anglo-American family members invested in lucrative opportunities together, families like Glen’s were less concerned with seeing that the needs of Indians were met than with how their familial networks could provide profits to family members, especially themselves. This contrast between British and Cherokee cultural norms governing familial relationships provided the foundation for economic and political tensions between British and American Indian leaders. Kinship connections, however, also held the key to creating relationships that could cross intercultural divides, decreasing tensions between these governments, especially in times of war. During the 1750s and 1760s, the intersection of kinship and trade fundamentally shaped the relationships of Cherokees and Chickasaws to the British colonies in the midst of Britain’s conflict with France known as the French and Indian War.
Cherokees followed a tradition of matrilineal kinship that ensured that a child’s maternal relatives, bound together within the same clan, were the most important influences on his or her life. Marriages created an intersection for clans that ensured that the two clans would support one another, but each lineage existed and operated separate from one another. Fathers would bring gifts to their children and encourage them, but the mother, grandmother, and mother’s brothers held authority over and the responsibility for the children. Cherokees lived within a society that maintained that family, or clan, responsibilities were primary and central to town governance. James Adair wrote of the Southeastern Indian method of governance: “When any national affair is in debate, you may hear every father [uncle] of a family speaking in his house on the subject, with rapid, bold language, and the utmost freedom that a people can use. Their voices, to a man have due weight in every public affair, as it concerns their welfare alike. Every town is independent of another. Their own friendly compact continues the union.”3 Clan leaders spoke for their families, raised up the next generation of war leaders or diplomats, and ensured their families were provided for with meat and skins, as well as trade goods acquired by giving up surplus skins. Clans also provided the mechanism for facilitating positive relationships and alliances between towns.
Individual actions reflected family identity and responsibility and thus could bring honor or shame on one’s kin. In this context, Governor Glen was responsible for his trader kinsman Elliott and should have stopped his “barbarous” treatment or made amends for the sake of the family honor and Glen’s relationship with his native allies. By not doing so, Glen allowed the dissension caused by his kin’s activities to mar his family’s, as well as South Carolina’s, trading reputation with the Cherokees.4
Forging kinship connections during the 1750s helped individuals and governments pursue the shared goal of establishing profitable trade and military alliances across cultural and political lines. The emphasis, however, of each group on one of these goals to the detriment of the other also caused these governments to clash. The creation of these Cherokee, Chickasaw, Anglo-American, and intercultural familial networks, through intermarriage, ritual adoption, or adoption, mediated these clashes to some degree and paved a way for future interactions between these family networks and governments. The kinship connections of Little Carpenter, of his niece Nan-ye-hi, and of James Logan Colbert, a British trader to the Chickasaws, as well as the language of treaties illuminate both the possibilities and limits of the degree to which kinship could create the basis for peace during and after the French and Indian War.
Using familial relationships as links between communities was not new in the 1750s. By then, both American Indians and Anglo-Americans in the Southeast identified kinship as a way of bonding British people who traveled and lived in native towns to those communities, extended families or clans, and the nations of which they were a part.5 Traders and officials who married native women gained the protection of their wives’ clans, a place to live in the town, and a degree of acceptance there. Children born of that union would be members of their mother’s clan.
The language of treaties invoked friendship as well as parental, sibling, or uncle/nephew relationships to define the obligations and rights of the negotiating parties. Kinship relationships required members of a kin group to look out for each other’s interests and to support one another in fair trade and warfare against enemies. Failing to live up to this alliance would result in additional negotiations to restore the relationship, but if those negotiations failed, war would follow.
Intermarriage proved a foundation for alliance. British traders and officials recognized the power of native societies to determine the terms of trade by agreeing to native insistence upon intermarriage to unite the interests of traders and Indian agents with those of influential native families. Ritual kinship, often formed through ceremonial smoking of the calumet pipe, sharing of the black drink, and other ceremonies, could provide the basis for a temporary relationship between a stranger and the town with which he wished to trade or create a treaty. Intermarriage relationships created a more permanent bond and also reflected British traditions in which members of royal families, as well as the merchant class and aristocracy, married to create political alliances and to reinforce their wealth and status. British attitudes toward race, however, kept many from choosing this path as they saw Indians as having materials or land they wanted but not as sharing their own class, status, or “civilized” culture. The most common intercultural alliances in this period involved marriages of traders to native women of powerful clans, the ritual adoption of diplomats forging a fictive kinship, and wartime adoption of captives into native families. These forms of alliances were not mutually exclusive, but rather one could lead to another. The language of treaties reinforced the importance of these bonds.
Kinship relationships had special significance in the aftermath of the Yamasee War. Native and European polities aligned their economic and political interests to compensate for the loss of life incurred both in the war and in the previous slaving wars in the Southeast. Factions among the Cherokees were willing to form trade connections with British or French traders, which created tension between towns and clans over resources and alliances.6 As competition between the European colonies increased, so did British pressure to bring all of the factions in line to make the trade alliances exclusive and to secure military allies for the conflicts against France. Chickasaws maintained a firm alliance with the British in opposition to their French and Choctaw enemies, who had been waging war against them for decades.
Attakullakulla, or Little Carpenter, had traveled to England in the 1730s as part of a Cherokee delegation to see the king.7 What he saw there impressed upon him England’s capability to be a good trading partner. English goods were abundant, of good quality, and seemed to be endlessly available. As wars between the French and English increased pressure on American Indian allies to take sides, Little Carpenter became an advocate of alliance with the British and launched several forays against French convoys traveling down the Mississippi River. His support, however, did not ensure that all Cherokees backed the British. Old Hop, chief of Chota, an Overhill Cherokee town, was among those maintaining ties to French traders alongside ties to English traders.8 Lt. Henry Timber-lake of Virginia noted in 1761:
On my arrival in the Cherokee Country, I found the nation much attached to the French, who have the prudence . . . to conciliate the inclinations of almost all the Indians they are acquainted with, while the pride of our officers often disgusts them; nay, they did not scruple to own to me, that it was the trade alone that induced them to make peace with us and not any preference to the French, whom they loved a great deal better. . . . [Fondness of the French] was not only their general opinion, but the policy of most of their head-men; except Attakullakulla, who conserves his attachment inviolably to the English.9
Little Carpenter was prominent within the government of the Cherokee town of Chota, and his opinion was important but contested. Other towns chose alliances with the French to counteract South Carolina’s trade monopoly that limited the amount of goods flowing into Cherokee towns.10
During the 1740s and 1750s, tensions mounted between British and French colonial authorities over competing claims of jurisdiction. After war was declared in 1754, both sides, short on troops, called upon their native allies to back competing colonial claims militarily. The British government of South Carolina had created relationships, through its traders, with both Cherokees and Chickasaws by the 1730s. Most Cherokees and Chickasaws remained allies with the British and sent warrior bands to support their allies in the Seven Years’ War against the French.
Although South Carolina maintained control over a majority of trade with both the Cherokees and Chickasaws, Virginia provided the colony with some competition for the Cherokee trade. By the early 1750s the Cherokees, unhappy with the scarcity and price of goods from Charles Town, sought to break that colony’s monopoly on trade. Sending diplomats to Virginia, Georgia, and the French along the Mississippi, Cherokee leaders hoped that soliciting new traders for their towns would fix their problems by providing them with all of the goods they needed at competitive prices. These policies were risky at a time when both French and English officials demanded exclusive trade agreements with their Indian allies. The European officials privileged exclusivity and military alliance at the expense of trade relationships, while trade remained the central motivation for Cherokees.
As tensions mounted, Cherokee leaders like Old Hop, Little Carpenter, and Oconostota engaged in a diplomatic balancing act by sending delegations to rival powers, utilizing rhetoric, and disclaiming alliances or diplomatic delegations as necessary. The power of trade, however, was primary for Cherokees. Different town leaders forged relationships with traders that could provide the most plentiful and high-quality goods. Towns with the best traders gained prominence in relation to surrounding towns, and the leaders of the most profitable towns also gained status for their ability to access and distribute prime goods. The efforts of both Virginia and South Carolina to maintain amiable relations with their Cherokee allies by meeting their trade needs were impeded by the governors’ and assemblies’ determination to keep taxes to a minimum and cut what they saw as useless spending, especially on Indian “gifts.” Gifts had been part of the trading and military alliance between the British and their Cherokee allies from the beginning. It was standard practice among native people that gifts, which bound negotiating parties together in friendship, were part of the trading process. The practice of gift giving was so established that Indian nations counted on the gifts as a significant part of the goods they received in trade agreements, part of the price of doing business. British officials, however, saw gift giving as superfluous, bordering on bribery or extortion, and extraneous to the process of trade, a cost separate from the price of the goods for which they were to be paid market value. Indian allies, according to these officials, owed allegiance as a condition of the trading and military alliances. The alliances were reciprocal and therefore warranted no gifts or other payments. To them the military services of Indian allies should be forthcoming without exchange of gifts as simple fulfillment of an agreed-upon mutual arrangement. To the Indians, however, relationships, including trade and military alliances, required ritual reciprocity that displayed to the parties, as well as all observers, that the two were tied to one another and maintained obligations to one another. Gift giving was the outward manifestation of the relationship and the responsibilities each owed the other. Giving gifts therefore was a part of the relationship, performed with great ceremony and gravity, because it represented the renewal of a ritual kinship between the parties in which each owed the other obligations as ritual kin. These ritual relationships, however, were temporary and had to be renewed with each new trading or military expedition. Failure to perform the gift-giving ritual was to let the ritual kinship lapse and to fail to renew the relationship that bound them together. This contrast in views on gift giving, in which both sides felt strongly about how gifts should be treated, led quickly to tensions.11
Wars between the French and British had been ongoing throughout the early eighteenth century. The Nine Years’ War blended into the War of Spanish Succession between 1689 and 1713. The French again fought the British as allies of the Spanish during the War of Jenkin’s Ear in 1744, which ceased with the peace of 1748. However, both sides increased fortifications in their North American colonies with a jealous eye toward each other even in times of peace.12 In 1754 Indian allies of the British, led by the Half-King, a Delaware headman, accompanied young George Washington and his troops on an expedition to try to convince the French to leave the Ohio Valley region. The Indian allies within the group attacked and killed French officers near Fort Duquesne. The incident spiraled quickly into a war that encompassed the French and British colonial claims in North America and spilled over into a war fought around the world.13 In the colonial Southeast, conferences were called to induce native leaders to join one side or the other.
South Carolina’s governor, James Glen, encouraged Cherokee leaders to heed the call for troops issued by Virginia’s governor, Robert Dinwiddie.14 Several hundred Cherokees joined Virginians in “protecting the frontier” from the French and French-allied Indians like the Shawnees.15 In return for this military assistance, Virginia’s governor promised to help build a fort near the powerful Cherokee town of Chota. This fort, garrisoned by Virginians, would augment Fort Prince George, built by Carolina in 1753 at Keowee town. Both of these forts, according to the Cherokees, were to be sites of trade and military protection, as well as symbols of the strength of the alliance between the governments. These forts were meant to bolster existing trade and remind the colonies of their commitment to provide the nation with plentiful goods.16 Virginia finished building the fort in 1756 but left it ungarrisoned, and it was eventually burned by the Cherokees to show their disapproval of the neglect. Virginia had not followed through on their promises made and obligations incurred as part of the ritual kinship that formed the basis of the alliance. South Carolina built and garrisoned Fort Loudon near the Cherok...
