William McIntosh
William McIntosh, also known as Tustunnuggee Hutke, was one of the most prominent chiefs of the Muscogee Creek Nation between the turn of the 19th-century and his execution in 1825. He was a chief of Coweta tribal town and commander of a mounted police force. He became a large-scale planter, built and managed a successful inn, and operated a commercial ferry business.
Early European-American historians attributed McIntosh's achievements and influence to his mixed-race Scottish ancestry. Since the late 20th century, historians have argued much of McIntosh's political influence stemmed more from his Muscogee upbringing and cultural standing, particularly his mother's prominent Wind Clan in the Muscogee matrilineal system, and to other aspects of Muscogee culture.
Because McIntosh led a group that negotiated and signed the Treaty of Indian Springs in February 1825, which ceded much of remaining Muscogee lands to the United States in violation of Muscogee law, for the first time the Muscogee Creek National Council ordered that a Muscogee be executed for crimes against the Nation. It sentenced him and other signatories to death. McIntosh was executed by his long-time political nemesis Menawa and a large force of Law Menders in late April 1825. Two other signatories were executed. McIntosh's son Chilly was shot at but escaped unharmed. Menawa signed a treaty in 1826 that was very similar in both language and benefits, but one which the Muscogee Creek National Council had agreed to and was therefore considered a legitimate treaty according to contemporary Muscogee law.
The majority of Chief McIntosh's descendants migrated to Indian Territory before 1831, when the U.S. federal government began forcibly removing tribes west in the Trail of Tears. Two of Chief McIntosh's sons, Chilly and Daniel, served as Confederate officers during the American Civil War. Daughter Kate and her family became pre-statehood pioneers of the Florida Panhandle. Daughters Rebecca and Delilah moved to East Texas with their husbands and developed plantations there. Rebecca remarried after her first husband died young, and by 1860 was the wealthiest woman in Texas, owning three plantations with a total of 12,800 acres and 120 enslaved people.
Early life and education
Tustunnuggee Hutke was born in the Lower Creek Town of Coweta in present-day Georgia to Scottish-American soldier William McIntosh and to Senoya, a Muscogee member of the Wind Clan. As the Muscogee had a matrilineal kinship system, through which property and hereditary positions were passed, his mother's status determined that of White Warrior.The boy was also named after his father, who was connected to a prominent Savannah, Georgia family. Captain McIntosh, a Loyalist during the Revolutionary War, had worked with the Muscogee to recruit them as military allies to the British. The senior McIntosh's mother was Margaret "Mary" McGillivray, believed to have been a sister of the Scot Lachlan McGillivray, a wealthy fur trader and planter in Georgia. After the Revolutionary War, Captain McIntosh moved from the frontier to Savannah to settle. There, he married a paternal cousin, Barbara McIntosh.
McIntosh gained his status and place among the Muscogee from his mother's clan. Benjamin Hawkins, first appointed as United States Indian agent in the Southeast and then as Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the territory south of the Ohio River, lived among the Muscogee and Choctaws, and knew them well. He commented in letters to President Thomas Jefferson that Muscogee women were matriarchs and had control of children "when connected with a white man." Hawkins further observed that even wealthy traders were nearly as "inattentive" to their mixed-race children as "the Indians". What he did not understand about the Muscogee culture was that the children had a closer relationship with their mother's eldest brother than with their biological father, because of the importance of the clan structure.
McIntosh was considered a skilled orator and politician. He became a wealthy planter and slaveholder; and he was influential in both Muscogee and European-American society. One of his cousins was George Troup, who became governor of Georgia when McIntosh was a prominent chief. Whites sometimes mistakenly assumed that McIntosh had centralized authority over the Muscogee, but he was only one among numerous chiefs, and the central power became the Muscogee Creek National Council, especially after it adopted the Code of 1818.
For generations, Muscogee chiefs had approved their daughters' marriages to fur traders in order to strengthen their alliances and trading power with the wealthy Europeans. Through both his mother and father, McIntosh was related to numerous other influential Muscogee chiefs, most of whom were mixed-race, of Muscogee mothers and white fathers, who were valued as husbands. The most prominent were Alexander McGillivray, the son of Sehoy II, a Wind Clan mother, and Lachlan McGillivray; and William Weatherford, also born to the Wind Clan. Both McIntosh and Weatherford became well-established as Muscogee chiefs and wealthy planters, but Weatherford was aligned with the traditionalist Red Sticks of the Upper Towns in the period of the Creek Wars. The Red Sticks were allied with the British and so he and McIntosh, who was with the Lower Towns and allied with the Americans, were opposed to each other during the conflict.
Marriages and children
Chief McIntosh's first wife was Eliza Hawkins, although she has often erroneously been conflated with Elizabeth Grierson. Married around McIntosh's twenty-fifth birthday, he and Eliza's marriage produced five children: Chillicothe, Jane, Kate, Sallie, and Louis. Their first-born was a son, named Chilly McIntosh, born near Georgia, in Coweta. Their daughter Jane married Samuel Hawkins, Kate married William Cousins, and their daughter Sallie's husband was George McLish. Around the end of the Creek War, McIntosh took a second wife, Susannah Ree, whose heritage is variously given as Cherokee, and full-blooded Muscogee. McIntosh and Susannah had four children: Rebecca, Catherine Hettie, Delilah, and Daniel, known as D.N. As a highly successful soldier and businessman, McIntosh's elevated social/tribal status allowed him to take a third wife, a woman named Peggy. Records conflict as to whether Peggy and McIntosh had three additional children or no children.Following his death in April 1825, Chief McIntosh's widow Eliza, younger half-brother Roley, and all but one of the chief's children would voluntarily relocate to "Indian Territory" in Eastern Oklahoma between 1826 and 1830. Second eldest daughter Kate would remain behind after marrying a full-blooded Muscogee named William Cousins, the grandson of George Cousins, in August 1825 in Cusseta, Georgia. The young couple remained with Billy's extended tribal kinsmen in Clayton, Alabama until September 1842, when they began traveling by wagon train with three other Muscogee families bound for Oklahoma. A broken wagon wheel unexpectedly delayed their travels near Laurel Hill, Florida . Kate and Billy found their new Northwestern Florida Panhandle surroundings akin to their native homelands and decided to stay—ultimately settling in modern-day Mossy Head in Walton County, Florida, as a pre-statehood Florida pioneer family. As for the rest of the McIntosh Family, once settled in Oklahoma, Chilly and his younger half-brother Daniel McIntosh would both serve as officers with the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War – with Chilly rising to the rank of Colonel.
Career
Chief McIntosh as a leader adopted certain elements of European-American culture. He was interested in introducing American education among the Muscogee, adopted the use of chattel slavery on his plantations, and played a role in centralizing the Muscogee Creek National Council over the years. As a successful merchant and gentleman farmer, he owned more than one hundred black slaves and two plantations where he grew cotton and raised livestock. He also operated two ferries, an inn, and a tavern.He used his influence to improve a Creek trail connecting the Upper and Lower Towns, that ran from Talladega, Alabama, to the Chattahoochee River. He owned two plantations, Lockchau Talofau in present-day Carroll County, and Indian Springs, in present-day Butts County His plantation of Acorn Bluff was at the eastern terminus of the McIntosh Road, where the chief developed a ferry operation across the Chattahoochee River. Acorn Creek, a tributary of the Chattahoochee located adjacent to the McIntosh estate, is named after the plantation. He owned numerous black slaves to cultivate cotton as a commodity crop on his plantations. He also built a resort hotel at Indian Springs, hoping to attract more travelers along the improved road. Parts of this route are still referred to as the McIntosh Road, or the McIntosh Trail. It passes through several northern counties in Alabama and Georgia.
The Muscogee struggled with internal tensions after the American Revolutionary War and during the War of 1812, as debates surfaced over the increasing adoption of European-American culture. The Lower Towns, which comprised the majority of the population, were adopting some elements of European-American culture and lived more closely in relation to white settlers on the Georgia frontier. Many educated their children in English. Some prominent Muscogee sent their sons to eastern universities for their education, and some adopted Christianity; as well as forms of European dress and houses, hence they qualified as one of the "civilized tribes". They expanded their farms, and many of the Muscogee elite became planters, purchasing enslaved African-Americans to work on plantations in a manner similar to their European-American neighbors.
Role in Creek War
Internal Muscogee tensions resulted in the Creek War, when tensions between the Lower Creeks and the traditional Red Sticks of the Upper Towns erupted into open conflict. McIntosh and other Lower Creeks allied with United States forces against the Red Sticks after 1813, during the War of 1812. The Red Sticks were allied with the British, as both wanted to limit American expansion in the Southeast. McIntosh fought in support of General Andrew Jackson and state militias in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, marking the defeat in 1814 of the Red Sticks and the end of the Creek War. McIntosh was appointed a brigadier general of the United States Volunteers by then-Major General Jackson and enjoyed the full emoluments, such as pay and allowances for subsistence, forage and servants, as officers of the same flag officer rank in the United States Army.The Muscogee were forced to cede lands to the United States in the early 1800s. Maps mark the strips that were ceded over the years. McIntosh played a role in negotiations and cessions of 1805, 1814, 1818 and 1821. For his role in completing the cession in 1821, American agents awarded McIntosh 1,000 acres of land at Indian Springs and 640 acres on the Ocmulgee River.
After the wars, European-American settlers were increasingly migrating to the interior of the Southeast from the coastal areas and encroached on the territories of the Muscogee and other Southeastern tribes. Cultivation of short-staple cotton, which did well in these areas, was made profitable by Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s, which mechanized processing of the cotton. Lands were developed in the piedmont areas for large cotton plantations, stimulating a demand for African-American slaves that resulted in the forcible migration of more than one million slaves to the Deep South in the domestic trade.