United we stand! Joint struggles of native American and African American in the Columbian era - Columbus and the New World Order 1492-1992

Monthly Review, July-August, 1992 by Jan R. Carew

General Lee, commanding the Georgian colonial forces in 1776, called Congress' attention to the fact that slaves were escaping in increasing numbers and seeking freedom among the "Exiles of Florida." Once the Revolutionary War had ended, it became clear that the Black-Seminole insurgency was being perceived as the greatest threat to the slave system in colonies that had just freed themselves from an oppressive British colonial rule. The freedom from colonial rule was exclusively for whites. It did not apply to Native Americans and Blacks. From the former, the newly independent United States required land, while from the latter, it required slave labor. The Florida insurgency, therefore, had to be crushed by any means necessary.

The main ploy of the newly independent whites was the ancient Roman one of divide and conquer. And, as a result, the Creek nation lived under constant pressure from encroaching white settlers. Its population, too, was steadily being reduced by the white man's diseases, and its culture was being wracked by intolerable tensions as an aggressive, violent, and racist settler-culture threatened to overwhelm it. It was clear to the Creeks that their very existence was being threatened. What made the threat even more ominous was the fact that it was coupled with an onrushing tide of white immigrants backed by a state apparatus and armed forces equipped with superior weapons.

The Creek nation had already been sundered in 1750 when the resolute and far sighted Seacoffee led a large number of followers into Florida. Seacoffee understood the strategic and geopolitical importance of securing a fighting base in this sparsely populated peninsula where, in league with other Native American and Black allies, the chances of survival could be greatly enhanced. But the white settler government, while simultaneously dismembering the Creek nation, was, on the other hand, creating one on paper. Representatives of this fictitious "Creek Nation" were then called upon to legitimize so-called treaties that effectively ceded more and more Native American land to the settlers. They were also called upon to act as slave-catchers. Two such treaties--the Treaty of Galphinton in 1785, and the one ostensibly signed at Shoulderbone in 1788--are prime examples of this official exercise in duplicity.

In the case of the former, three Commissioners appointed by Congress waited at Galphinton for several days where they eventually met representatives of two of the "one hundred towns comprising the Creek tribe... this pretended treaty gave the State of Georgia a large territory; and the eighth article provided, that 'The Indians shall restore all the negroes, horses and other property... to such a person as the Governor shall appoint. '"[24]

As far as the Shoulder bone treaty is concerned--no one has ever laid eyes on it--Georgian authorities made the highly questionable claim that it was never copied and the original had been lost. A succession of other fraudulent treaties were to follow, however, and in every instance, renegade Creeks, after a century of separation from their distant Seminole relatives, were used as signatories of these peculiar official documents.