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132 Joel W. Martin

Whether regarded positively or negatively, border-crossers were considered by most eighteenth-century southerners to be key players in the economic and social life of the southeastern interior. The same can be said for Indian peoples in gen­ eral. Regarded alternatively with mistrust and respect, they were never ignored, because the South, during much of this period, was a true "middle ground,"' in which native peoples such as the Cherokees, Creeks, and Choctaws participated in multiple exchange networks. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, southeastern Indians, Africans, and Europeans learned to communicate across linguistic and cultural barriers, bringing their cultures into contact and trans­ forming one another as a result. Indians, European settlers, and African slaves traded deerskins, cloth, rum, corn, and horses, but they also intermarried, mixed genes, and produced bicultural peoples. They swapped ideas, songs, poems, sto­ ries, and symbols. They exchanged and compared religious perspectives. It was in such a context that stories and in1ages of figures such as Mary Musgrove first be­ came popular. To people living on the middle ground, she seemed an emblematic figure.

As the eighteenth century unfolded, the middle-ground ideology was chal­ lenged by a counterideology promoted by Anglo-American settlers and planters. Dependent far less upon access to Indian trade and far more upon access to In­ dian land, they held that there was no place for Indians in the Southeast. Their ideology started to gain prominence after the departure of the French in 1763,' as representations of Indians as savages became more popular in the Southeast.

Southeastern expansionists and planters found their spokesperson in Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee slaveholder (who later became president). No friend of the middle ground, Jackson despised its protocols, ambiguities, and complexities. His representations of Indians were saturated with the rhetoric of savagery, captivity, and miscegenation. He was not fascinated with a figure such as that of Mary Mus­ grove, but rather with the figures of bestial Indian warriors attacking innocent white women. In May 1812, just before he became nationally famous, Jackson gave voice tu his ubsessiun, describing the deaili uf a frontier woman and calling for vengeance. "When we make the case of Mrs. Manly and her family and Mrs. Crawley our own-when we figure to ourselves our beloved wives and little prat­ tling infants, butchered, mangled, murdered, and torn to pieces, by savage blood­ hounds, and wallowing in their gore ... we are ready to pant for vengeance ... the whole Creek nation shall be covered with blood."' In Jackson's world, Indians were savages, irremediably in conflict with civilization. They needed a punishing, violent fa tiler. This ideology would become domi�ant in the early decades of the nineteenth century, climaxing with the Indian Removal Act (signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1830). Around 1800, however, tllis ideology was still emergent, Jackson was just a lawyer and slaveholder, and a third ideology was temporarily dominant.

Promulgated largeiy by the federal government and its cultural missionaries, this ideology provided a less violent vision of Indian-white relations and used a

Representations of Indians in Southern History 133

different set of images. It was a Eurocentric view that nonetheless acknowledged me potential humanity of natives. It held that Indians could be assimilated to white ways, become Christians, learn to respect law, and practice intensive, com­ mercial agriculture on much less land. This ideology projected Indians as chil­ dren, in need of paternalistic instruction in the ways of civilization. Intermarriage witll Indians was sanctioned, not to forge intimate bonds between interdependent peoples but as a means of diluting Indian blood. Federal proponents launched "experiments" to prove Indians could be civilized, sending Indian agents and Christian missionaries among the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees. There they labored to save Indians by transforming them into white people.'

Encountering tllese tllree conflicting ideologies and images, Indian peoples re­ acted in different ways, the sharpest division occurring among the Creeks. A sig­ nificant faction, numbering about nine tllousand individuals, believed that whites were determined to drive them out of the Southeast. These Creeks found the gov­ ernment's assimilationist program objectionable and feared the exterminationist rhetoric of leaders such as Andrew Jackson. They were persuaded when the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, who visited them in 1811, called for massive pan­ Indian renewal and resistance. They developed a set of pan-Indian symbols and actions to mark authentic Indianness, valuing the wild over the tame, turkeys and deer over chickens and cows. They tried to abandon European manufactures and to reduce the cultural and political influence of white Indian agents. When push came to shove, they decided to fight. Since these rebel Creeks wielded red battle clubs, they became known as the Redsticks.

The Redsticks had some initial successes, defeating a Mississippi militia in a skirmish at a place called Burnt Corn. They captured the frontier stronghold of Fort Mims, where, after losing many lives themselves, the Redsticks killed many men, women, and children. This provided whites with the pretext for an unprece­ dented invasion of Creek lands. Three American armies, including one led by An­ drew Jackson, marched into their nation. In March 1814, at the Battle (or Mas­ sacre) uf Horseshoe Dend, Jackson's army killed more Indians tl1an any U.S. army before or since, including "too many women and children."'

This bloody slaughter and the entire Creek war would provide some of the Southeast's most important and lasting representations of Indians, to be dis­ cussed later in the section on the contemporary scene. For now, the point is that Creeks became asso�iated with "savagery;' warfare, and conflict. A different sym­ bolic fate awaited the Cherokees. Because they had fought and lost earlier (de­ feated by the British in 1760 and by tl1e Whigs in 1776), they also had been vilified as savages deserving extermination.'° But since they never fought against the United States proper, tl1ey would not be memorialized as enemies of the nation­ state itself. Whereas Creeks were destined to be remembered as warriors, the Cherokees were cast as the model converts to white culture.

In tile years after the Revolution, a Cherokee elite emerged. Heavily missionized and increasingly acculturated, this elite attracted national praise, as Anglo writers