Brothers Born of One Mother: British–Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast

By Michelle LeMaster

The arrival of English settlers in the American Southeast in 1670 brought the British and the Native Americans into contact both with foreign peoples and with unfamiliar gender systems. In a region in which the balance of power between multiple players remained uncertain for many decades, British and Native leaders turned to concepts of gender and family to create new diplomatic norms to govern interactions as they sought to construct and maintain working relationships. In Brothers Born of One Mother, Michelle LeMaster addresses the question of how differing cultural attitudes toward gender influenced Anglo-Indian relations in the colonial Southeast.

As one of the most fundamental aspects of culture, gender had significant implications for military and diplomatic relations. Understood differently by each side, notions of kinship and proper masculine and feminine behavior wielded during negotiations had the power to either strengthen or disrupt alliances. The collision of different cultural expectations of masculine behavior and men's relationships to and responsibilities for women and children became significant areas of discussion and contention. Native American and British leaders frequently discussed issues of manhood (especially in the context of warfare), the treatment of women and children, and intermarriage. Women themselves could either enhance or upset relations through their active participation in diplomacy, war, and trade.

Leaders invoked gendered metaphors and fictive kinship relations in their discussions, and by evaluating their rhetoric, Brothers Born of One Mother investigates the intercultural conversations about gender that shaped Anglo-Indian diplomacy. LeMaster's study contributes importantly to historians’ understanding of the role of cultural differences in intergroup contact and investigates how gender became part of the ideology of European conquest in North America, providing a unique window into the process of colonization in America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: May 8, 2012
• ISBN: 9780813932422

Book preview

Brothers Born of One Mother

Brothers Born of One Mother

BRITISH– NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS IN THE COLONIAL SOUTHEAST

Michelle LeMaster

University of Virginia Press      Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2012 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2012

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

LeMaster, Michelle, 1970-

Brothers born of one mother : British Native American relations in the colonial Southeast / Michelle LeMaster.

p.         cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3241-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3242-2 (e-book)

1. Masculinity—Southern States—History. 2. Femininity—Southern States—History. 3. Indians, Treatment of—Southern States—History. 4. British—Southern States—History. I. Title.

BF692.5.L457 2012

305.30975′09033—dc23

2011035010

For my parents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. A Friend and a Brother: Gender, Family, and Diplomacy

2. I Am a Man and a Warrior: Native and British Rhetorics of Manhood and Warfare

3. To Protect Them and Their Wives and Children: Women and War

4. Guns and Garters: Men, Women, and the Trade

5. To Stay amongst Them by a Marriage: The Politics and Domestics of Intermarriage

Conclusion

Appendix: Maps

The Southeast circa 1715

The Southeast in the 1740s

The Southeast on the eve of the American Revolution

Cherokee settlements, mid-eighteenth century

Creek settlements, mid-eighteenth century

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

In the course of any research project, one incurs a significant number of debts. Although my thanks seem inadequate, I wish to acknowledge those who have helped me so substantially along the way. This work could not have been completed without the direction and support of Jack P. Greene. He gave me the freedom to pursue my own passions while also setting high standards for scholarship. I am also grateful for the guidance I received at the Johns Hopkins University from Michael Johnson, Toby Ditz, A. J. R. Russell-Wood, Ron Walters, and Phil Morgan. The members of the Colonial American History Seminar at Hopkins provided both penetrating critiques and collegial camaraderie, and I value the continued support that I receive from many of the former members, especially Ellen Holmes Pearson and Bradford Wood.

Numerous institutions provided financial assistance for this project, without which it would have been impossible for me to complete it. Research and teaching fellowships along with a Southern History Research Grant from The Johns Hopkins University helped fund the initial research. Two unfunded fellowships from the Institute for Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina helped me to obtain temporary housing and library privileges at the university during my stay in Columbia. A Council on Faculty Research Grant from Eastern Illinois University and a Paul J. Franz Jr. and Class of 1968 Junior Faculty Fellowship from Lehigh University allowed me to complete the archival research and to conduct interviews in the Choctaw Nation.

Many scholars have given generously of their time, reading portions of the manuscript. I am particularly grateful to James Merrell, James Saeger, and Amy Turner-Bushnell, who read the entire book. Many others read chapters, including Alan Gallay, Monica Najar, and John Pettegrew. Their insightful comments helped me to reconsider important ideas and reshape the argument in critical ways. Faculty colloquia at Eastern Illinois University and Lehigh University supplied additional feedback, as did a women’s reading group at Eastern Illinois University (which included Sace Elder, Lynnea Magnuson, and Debra Reed). Anne Little and the anonymous readers for the University of Virginia Press provided a rigorous critique that helped me to hone key points. The Newberry Seminar in Early American History and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture provided a stimulating forum for me to present chapters and work out my ideas. Several scholars commented on portions of the project presented at conferences, including Nancy Shoemaker and Clara Sue Kidwell.

The staff at the many repositories I visited gave of their time and expertise, helping me to find sources and generally making the task of completing research pleasant and fruitful. I wish to thank the North Carolina Department of History and Archives in Raleigh; the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia; the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston; the Georgia Department of Archives and History in Atlanta; the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah; and the Library of Congress. Very special thanks go to the South Carolina Department of Archives and History in Columbia. The wonderful staff put up with me for several months, pulling volume after volume of Council Journals and Miscellaneous Records. Their humor and flexibility were greatly appreciated.

I especially wish to thank the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma for the generous hospitality that I received when I visited in 2004 and 2007. I am particularly grateful to Olin Williams, Cultural Preservation Specialist, who graciously introduced me to many people in the nation and to his nation’s history. Chief Greg Pyle was very welcoming as well. I also wish to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Teresa Billy, Clive Billy, and Hannah Bryan of the Choctaw Language Department, as well as the committee working to produce a new Choctaw dictionary, in helping me with translations of eighteenth-century transcriptions of Choctaw words. I received very useful insights from talking with Nancy Southerland-Holmes of the Choctaw National Capitol Museum and Sandra Stroud of Chi Hullo Li. I also wish to thank Terry Cole, Barbara Grant, Tom Williams, and Burt Holt for generously sharing their time. I am sure that this work has been greatly improved because of their input. Any and all errors that remain are entirely my own.

Brothers Born of One Mother

Introduction

ON APRIL 12, 1715, a Yamasee Indian approached the wife of prominent Port Royal planter and sometime trader William Bray and told her he had a great Matter to tell her, which was that the Creek Indians had a Design to cut of[f ] the Traders first and then to fall on the Settlement, and that itt was very neare, but that he had a great Love for her and her two Sisters and when itt was very near he would come again and when he came next they must goe immediately to their Town.¹ After years of corrupt trading practices, abuse and enslavement of their women and children, and encroachment on their lands, Yamasee and Ochese (soon to be known as the Lower Creek) Indians were nearing the breaking point in their alliance with Charles Town. Although Carolina officials responded promptly to this and similar warnings and sent representatives to Pocotaligo (the chief Yamasee town) to try to ease the tensions, the situation was already spiraling dangerously out of control.

The emissaries—including Bray; the former Indian agent John Wright; and the current agent to the Yamasee, Thomas Nairne; along with several others—met with Yamasee headmen on April 14, 1715. Accounts of the meeting that followed differ substantially. According to one contemporary account, the British ambassadors delivered a peaceful message: they promised redress of grievances and reminded the Yamasee of the benefits of the alliance between Pocotaligo and Charles Town. After the Carolinians had gone to sleep that night, however, a Yamasee woman who spoke English arrived in the town square of Pocotaligo and reported that the Englishmen had not come to make peace but rather to spy. In the already-tense atmosphere of the council house that night, this rumor ignited a conflagration.² The Yamasee, however, provided a different account of the origins of the war. The Huspaw king claimed that Mr. Wright said that the white men would come and [fetch] [illegible] the Yamasees in one night, and that they would hang four of their head men and take all the rest of them for Slaves, and that he would send them all off the Country, for he said that the men of the Yamasees were like women, and shew’d his hands one to the other, and what he said vex’d the great Warrier’s, and this made them begin the war.³ Regardless of which scenario was closer to the truth, only two British ambassadors survived the night. Colleton County militia captain Seymour Burroughs was shot twice before escaping by plunging into the Pocotaligo River, while another unnamed man hid in the woods.⁴

What followed was one of the most devastating Indian wars in British colonial history. The Yamasee fell on the settlement of Port Royal. Panicked men, women, and children, warned by Burroughs, had already fled to a ship in the harbor. A second war party attacked Saint Bartholomew’s Parish with greater success, killing more than one hundred settlers without regard to age or sex.⁵ Other tribes quickly joined in, convincing the British that they were facing a general conspiracy among their Indian neighbors. Over the next several months, Charles Town officials scrambled to build fortifications for the reception of the women and children, and to secure provisions for them and others in distress.⁶ The Yamasee also scrambled to build a fort for similar purposes, but they were overrun before its construction was complete.⁷

Active fighting between the British and Yamasee lasted only a few months. In the end, the British killed or enslaved hundreds of Yamasee men, women, and children. Hundreds more fled either to the Ocheses, to other neighboring towns, or to the Spanish in St. Augustine. The repercussions for Anglo-Indian relations would be felt for years to come. Long after, the British continued to fear Rupture and War with those Savages, which would be attended with many terrible Consequences from their Manner of making War, and their Cruelty to Captives, which is still fresh in the Memory of some who were so happy as to survive their Captivity in the last bloody Indian War.⁸ For many Indians, on the other hand, the war evoked both sorrow at the terrible losses they suffered and pride in the damage they had inflicted upon their aggressive white neighbors. Coweta (Ochese) headman Cherekeileigie later remembered that during the war he did the English all the harm I could. For him, performing well in warfare, either against the English or against enemy Indians like the Tuscarora, meant that he had given proofes of my being a man.⁹

While the military and diplomatic story of the Yamasee War is well known, scholars have been slower to acknowledge that the war, like so many other aspects of British-native contact in the region, was shaped by both complementary and clashing understandings of masculinity and femininity.¹⁰ These competing ideas were expressed in a variety of ways as people of all ages and sexes were drawn into the conflict. Abuse and enslavement of Indian women by male English and Scottish traders was one of the foremost Yamasee grievances. Although in both British and Indian societies women did not take primary responsibility for diplomatic relations, individual women played a crucial part in the days preceding the war. An English woman received one of the first warnings that a rupture was imminent, and a Yamasee woman brought the deadly rumors that contributed to the execution of the South Carolina ambassadors. In spite of shared values that linked women, femininity, and noncombatant status, women and children on both sides became casualties of the ensuing mayhem, while British and native men struggled to find means to defend their families. Notions of masculinity and its connections to political leadership and military concerns quickly came to the forefront of the conflict. Male leaders conducted the negotiations intended to avoid the conflict, and a gendered language of insult contributed to undermining the talks. Men then proved their manhood when they picked up weapons to defend their communities and avenge the wrongs they believed had been visited upon them. British dependence on Indian warriors for the defense of the province could not be ignored, and the challenge that such weakness presented to English masculinity raised a number of difficult questions for colonial leaders in the war’s aftermath.

GENDER, FAMILY, AND RHETORIC IN CROSS-CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Ideals of normative gendered behavior both influenced and were influenced by contact between British and Amerindian cultures. The arrival of the English in what is now the southeastern United States after 1660 brought several different gender systems into contact.¹¹ In the decades that followed, English (or, after 1707, British) officials would try to construct and maintain working relationships with the various native groups that inhabited the region. Because notions of gender and family were so fundamental to the social and political organization of all the cultures of the region, they were logical building blocks in the creation of new diplomatic norms to govern interactions. Gender ideology, therefore, would shape cross-cultural interactions (for better or for worse) throughout the period of British occupation. Gendered language figures prominently in the official records produced by colonial governors, legislators, and clerks and in travel accounts and natural histories. Both Anglo-American and Native American leaders regularly expressed their understandings of manhood and kinship. Shared or contrasting ideas of womanhood, as well as men’s relationships to women and children, also played significant rolls in discussions. Rhetoric based on notions of family, masculinity, and femininity became a key component of both formal and informal negotiations. These intercultural conversations provide a unique window into the process of colonization in colonial America.¹² They reveal areas of cultural overlap and conflict. More important, they illustrate the efforts of both sides to establish cross-cultural understanding and to build new diplomatic systems in a new world.¹³

Bringing these gendered conversations into focus sheds new light on seemingly familiar subjects like diplomacy, war, and trade. Issues of masculinity in particular figured prominently in treaty talks and other official and unofficial records. The collision of different cultural expectations of manly behavior had significant implications for military and diplomatic relations, furthering alliances in some cases and disrupting them in others. Further, men’s relationships to and responsibilities for women and children became significant areas of discussion and negotiation, as well as of conflict and misunderstanding. Women, although relatively silent during formal meetings, shaped the relationships between the British and Indians through their active participation in diplomacy, war, and trade.

Gendered language can both reveal and conceal cultural values and actual gendered behavior. Ideas about gender were contested and unstable within each society. Certainly, some rules regarding gendered behavior were culturally enforced or built structurally into the framework of each society. The British legal system supported a certain vision of appropriate gender roles and sexual behavior. In native society, shunning, ridicule, or threats penalized the violation of taboos, while intraclan discipline or interclan retribution enforced socially agreed-upon norms. Other aspects of gender performance were more flexible, however, or might be less generally accepted or enforced. Within Britain itself (and in the colonies), expectations regarding gendered behavior differed according to an individual’s class, religious affiliation, and personal circumstances. Different social groups accepted divergent expressions of sexuality and family relations.¹⁴ Indian communities, too, tolerated certain variations on manhood and womanhood, and some crossing of gender boundaries was allowed, as long as it occurred in socially sanctioned ways.¹⁵ Many individuals defied even generally agreed-upon gender roles (and suffered the consequences). It is most accurate, then, to speak of British and native masculinities and femininities rather than any kind of unitary gender identities.

Furthermore, gender itself is but one aspect of the far more complex construct that is individual identity and but one of many categories around which society is organized. As such, gender animates and intersects with other identities and social structures. In British society, a person’s position in society was also shaped by class, race, age, and legal status (free or unfree, married or single). In certain circumstances class and race might trump gender (for example, an elite woman might own male slaves or indentured servants). In native society clan membership was the single most important marker of identity, although age and individual abilities and accomplishments contributed to a person’s role and standing in the community. Gender, as an analytical tool, sheds light on certain aspects of behavior, identity, and cultural values but can never be fully separated from other factors.¹⁶

The gendered rhetoric that emerges from the historical record, therefore, does not reflect a social consensus on gender ideals. Instead, it was constructed by the speaker, often with a deliberate aim. Elite men most often delivered diplomatic speeches and disproportionally shaped the kinds of cross-cultural conversations that came to characterize Anglo-Indian relations. Leaders on both sides at times depicted an idealized form of gender ideology, one that was exaggerated and manipulated in order to achieve maximum effect. Speakers often sought to appropriate what they saw as the values of the other side in order to shame or motivate allies into desired behavior, or they presented distorted performances of gendered ideals from their own society in order to affect the outcome of negotiations or gain prestige. As a result, the picture that emerges is itself often inconsistent and contested.

Consideration of behavior can sometimes broaden the picture substantially. When individuals behaved in ways that belied the rhetoric of official meetings, they demonstrated the diversity possible within their societies or within those areas in which gendered ideology was contested. Deeds also reveal values, especially those held by women, that went unarticulated by male leaders. Actions, as well as rhetoric, then, often produced a kind of cross-cultural conversation that exposes conflicting gender ideals. Even in these cases, however, one must keep in mind that all of these gendered performances were mediated through the documentary record.

Ideas of family also emerged regularly during cross-cultural conversations between the British and Native Americans. In both societies, family was a key component of social organization and performed crucial governing functions. In the British system, the patriarchal family was a microcosm of the state, and the patriarch was responsible for governing his dependents.¹⁷ In native society, clan membership determined citizenship in the society. Clans implemented law and meted out justice, and tribal councils included senior members of each clan. Family was so crucial to native ways of understanding the world that most native societies recognized two categories of people: kin and enemies.¹⁸ Therefore, fictive kinship played a crucial role in shaping all intercultural relations. Family terminology came to define Anglo-Indian relationships, and genuine kinship ties bound the various groups together. Yet because each side understood family in different ways, the use of kinship rhetoric became an equally complex and contested part of diplomatic interactions.

THE COLONIAL SOUTHEAST

The colonial Southeast provides a unique locus for evaluating the role of gender in shaping Anglo-Indian contact.¹⁹ The Southeast as a region differed substantially from other territories claimed by the English, most notably New England and the Chesapeake. In those places, the English had managed to establish a clear dominance by the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Indians, defeated in King Philip’s War and Bacon’s Rebellion, respectively, were reduced to the status of subordinate tributaries that posed little threat to the stability of expanding English settlements.²⁰ In the Southeast, however, the British faced substantial competition that hindered their efforts to assert dominance. The Spanish in Florida and the French in Louisiana posed a challenge to British territorial aspirations, restricting British expansion and threatening the stability of their settlements. British hegemony was also disputed by the several powerful Indian tribes that inhabited the region, including the Creek (Muskogee), Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, and Catawba, as well as a number of smaller coastal tribes.²¹ Too numerous to be pushed aside or easily defeated, the Indians were a force to be reckoned with. They took advantage of European competition to seek multiple alliances and trading relationships. Unable to establish the kind of control they desired and had achieved elsewhere, the British were forced to negotiate with their native allies, making concessions and establishing systems of diplomacy that recognized at least some of the cultural expectations of native peoples.

In the centuries before contact, southeastern nations had developed a working set of norms that governed diplomacy, war, intermarriage, and trade between neighbors in the region. In this sense, a kind of international law set standards for intergroup interaction. Although substantial diversity characterized southeastern Indian communities, these broader rules drew upon and reinforced cultural similarities between groups and helped create a regional diplomatic culture. The European invasion of the Southeast introduced new players into this existing matrix of relations, bringing about a collision in diplomatic systems. In Europe, the various countries had developed a Law of Nations that governed international relations. Codified in the writings of Hugo Grotius and later Emmerich de Vattel, the Law of Nations specified a general European standard regulating diplomacy and war.²² Colonization would bring these two regional systems in contact, and often into conflict.

As a result of this meeting of European and native laws of nations, British officials and native leaders were forced to construct a new set of diplomatic norms to govern relations in the region, norms that relied upon notions of gender and the family and rhetoric relating to both. This effort to create a new international system sets the colonial period apart from that which would follow.²³ Although it would be more than a decade after the Revolution before the new United States was able to fully gain control of Indian affairs in the Southeast, American expansionism and civilization policy would put enormous pressure on native societies to alter their family structures and divisions of labor. Consequently, the last forty years before removal (from the 1790s to the 1830s) was a period of substantial transformation in Indian gender relations. The period of British colonization does not feature this kind of dramatic change. Instead, during this earlier period, much greater continuity persisted within Indian gender systems, and Indian nations were powerful enough to force the British to negotiate on Indian terms. As a result, focusing on the colonial period offers a substantially different perspective on cross-cultural gender relations. The British were unable to pressure Indian nations into changing their constructions of gender and therefore had to work with existing native norms. The real story of the colonial period, then, is not about native acculturation to Anglo-American gender norms. Rather, it is a story of mutual adaptation, dependence, compromise, and negotiation. Although neither side accepted the gender ideology of the other (and it is doubtful that either ever fully comprehended the other’s notions or behavior), they managed to build a functioning system of diplomacy that drew on agreed-upon tropes and shared practices.

To some extent, the relationship between the British and powerful inland tribes is difficult to characterize. The Southeast can’t really be termed a middle ground, as defined by Richard White, and it certainly wasn’t native ground.²⁴ Instead, it was a place in which the balance of power shifted during the eighteenth century, creating complex and often changing diplomatic situations that required constant renegotiation and reevaluation of existing relationships.²⁵ The English stepped into a region already radically altered by the aftereffects of contact, in which Spanish settlers and Indians had existed in uneasy proximity for decades. In the 1660s, when the English began creating their first permanent settlements, Indians dominated the region. Early English and Scottish colonists depended upon Indian tolerance and often required Indian support and protection. Officials encouraged Carolina’s closest Indian allies to relocate and live near the settlements to serve as buffers against Spanish or hostile Indian invasion. English reliance on native trading partners for defense demonstrated clearly the weakness of the English colonies themselves. The English often found their native allies difficult to manage, and when they decided to break off their relationship with one group, they had to rely on another group to remove the first from the field. They used the Savannah to defeat the Westo, then turned Piedmont groups against the Savannah. Most significantly, though, the Tuscarora and Yamasee Wars of 1711 and 1715, respectively, demonstrated the power of the Indians and the weakness of the British settlements. In both cases, Indian attacks threatened to wipe out the young colonies, and the British had to turn to native allies to help defeat their enemies.²⁶

The balance of power in the region shifted substantially over the next forty years. As the Carolinas grew and Georgia was founded, British might in the region expanded. More and more settlers moved into the region, bolstering the number of men the British could put in the field and putting increasing pressure on Indian villages and hunting territories. The growing success of rice and later indigo planting reduced Carolinians’ reliance on the deerskin trade, at a time when southern tribes had become more and more dependent on it. Earlier slave raids had weakened Spanish Florida, reducing effective Spanish control to those areas around the forts at St. Augustine, Pensacola, and San Marcos. To the west, the French remained weak and dependent upon metropolitan officials for support and supplies. Neither Spain nor France could mount an effective challenge to British power, although they provided an alternative source of trade goods and alliances to southeastern tribes, which played the three off against one another (with varying degrees of success). For much of this period, it probably was not clear to anyone who could exert the greatest power. Natives’ ability to find other trading partners or form other alliances rendered them, in British eyes, recalcitrant and untrustworthy. Powerful inland tribes therefore maintained a considerable degree of autonomy.²⁷

The balance of power tipped in favor of the British with the defeat of the French in the French and Indian War. The Cherokee War of 1759–61, part of the larger conflict, did not have the devastating effects of earlier Indian wars for the British, and a force of combined colonial and regular troops relied less on Indian allies to force an end to the conflict. With the removal of the Spanish from Florida and the transfer of Louisiana to Spain, Britain emerged as the dominant force in the region. The continued presence of the Spanish left southeastern tribes an alternative to British alliances that their northern counterparts lacked, but the Spanish were weak and unreliable as a source of trade goods, and many tribes found that efforts to play the British and Spanish against one another were less successful than they had hoped.²⁸

A simple declension narrative, then, in which Indian peoples lost power and became subordinate to European powers distorts our picture of the colonial Southeast. Such an analysis reads the story of nineteenth-century acculturation and removal back in time and does not recognize the complex, shifting power relations of the eighteenth century. Looking at the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provides a view of intercultural negotiations in the time before Anglo-American dominance was assured and when the potential for intercultural exchange, rather than conquest, still existed. Europeans and natives were both forced to adapt to the norms and traditions of the other. Diplomacy and trade incorporated ceremonies and rhetoric from several cultures, forging a set of hybrid practices that, while never fully embraced by either side, allowed Europeans and Indians to talk to one another. This era of ambiguous power relations illuminates the ways these cultures responded to encounters with unfamiliar gender systems while Amerindians still had the power to make independent decisions. To advance particular aims, both at times modified their behavior to maximize similarities or exploit differences but never fundamentally altered their notions of masculinity and femininity. The Indians still had the ability to adapt to a white presence in ways consistent with their own cultures because Europeans could not yet dictate the terms of interaction. The British, on the other hand, found themselves forced to make frustrating concessions to groups they considered inferior but could not control.

THEMES

Ideas about gender shaped intercultural contact in the colonial Southeast in several key ways. First, Indian and British leaders deliberately tried to find a common meeting place of diplomacy and metaphor, which was often highly gendered. In a region in which no one group could fully dominate the others, all parties involved had to find points of similarity or agreement where they could meet. Each group had different concepts of what it meant to be men and women, fathers and mothers, or brothers and sisters. Yet they shared enough to allow for the use of gendered and familial metaphors to describe their relationship in ways acceptable to both, although fully understood by neither. Men in both British and southeastern Indian cultures performed most official diplomatic and military functions, while women generally had the care of the home and the family.²⁹ Building on these similarities, British and native leaders constructed a set of diplomatic, military, and trade protocols designed to promote peaceful interactions. Such formalities did not always work, and misunderstandings were common, but even misunderstandings could be productive in allowing all to see the relationship in ways that suited them. Together, they constructed and then manipulated a gendered language of diplomacy to advance their own separate interests.

Second, participants had only a limited ability to identify or exploit areas of cultural overlap. Differences in how natives and whites understood gender affected how each viewed and defined the other. Each group believed its own gender roles and norms natural. When men and women did not conform to expectations of proper behavior, their actions were read as unnatural, suggesting that something was fundamentally wrong in the culture. White and Indian men observed one another’s occupations, martial ability, and family relations and found substantial points of difference. In the end, each group concluded that the other were not proper men. Because they misperceived each other’s cultures, they also tended to make tactical errors in managing relations. They either underestimated one another or appealed to values that the other simply did not hold. They could also unwittingly (or wittingly) insult one another by their failure to recognize the other’s manhood. Contrasting views of the proper roles of women also contributed to misunderstandings. Maltreatment of women disrupted diplomacy, and conflict often arose on this score. By the late eighteenth century, as Anglo-Americans became more confident in their ability to assert their preeminence in the region, they devoted less effort to finding a common ground based on shared notions of manhood or family, thereby undermining the gendered diplomatic language that had characterized the earlier period.

Finally, in addition to causing Englishmen and natives to negotiate their notions of gender within the context of diplomacy, contact caused a renegotiation of gender ideals within societies. Contact caused more substantial alteration to native than British gender roles, but all groups had to adapt to the complex geopolitical realities of the Southeast. Overall, however, substantial continuities persisted in both British and native notions of gender and divisions of labor, and these continuities were often more significant in the lives of participants than was change during the pre-Revolutionary period. Some scholars have suggested a distinction between change in people’s experiences on the one hand and transformations in status or the larger gender system on the other.³⁰ This idea applies well to both the British and their native neighbors in the Southeast. Although colonization forced some changes in British notions of gender (most notably the adoption of an increasingly militarized stance and martial notions of manhood that emphasized the ideal of the citizen-soldier), these changes are less notable than the broader continuity in gender ideals that persisted throughout the era. Patriarchal family organization and the division of labor that accompanied it survived and adapted to the realities of frontier life and plantation slavery.³¹ Only those involved directly in the deerskin trade and a small number of settlers living on the most distant frontiers found that new family forms and gendered divisions of labor were beneficial.³² Native peoples faced more pressure than did the British, resulting in more substantial changes in economic orientation to meet the needs of the trade and new alliances. Nevertheless, Native Americans adapted to the radical forces of European colonialism without losing the basic foundations of their culture or experiencing substantial transformation in their overall concepts of proper men’s and women’s roles. During the seventeenth and most of the eighteenth century, the new colonial governments of the southern colonies were too weak to force major alterations in gender relations on the strong tribes of the Southeast.³³ Not until the early nineteenth century would native societies experience more substantial transformations in their gender organization, as American pressures to civilize led tribal governments to accept patrilineal inheritance and many acculturated elites adopted patriarchal family organization.

Five thematic chapters explore four major areas of Indian-white interaction: diplomacy, war, trade, and intermarriage. Chapter 1 investigates the role of gender in diplomacy. Formal diplomatic meetings were the key to establishing and maintaining relationships and were the primary forum in which gendered rhetoric was utilized and manipulated. Participants frequently employed family analogies and gendered metaphors, and the formalities involved women as well as men. Because native leaders and white officials had differing views of kinship and of women’s role in diplomacy and society, however, they also held variant views of what fictive familial relationships in diplomacy meant. Such misunderstandings allowed each party to see the relationship in its own way, without ever fully understanding how the other viewed these metaphors.

Warfare, because of its lethal potential, occupied the greatest amount of concern and often dominated diplomatic discussions. Indian and European societies recognized an intimate link between manhood and warfare, which is the subject of chapter 2. Leaders sought to impress their allies or intimidate enemies by asserting the military prowess of their young men and, by extension, the relative power of their societies. Ultimately, each group judged the masculinity of others based on its own culturally specific notions of proper martial behavior and found these other men wanting. As chapter 3 demonstrates, each side also had to deal with the presence of women, both white and native, on the frontiers during war. Allies met to discuss problems of defense, while enemies used the failure of their foes to spare nonwarriors as justification for continued warfare and escalating atrocities.

Trade, in the meantime, was one of the strongest ties binding together Europeans and Indians and is the focus of chapter 4. It forced Englishmen and natives to define men’s and women’s roles in commerce and the family economy. Commerce also provoked a renegotiation of gender roles in Indian society (and, to a far lesser extent, in British frontier society), providing new opportunities for both sexes but ultimately doing little to change the fundamental divisions of labor. Traditional gender roles shaped how men and women responded to the new realities of the trade. Further, new rhetoric based around the support of women and children arose as a useful diplomatic tool for both sides as they struggled to control the new moral economy of frontier exchange.

Arising as a companion to trade, intermarriage (the subject of chapter 5) substantially shaped Anglo-Indian relations, but with sometimes ambiguous results. While happy unions could advance diplomacy and solidify alliances, mistreatment of Indian women could cause serious tensions between white and Indian societies, with potentially violent consequences. Although a frequent topic of discussion and of British efforts at regulation, trader abuses of native women and violations of sexual and familial norms continued to destabilize relations throughout the colonial period.

In 1717, Chief Brim of Coweta, a leading Ochese town, decided to reestablish ties with the British in the wake of the Yamasee War. In his town, there were strong pro-Spanish and pro-British factions. Brim was convinced that the best way to preserve the security and prosperity of his town was to maintain alliances with both. From this time on, he embarked on a policy of neutrality, playing one side against the other. In order to firmly establish the peace with the British, he arranged a marriage between his niece Coosaponakeesa (whom the British knew as Mary) and Colonel John Musgrove’s half-Creek son Johnny. The wedding, along with an exchange of presents, solidified the alliance between the British and the Coweta, to the great frustration of the Spanish. For Brim and the Creek, the union was the critical episode that effectively bound the groups together according to the rules of kinship reciprocity.³⁴ A conflict that had begun at least in part because of news carried by a woman ended with the restoration of peace effected by a woman. Johnny and Mary Musgrove (and after Johnny’s death, Mary alone) would be crucial intermediaries between Coweta and the British, first in South Carolina and then in Georgia, for decades to come.

Mary Musgrove was an unusual woman. Many other women, less visible in the records and therefore less known to posterity, also played important roles in intercultural contact. They served as translators, messengers, and providers of hospitality and, in their roles as wives, gave white men access to Indian kinship systems. They traveled with diplomatic delegations and shaped political decisions. Men had little choice but to reckon with their presence. Male leaders also defined their own social roles in relation