5 - Blacks in Creek country

Summary

Throughout the widely scattered towns of Creek country, the status of African Americans varied according to the uneven expansion across the land of private property and centralized power. At one extreme, Creeks used African Americans as slaves, particularly at the confluence of the Coosa and Tallapoosa where the loamy riverbanks permitted wealthy mestizos to establish plantations. At the other extreme, some Creeks adopted blacks into their clans and gave them all the rights and obligations of other kin. This contrasting pattern also had a specific location, for it focused around a number of Creek towns on the lower Chattahoochee and in north-central Florida. Here, despite the threats issued by self-proclaimed “national leaders,” Creeks welcomed African American fugitives as full-fledged participants in community life. The significance of this geographic and social distinction is greater than the small numbers of blacks in Creek country in the 1780s and 1790s would seem to indicate. African Americans, as slaves on the one hand and as equal members of society on the other, became central to the struggle for and against the new order emerging in the region. They played key roles in shaping how private property and centralized power expanded across the Deep South.

Unlike the neighboring colonists who divided people according to religion and skin color, Creeks had their own ways of categorizing the Africans and Europeans who invaded their land.