7 - Creating a country of laws and property

Summary

“Every man who has understanding enough to acquire property and to know his own,” Tustanagee Hopoy (Little Prince) and Tuskegee Tustanagee stated in 1809, “ought to know his neighbours property and in a country of Laws and property should be made to respect it.” Though these Lower Creek leaders, objecting to the theft of their cattle by Georgians, surely enjoyed addressing whites with rhetoric usually directed at Native Americans, they spoke only partially in irony. Their admonishment also reflected the lessons of hard-won experience, for Creeks themselves had recently begun to covet and acquire property. The words of Benjamin Hawkins neatly summed up the process: The Creeks “tasted the sweets of civilization” and “began to know the value of property and the necessity of defending it.” Some of them became desirous of its accumulation, uneasy about its security, and violent in its defense. In the last three years of the eighteenth century, these changes, whose early origins and subsequent development will be traced in this chapter, culminated when Creeks under the direction of Hawkins formed a national police force to make recalcitrant Muskogees respect their neighbors' property.

Understanding these developments clearly requires examination of the local dynamics of Creek history. But it also demands attention to more general and far-reaching changes in this period, when the Atlantic economy and U.S. government invaded once autonomous regions throughout North America.