Copyright by Rachel Beth Herrmann 2013

The Dissertation Committee for Rachel Beth Herrmann Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Food and War: Indians, Slaves, and the American Revolution

Committee:

Neil Kamil, Supervisor

Carolyn Eastman, Co-Supervisor

Erika Bsumek

Elizabeth Engelhardt

Robert Olwell

James Sidbury Food and War: Indians, Slaves, and the American Revolution

by

Rachel Beth Herrmann, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Dedication

For Marilyn and Amy

Acknowledgements

I have received more professional and personal support than I could have hoped for while writing this dissertation. Research funding from the history department, the graduate school, and British Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the Colonial

Williamsburg Foundation, the David Library of the American Revolution, the Huntington

Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the New York Public Library allowed me to bury myself in manuscripts and microfilm. Two additional writing fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and International Security Studies at

Yale enabled me to write my dissertation surrounded by supportive, welcoming, and very smart people.

My committee has provided me with the feedback I needed to make this work as strong as I could. Carolyn Eastman constantly pushed me to ask big questions about my sources, and to separate the forest from the trees. Neil Kamil gently let me know when I overstated the size and importance of the former. Erika Bsumek read some of my earliest work on food history and cannibalism, and ensured that I became securely grounded in

Native American history. Elizabeth Engelhardt introduced me to some of the newest work in food studies, and showed me that it was possible to successfully blend American

Studies with early American history. Robert Olwell’s work on slaves has informed my work tremendously, and his interest in the historiography of the American Revolution helped me to figure out the sorts of arguments I needed to make. James Sidbury read my

v work with an enormously helpful critical eye, and challenged me where I needed to be challenged on the Sierra Leone material. Obviously, I take full responsibility for any errors that remain in these pages.

As a historian, I would be remiss if I did not look back on the teachers whose enthusiasm for the past fired my own. At the Bronx High School of Science, Melvin

Maskin turned me from a math and science student into someone who went to college to major in history. At Vassar, Jim Merrell advised my undergraduate work on foodways in the Early Republic, and his tough questions and encouragement convinced me that I could make a place for myself in the field of food history.

At the University of Texas at Austin, many people cheered me on. I thank Dharitri

Bhattacharjee for excellent movie recommendations, Ben Breen for all things early modern, Mikki Brock for demonology and enthusiasm for margaritas, Felipe Cruz for aviation anecdotes and careful edits about chamomile tea, Chris Dietrich for advice about

New Haven and going easy on his TA, Bryan Glass for the world of British Studies,

Chris Heaney for skulls and appendices, Marilyn Lehman for helping me jump through administrative hoops, Storm Miller for ribbing me about my baseball predilections,

Rachel Ozanne for being the best roommate I could ask for, Alexis Harasemovitch Truax for camping adventures and homebrewed beer, Trevor Simmons for updates on the weather in Austin, and Angela Smith for her humor and support.

I’ve also met people outside of Austin who have enriched my work and kept me company during my travels. Thanks to Joe Adelman for introducing me to the world of

Twitter and other communication networks, Amanda Behm for making me feel at home vi in the foreign world of security studies, Rachel Finn for listening to my early thoughts on black foodways, Rachel Laudan for talking with me about food studies writ large,

Kristina Poznan for feeding me copious amounts of Hungarian food in Colonial

Williamsburg, and William P. Tatum for keeping me honest about military history and the British army.

Every now and again, a scholar is lucky enough to land in a place where she makes colleagues and friends at the same time; for me, this place was the McNeil Center.

Dan Richter was kind enough to read one of my very rough chapters, but more importantly, he provided an example of a seminar leader who steered discussions with humor, wit, collegiality, and an impressive array of ties. I am grateful to all of the fellows who called 3355 Woodland Walk home for the year, but especially to Glenda Goodman,

Dael Norwood, Nenette Luarca-Shoaf, and Nic Wood, who made extended lunch conversations just as important as sorting out my dissertation paragraphs. To Sari

Altschuler, Chris Parsons, Jessica Roney, and Seth Perry, I think I am, for once, at a loss for words. I suppose that in these sorts of situations, one can only offer unlimited amounts of gratitude and promises of future deliveries of cookies.

There will always be people who love you for who you are, no matter what you have written. My mother Marilyn and my sister Amy will in all likelihood never read this work, but I owe them my ability to write it. To Chelsea Backer, Erica Fink, Kofi James,

Sasha Litwin, Anna Rogers, Matt Shapiro, and Kathryn Swallow: I couldn’t have done it without you.

vii Finally, to Marc-William Palen, who’s been here since I started writing this thing, and who has gone on food adventures with me in Austin, Washington Crossing,

Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Washington, D.C., Paris, London, Sydney, Maine, and New Haven, and probably consumed more than his fair share of stress-induced cooking: thank you.

viii Food and War: Indians, Slaves, and the American Revolution

Rachel Beth Herrmann, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013

Supervisors: Neil Kamil and Carolyn Eastman

This work asks how Native Americans, free blacks, and slaves used food to wage war and broker peace during and after the American Revolution. I argue that from 1774 to 1812 food diplomacy and victual warfare were two opposing yet related ways of communicating in the Atlantic world, and therefore ways of negotiating power. Case studies of white soldiers, black soldiers, black Loyalists, Iroquois, Cherokee, Creek, and

Western Confederacy Indians stitch together the broad fabric of the Atlantic by illuminating points of commonality and divergence in places as far-flung as the Upper

Ohio Valley, the North- and Southeastern Woodlands, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra

Leone. I argue that Iroquois Indians’ abilities to use food diplomacy speak to an anti- declension narrative and help to chart the pan-Indian movement that cohered from the

1780s to the 1810s. By the end of the war nearly everyone in the North adhered to a

Native iteration of food diplomacy. In the South, by contrast, food diplomacy failed.

Victual warfare illuminates factions among Americans, Britons, and Natives, and explains how the violence of the Revolution continued into the postwar period. My chapters on black Loyalists in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone show how discourses about food followed people out of the colonies and into increasingly transnational worlds. Yet ix by 1812 Native Americans and black Loyalists lost the ability to use food as a bargaining tool, and Americans and Britons increasingly dictated the terms of a less flexible diplomacy, which they enforced with stringent food laws. This project offers the first study of how people in the Revolutionary Atlantic used food as a tool of social and political control.

x Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Cast of Characters ...... 41

Chapter 1: “The pivot upon which all your operations turn”: Domestic and Military Foodways ...... 52

Chapter 2: “What he now related he heard the Officers talk over at Table”: Black Food Networks ...... 104

Chapter 3: “No useless Mouth”: Iroquoian Food Diplomacy ...... 139

Chapter 4: “We shall make their Towns Smoak with fire, and their Streets run with blood”: Victual Warfare and the Not-So-New Order of Things ...... 187

Chapter 5: “From hunters to husbandmen”: Culinary Imperialism and the Pan-Indian Western Confederacy War ...... 238

Chapter 6: “A denial of bread to many hungry families”: the State-Federal Battle in Postwar Creek and Cherokee Country ...... 290

Chapter 7: “One days alowance of frish Beef for a Christmas diner”: Race and Food Laws in Nova Scotia ...... 342

Chapter 8: “So inconsistent with those equitable principles by which we professed to be governed”: Nova Scotian, Maroon, and Temne Foodways in Sierra Leone ...... 380

Conclusion ...... 438

Bibliography ...... 445

Vita...... 469

xi Introduction

There is a print cartoon in the Library of Congress, published in 1780 and titled

“The Allies—par nobile fratrum.” In this image King George III shares a cannibal feast with three Native Americans. The Indians occupy the far left side of the frame: a man drains blood from a dismembered corpse into a skull which a second, kneeling man holds. The third Indian gnaws on one side of a long, thin bone, while King George sucks the marrow out of the other end. A disembodied child’s head lies by the King’s foot, while a starving dog occupies himself with the scraps. From the right portion of the picture a bishop and a sailor look on as the sailor comments sarcastically, “We are hellish good Christians.” The caption of the scene reads, “The Party of Savages went out with

Orders not to spare Man, Woman, or Child. To this cruel Mandate even some of the

Savages made an Objection...but they were told the Children would make Soldiers, & the

Women would keep up the Stock.”1 To the untrained eye this cartoon appears to be no more than an American’s depiction of British-Native alliance in the American War of

Independence. Given American stories of Indian and British “atrocities” during moments such as the Battle of Wyoming, tales of brutality, rape, and captive-taking seem unremarkable.

But John Almon, the publisher, was British, and he printed this cartoon in

London. The print, then, also presents evidence of Britons’ ambivalence about employing

Indians for waging war. In some Englishmen’s eyes, Indian-Anglo allegiances ran the

1 John Almon, “The Allies—par nobile fratrum,” 3 February 1780, London. Print. Washington D.C., Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2004673372/. I have been unable to identify the engraver. 1 risk of debasing white men by turning them into metaphorical cannibals. Surely no one believed that the King’s association with Indians left him with a penchant for consuming human flesh, but the fact that Londoners saw, and perhaps even agreed with depictions of such coalitions indicated a serious distrust of their country’s leadership—symbolized by the bloody dish the King shared with his Indian allies. Yet the artist also conveyed a second, more subtle idea: the cartoon’s caption, “par nobile fratrum”—“a noble pair of brothers”—indicates the artist’s sense that this military alliance demanded a degree of equality. This depiction suggested that while on their campaigns, when combined forces of Natives and Britons took stores of food as plunder, Indians would expect a fair share of the edible spoils.

Food is a tie that both binds and divides, and hence comprises a subject that throws new light on the American Revolution. Human beings experience birth, death, and hunger, but very few people are Shandean enough to recall their lives ab ovo. Only half the population gives birth, and the dead, so far as I know, leave unreliable records.2 But everyone has eaten, and most have at some point gone without food. In placing food at the center of this study, I join a new generation of scholars thinking seriously about its complex significance in the Atlantic world. Recent books on food assert that food changes history; I began research on the eighteenth century seeking to learn how history changed food. In response to this question I offer the first account of how people in the

Revolutionary Atlantic used food as a tool of social and political control. Food history, I

2 Some historians, to be sure, have charted the overarching importance of death and ceremonies associated with mortuary practices, but these histories by their very nature can only draw on other peoples’ observations of the deaths of others. See, for example, Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 2 argue, has the potential to offer us fresh insight into the workings of power, diplomacy, and race in the early Atlantic.

***

I intend this work to function primarily as an Atlantic history, as delineated by early practitioners (and to some extent, skeptics) of the field.3 I wanted to address their worries that the Atlantic paradigm was too broad geographically, and incapable of considering the stories of Native Americans, slaves, and indigenous Africans at the same time. My focus on food stitches together the broad fabric of the Atlantic by illuminating points of commonality and divergence in places as far-flung as the Upper Ohio Valley and North- and Southeastern Woodlands, Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone.

3 For foundational works on Atlantic history see Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: European and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London and New York: Methuen, 1986); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For more recent syntheses, as well as case studies, see Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670-1780 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain 1492-1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review, vol. 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 741-757; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Douglas R. Egerton, Alison Games, Jane G. Landers, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright, eds., The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2007); Peter C. Mancall, ed., The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550-1624 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3 This dissertation is secondarily a food history that uses diplomatic and cultural history to tell a narrative about Native Americans, free blacks, and slaves. Food was not merely far more important to the Revolutionary era than scholars have previously recognized: the largest, most critical distinction that sets food apart is people used it as much to broker peace as to wage war.

As the events of the American Revolution unfolded, Americans and Britons learned that food proved indispensable in maintaining diplomatic alliances with Indians, as well as in extracting promises of military service from slaves and free blacks.

Negotiations about food—from its role as a symbolic gift to its necessary inclusion in military rations—became crucial to diplomatic and military affairs. By 1783 food transcended its status as a practical foodstuff and became, in addition, an essential component of diplomacy, as well as a site and means of battle. Yet by 1812 Native

Americans and black Loyalists lost the ability to use food as a bargaining tool, and

Americans and Britons increasingly dictated the terms of a new, less flexible diplomacy, which they enforced with stringent food laws.

This dissertation focuses on food in order to analyze a spectrum of power amongst these groups of people that operated between 1774 and 1812. I argue that food diplomacy and victual warfare were two opposing yet related ways of communicating in the Atlantic world, and therefore ways of negotiating power. I define food diplomacy as the use of consumable goods such as corn, salt, rum, and meat—in the form of beef, pork, mutton, and sometimes horses—to gain or hold alliances. When food diplomacy failed, victual warfare often followed in its wake. When Americans sought to impose their

4 agriculture and foodways on Indians, they were practicing perhaps the most insidious form of victual warfare; but Natives and blacks used other forms of victual warfare when other avenues to communication collapsed. Victual warfare was most immediately destructive and recognizable when Americans, Europeans, blacks, and Indians burned crops, killed, maimed, or stole domesticated animals, and dangled the threat of starvation over the heads of their enemies.4

A model that takes food as its building block is capable of revealing shifting power relations in the day-to-day lives of Revolutionary actors. If historians are used to thinking about white colonists as an increasingly powerful group, Natives as a decreasingly powerful cohort, and the enslaved as a people with relatively no power, then foodways—which comprise anything related to the production, distribution, or consumption of food—shed light on the moments when uncertainty about power remained the only constant.5 Although food diplomacy occupies one end of this power spectrum, and victual warfare the other, using this scale does not mean that all activities that involved food fit neatly into peaceful or violent moments, or that people always

4 My definitions elaborate on other historians’ definitions of diplomacy and food diplomacy, which I discuss below. The term “victual warfare” is my own. 5 The earliest citation of the term appears in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1941, as “The traditional customs or habits of a group of people concerning food and eating.” In a Ph.D. dissertation, Jay Allan Anderson traced the term to an earlier 1948 dissertation by John Honigmann (itself published in 1968), Foodways in a Muskeg Community. By contrast, Lucy Long, in an entry in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, claims that folklorist Don Yoder coined the term much later, in 1970. Yoder described foodways as “The total cookery complex, including attitudes, taboos, and meal systems—the whole range of cookery and food habits in a society.” Regardless of when the term was invented, the definition is adequate. Oxford English Dictionary Online, search under “Foodway, n.,” especially def. 2, http://oed.com; Jay Allan Anderson, “A Solid Sufficiency: An Ethnography of Yeoman Foodways in Stuart England” (Ph.D. diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1971), xl; John Honigmann, Foodways in a Muskeg Community (Ottawa: Distributed by Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre, Dept. of Northern Affairs and National Resources, 1961); Lucy Long, “Myths and Folklore,” in Smith, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 1, 134. 5 recognized those moments as such. Sometimes foodways such as patriotic fasts or celebratory feasts were imbued with symbolic meanings, but sometimes eighteenth- century actors were simply hungry. Nevertheless, food diplomacy and victual warfare have been a useful way of organizing my scholarship because all parties were at various times producers, consumers, and destroyers of food.

Food history allows historians to revise the eighteenth-century declension narrative that prevails in the historiography of Native American history, and speaks to recent literature on the Loyalist diaspora and the African Atlantic.6 I modify the declension narrative by pushing it past the Revolution itself and into the 1790s and

1800s. I engage with Loyalist historiography by demonstrating that black Loyalists in

Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, like their white counterparts in other reaches of the British

Empire, struggled to reconcile the ideals of the American Revolution with their new identities as British subjects. Further, I argue that during periods of contact with indigenous Africans black Loyalists were just as invested in using food as a weapon as they were in effecting religious conversions, finding common ground, and forging a cohesive identity.

***

Food history has changed significantly from its beginnings. Whereas the earliest food histories tended to be anecdotal and episodic, more recent popular histories often

6 I discuss the declension narrative at some length in the following paragraphs. For recent works on the black Loyalist diaspora see Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (London: BBC Books, 2005); Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). 6 focus solely on individual foods.7 Early food historians in the 1940s, likely influenced by a post-Depression milieu in which the study of food was relegated to questions of nutrition and diet, wrote exhaustive and almost wholly unempirical stories of what people ate.8 These works did not share much in common with more conventional histories of the

United States, and left readers with little understanding regarding why people consumed specific foods in a given place or time. With the rising popularity of the Annales school in the 1960s, however, a new focus on material culture and everyday life encouraged combined scholarship on food, eating, and history.9

The field of food studies still lacked a cohesive methodology, however, and as lay writers took up the subject food history became similar to trivia—a jumble of facts about specific foods from different places.10 Although anthropologists often included whole chapters on contemporary food habits, professional U.S. historians—with a few exceptions—usually mentioned food only in passing.11 Perhaps because, without a

7 I first discussed some of these matters at length in Rachel Beth Herrmann, “Cannibals All?: Starvation, Abundance, and Anglo-Indian Foodways in Colonial Virginia” (Master’s report, the University of Texas at Austin, 2009), 3-6; Rachel B. Herrmann, “The ‘tragicall historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 68, no. 1 (January 2011), 73-74. 8 One of the first of these books was Richard Osborn Cummings, The American and His Food (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940 & 1941). In 1981, looking backward at food historiography, Richard J. Hooker observed that very little had been published since Cummings wrote The American and His Food forty years earlier (with the exception of a 1972 book by Sam Bowers Hilliard. Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1972); Richard J. Hooker, Food and Drink in America: A History (New York: The Bobbs-Merill Company, 1981), xi. 9 “Historiography,” in Smith, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, vol. 1, 672. 10 For these sorts of histories, see Sally Smith Booth, Hung, Strung, & Potted: A History of Eating in Colonial America (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1971); Evan Jones, American Food: The Gastronomic Story (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975); Waverly Lewis Root and Richard de Rochemont, Eating in America: A History (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1976); Joseph R. Conlin, Bacon, Beans, and Galantines: Food and Foodways on the Western Mining Frontier (Reno & Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1986). 11 Stephen Nissenbaum’s book and a few others provide counter-examples to this ahistorical tendency. Nissenbaum writes explicitly about food. Other historians have included whole chapters on eating and table 7 methodology, it was difficult to generalize about food, the 1990s witnessed a spate of culinary microhistories: popular books on specific foods or food items such as Cod, Salt, and The Tomato in America.12

Culinary microhistories frequently promise to tell the story of a fruit, spice, expensive delicacy, or ubiquitous commodity from a global perspective.13 These books have played a key role in making the field of food studies visible and in generating

manners. See Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980); Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life 1790-1840 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988); John F. Kasson, Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1993 [1992]); Mark Caldwell, A Short History of Rudeness: Manners, Morals, and Misbehavior in Modern America (New York: Picador USA, 1999); James E. McWilliams, A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008). 12 Andrew F. Smith, The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World (New York: Penguin, 1998); Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Penguin, 2003). 13 For examples of these culinary microhistories, see Smith, The Tomato in America; Kurlansky, Cod; Smith, Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn in America (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Kurlansky, Salt; Smith, The Turkey: An American Story (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Ken Albala, Beans: A History (Berg Publishers, 2007); Ken Albala, Pancake: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2008); Carol Helstosky, Pizza: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2008); Andrew F. Smith, Hamburger: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2008); Janet Clarkson, Pie: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2009); Fred Czarra, Spices: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2009); Andrew Dalby, Cheese: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2009); Bruce Kraig, Hot Dog: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2009); Sarah Moss and Alexander Badenoch, Chocolate: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2009); Colleen Taylor Sen, Curry: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2009); Janet Clarkson, Soup: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010); Nicola Fletcher, Caviar: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010); Nicola Humble, Cake: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010); Kevin R. Kosar, Whiskey: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010); Helen Saberi, Tea: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010); Hannah Velten, Milk: A Global History London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2010); Bee Wilson, Sandwich: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2011); Nawal Nasrallah, Dates: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2011); Andrew F. Smith, Potato: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2011); Elisabeth Townsend, Lobster: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2011); Laura B. Weiss, Ice Cream: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2011). To be fair, some of these historians such as Ken Albala have written more comprehensive food histories as well, and Andrew F. Smith has edited two volumes of an encyclopedia on food and drink in America. See Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003); Albala, Cooking in Europe, 1250-1650 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006); Albala, The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Renaissance Europe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Smith, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. 8 enthusiasm for the subject. Unfortunately, studies of single commodities too frequently omit whole groups of people—Native Americans, free blacks, slaves, or Loyalists, to name a few. They succumb to a sense of timelessness because they pay more attention to food than to people. Other scholars share my misgivings about the direction that food studies is drifting.14 Like food studies scholar Kyla Wazana Tompkins, I am chagrined by the spate of culinary microhistories because their purview is too narrow. In her recent book Racial Indigestion, Tompkins champions the need “to shift food studies attention away from the what of food to the how of eating.”15 I agree that food studies books focus too heavily on what people in the past ate, but I would also add that such volumes seriously neglect the why of eating. I wanted to demonstrate that small time periods, conceived of fairly broadly in a geographic sense, offer more opportunities for rigorous scholarship.

Efforts to write about food from a scholarly interdisciplinary perspective have improved the situation, as the founding of publications like Food and Foodways in 1986,

Food, Culture & Society in 1997, and Anthropology of Food and Gastronomica in 2001 demonstrate. Gastronomica publishes short popular history pieces, essays on food, fiction, and poetry. Food and Foodways, which aims for a more academic audience, began to produce thematic volumes in 2004.16 Food, Culture & Society is the primary journal for members of the Association for the Study of Food and Society, which holds

14 Kyla Wazana Tompkins holds “the object-based fetishism of the foodie world” responsible for producing “an unending stream of single-commodity histories and ideologically worrisome localist politics.” Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 2. 15 Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 11. 16 See Issues 2/3 of 2004, which focuses on famine, and Issues 1/2 of 2005, which focuses on food and masculinity. Food and Foodways, Volume 12, Issues 2/3 (2004); Ibid., Volume 13, Issue 1/2 (2005). 9 the largest annual conference in the field of food studies. Since the turn of the century, there has been a considerable shift in interest toward a discussion of the local and organic foods movement, spurred in large part by the Slow Food movement in Italy and the

United States and the popularity of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.17 For the most part, these pursuits have still tended to address specific foods across broad time periods rather than larger ideas related to food in a particular time and place. Although it is important to salute these books and journals for institutionalizing food studies, much big picture work remains.18

The work of anthropologists has allowed me to think big ideas about food, and to negotiate between the concept of food as a symbol and food as a practical form of sustenance. Anthropologists have preceded historians in acknowledging that foodways frequently provide a venue for contact. Claude Lévi-Strauss recognized that food possesses communicative potential because of its symbolic implications when raw, cooked, or rotten.19 Marvin Harris, on the other hand, strenuously argued for the practical value of edible commodities such as pigs, cows, and horses. He emphasized the environmental and economic considerations over the religious taboos people invoked to

17 Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Press, 2006); Richard Wilk, ed., Fast Food/Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System (Lanham, New York: Altamira Press, 2006). 18 It is encouraging that the field has very recently witnessed an influx of edited primary source document collections, as well as multi-volume editions on food history and food studies. For primary source collections see Ken Albala, ed., The Food History Reader: Primary Sources (London: Berg Publishers, 2013); Jeffrey M. Pilcher, ed., Food History: Critical and Primary Sources (London: Berg Publishers, 2014), 4 vols. For secondary works see Alexander Nuetzenadel and Frank Trentmann, eds., Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World (London: Berg, 2008); Jeff Miller and Jonathan Deutsch, eds., Food Studies: An Introduction to Research Methods (London: Berg Publishers, 2009); Fabio Parasecoli and Peter Scholliers, eds., A Cultural History of Food (London: Berg Publishers, 2012), 6 vols. 19 Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Culinary Triangle,” in Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik, eds., Food and Culture: A Reader, 2nd edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 36-37. 10 avoid eating these animals.20 Roland Barthes calls food “a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior.” Like Harris, Barthes agrees that food provides sustenance, but he also acknowledges Lévi-Strauss’s influence when he says that this need for sustenance does not preclude more symbolic implications.21 And indeed, scholars in the field of communication studies have asserted that food is one of the best ways of communicating because those communications need not be verbal.22

Scholars can extend this last assertion to include those who do not write: in other words, writers can “read” the actions of Native Americans and enslaved Africans through their foodways.23 In the Revolutionary Atlantic people used the language of food to attempt to speak to each other. They did not always succeed. Just as Quebecois French- speakers can encounter difficulties in trying to understand French-speakers living in

Paris, people sometimes employed dialects of food diplomacy and victual warfare that proved just incomprehensible enough that outsiders could not understand. Sometimes, however, one gets the sense that all parties shared a core set of ideas about food. In places like Southern Creek country, where public meetings necessitated the use of Hitchiti,

Alabama, and Yuchi interpreters, food diplomacy may have served as a lingua franca in

20 Marvin Harris, Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1998 [1985]). 21 Roland Barthes, “Toward a psychosociology of contemporary food consumption,” in Counihan and Van Esterik, Food and Culture, 29-30. 22 Carlnita P. Greene and Janet M. Cramer, “Beyond mere sustenance: Food as communication/Communication as food,” in Janet M. Cramer, Carlnita P. Greene, and Lynn M. Walters, eds., Food as Communication: Communication as Food (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), x. 23 Philip D. Morgan influenced my ideas about this assertion when he wrote, “in part, behavior can substitute for voices.” Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), xxi. 11 much the same way that Indians, whites, and blacks used Mobilian.24 This dissertation tries to pin down food’s communicative potential during the Revolution while teasing out those moments of misunderstanding.

Scholars of colonial and Native America have been working on these instances of communication, including diplomacy, for decades. A recent definition defines diplomacy as “getting something you want from someone else by convincing them that they are benefitting from the bargain.”25 Francis Jennings was perhaps one of the first of a vanguard of writers interested in Indian diplomacy.26 Some have made the case that guns are the most pertinent neglected commodity in studies of Anglo-Indian diplomacy.27

24 Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 30. 25 Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Viking, 2008), 10. 26 See especially Francis Jennings, William N. Fenton, Mary A. Druke, and David R. Miller, eds., The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy: An Interdisciplinary Guide to the Treaties of the Six Nations and Their League (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1985). 27 Writers have long argued about the effectiveness of guns, and how and when Natives adopted them. Others have noted how Indians at treaties almost always requested ironworks or a blacksmith’s presence in their villages. Ironworks may have facilitated gun repairs, but they also enabled people to repair plows for growing food. And although Indians used guns to hunt animals for their furs, they also consumed the game meat that those dead animals provided. On the trans-Appalachian frontier and the pays d’en haut, Indians who hunted for furs had to observe a village’s territorial boundaries, but any hunter could take meat. Especially during the Revolution, when Anglo-Europeans possessed few goods to trade in exchange for Indians’ furs, and crops suffered from the destruction of victual warfare, meat was an important component of Indians’ diets. Secretary of War Henry Knox put it best when he observed, “the indians derive their subsistence chiefly by hunting,” and “according to fixed principles, their population is in proportion to the facility with which they procure their food.” Firearms given as diplomatic gifts helped Indians obtain sustenance, in addition to making them deadlier enemies. M. L. Brown, Firearms in Colonial America: The Impact on History and Technology, 1492-1792 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980); Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), esp. 111-141; David Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Transformation of Native America (forthcoming). For Indians requesting ironworks for building and repairing plows, see Joseph Brant to Major Mathews, 24 October 1784, f. 257, Add. MS 21772, the British Library, London, UK. For blacksmiths making plows, see Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 94. For hunting rights see Stephen Aron, “Pigs and Hunters: ‘Rights in the Woods’ on the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 187-88; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1991]), 104. For Henry Knox’s quote see Henry Knox to the President of the United States, War Office, 12 Others have talked about the calumet ceremony, the use of wampum, the writing of letters, and the importance of oratory.28 In 1779, for example, the Delawares requested that the Americans send them a written response to a question, rather than a wampum belt, thus demonstrating that other forms of diplomacy, in addition to food diplomacy, continued to matter during the Revolution.29 And just as Indians and colonists sometimes failed at effectively using other forms of metaphors in peacemaking, so too did food diplomacy fail.

To be sure, historians have not ignored food entirely; some have made significant inroads into food histories that cover post-Civil War America, the First and Second

World Wars, and the Cold War.30 Only very recently have scholars such as Michael

LaCombe and Kyla Wazana Tompkins turned their attention to the early modern period

15 June 1789, f. 5, vol. 2, box 3, Henry Knox Papers II, 1736-1803, Ms. N-198, Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter MHS). 28 For other variants of peacemaking and negotiation, see White, The Middle Ground, (for the calumet ceremony) 21-23; Jane T. Merritt, “Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding: Language and Power on the Pennsylvania Frontier,” in Cayton and Teute, Contact Points, 60-87; Gregory Evans Dowd, “‘Insidious Friends’: Gift Giving and the Cherokee-British Alliance in the Seven Years’ War,” in Cayton and Teute, Contact Points, 131, 136; Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009); Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 12. 29 White, The Middle Ground, 383. 30 For the post-Civil War era see Laura Shapiro, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1986); Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Hasia Diner, Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). For the First and Second World Wars see Richard Pillsbury, No Foreign Food: The American Diet in Time and Place (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998); Lizzie Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (New York: Penguin Books, 2012). For the Cold War see Kristin L. Ahlberg, “‘Machiavelli with a Heart’: The Johnson Administration’s Food for Peace Program in India, 1965-1966,” Diplomatic History, vol. 31, no. 4 (September 2007): 665-701; Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2008); Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (New York: Harvard University Press, 2010); Alexander Poster, “The Gentle War: Famine Relief, Politics, and Privatization in Ethiopia, 1983-1986,” Diplomatic History, vol. 36, no. 2 (April 2012): 399-425. 13 and nineteenth centuries, respectively.31 Environmental historians such as William

Cronon and Timothy Silver who have written about the colonial period have discussed foodways before and after the arrival of Europeans in North America. However, food is not the main focus of these studies, and there remain indisputably large gaps in food history in the eighteenth century.32 Some of these scholars have written books that have succeeded in making the study of food more rigorous, and taken essential steps toward developing a cohesive methodology. Others have produced excellent work on food and power.33 As Arlene Voski Avakian, Barbara Haber, and Meredith Abarca have noted, however, a huge lacuna also remains with respect to race and masculinity.34

I am not the first scholar to notice the presence of food and food metaphors in negotiations between peoples, especially between Indians and Anglos in early America.

In historians’ books people break bread together, reference it when they seek to end wars,

31 Michael A. LaCombe, Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Tompkins, Racial Indigestion. See also McWilliams, A Revolution in Eating. 32 William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Timothy Silver, A new face on the countryside: Indians, colonists, and slaves in South Atlantic forests, 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 33 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Press, 1985); E. Melanie DuPuis, Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 34 Arlene Voski Avakian and Barbara Haber, eds., From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005); Meredith Abarca, Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Working-Class Mexican and Mexican-American Women (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2006). Since the time of Avakian, Haber, and Abarca’s critiques a few volumes that deal with race and foodways have appeared. See Linda Murray Berzok, American Indian Food (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005); Williams- Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs; Anne L. Bower, ed., African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Andrew Warnes, Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America’s First Food (Athens, GA: The University of George Press, 2008); Tompkins, Racial Indigestion. 14 and attack food stores when peacemaking efforts falter. 35 James Merrell’s Catawbas and

Carolinians sat down to eat together, even when whites had to endure eating “fawns

‘taken out of the Doe’s Bellies, and boil’d in the same slimy Bags Nature has plac’d them in.’”36 Richard White’s Indians and Anglos in the pays d’en haut spoke of having to “To eat from a common dish” when they wanted to convey feelings of alliance, friendship, and peace—but Huron Indians also presented Iroquois Indians with “gifts” of poisoned cornbread.37 Tom Hatley describes an incident in which a group of Cherokees visited

Charleston in the 1720s with a gift of 130 deerskins for the governor. This moment is ostensibly about trade, yet Hatley also points to the fact that when the Cherokees were on their way to Charleston, the commander of a fort refused to give them provisions while they were en route. In Charleston, an unidentified man stole the wood they had obtained to boil their corn, once again making it difficult to eat.38 In these books such moments usually feature as mere episodes.

My work differs in both scale and analytical focus: I believe that food matters on a level that most scholars have not previously recognized. Negotiations over and disagreements about food occurred much more frequently than historians have acknowledged. To some extent my interests also stretch my analysis into the field of

35 For examples to the contrary, see Elizabeth Perkins on “culinary geography.” Elizabeth A. Perkins, “Distinctions and Partitions amongst Us: Identity and Interaction in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley,” in Cayton and Teute, Contact Points, 228-233, esp. 233 (for “culinary diplomacy”); Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), ch. 6. 36 James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1991 [the University of North Carolina Press, 1989]), 2. 37 White, The Middle Ground, 3, 441-2 (quote). 38 Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10. 15 military history, insofar as military historians have stressed the significance of food destruction or “scorched earth” campaigns (which included victual warfare), during later periods of warfare. Still, these scholars have categorized those acts in military terms rather than viewed them as part of a spectrum in which food was used for communicative and diplomatic measures, as “Food and War” seeks to do.

Diplomatic historians’ definitions of food diplomacy remain too narrow in that they do not consider early modern diplomacy, nor do they fully contend with it meanings and capabilities. Many authors assume that U.S. food diplomacy stretches back only as far as the 1950s.39 One scholar states that the United States instituted food diplomacy with the United States Agricultural Trade and Development Assistance Act of 1954, otherwise known as PL 480. He argues, “with the exception of emergency relief measures, food aid had not become a formal programme” before then because only at this time did the U.S. become self-sufficient enough to produce surplus agricultural

39 Realist Hans J. Morgenthau suggested that foreign aid could be used for six different purposes: economic development, bribery, humanitarian goals, military aims, prestige, and subsistence. The economist Hollis B. Chenery, former official of the United States Agency for International Development (AID), posited only three, albeit interconnected, objectives of such assistance: the long-term social and economic progress of other countries; the internal stability of those countries’ existing governments; and the security of the United States and its allies against external aggression. These divisions are useful, but they do not work within the context of the eighteenth century. Morgenthau, for example, asserts that the humanitarian type of aid is nonpolitical because it is “traditionally extended...in case of natural disasters, such as floods, famines, and epidemics.” The postwar period in the new United States was attended by drought, famine, starving conditions, smallpox outbreaks in military camps in the process of dismantling, and outbreaks of yellow fever. Yet when the United States offered Natives food, that food aid came with strings attached; it was certainly not proffered for humanitarian, nonpolitical purposes. In addition, bribery, prestige, subsistence, and military aims were inextricably linked, and during a time when only an amorphous frontier separated colonists from Natives, the line between internal and external stability disappears. To be fair, Morgenthau acknowledges that governments can and do use humanitarian aid for political purposes, but it still seems illogical to apply twentieth-century Cold War notions of politics and government to a decidedly different eighteenth-century milieu. Hans J. Morgenthau, “Preface to a Political Theory of Foreign Aid,” in Robert A. Goldwin, ed., Why Foreign Aid? (Chicago: Rand McNally Co., 1962), 71; Hollis B. Chenery, “Objectives and Criteria for Foreign Assistance,” in Goldwin, Why Foreign Aid?, 33. 16 commodities.40 Others recognize that the United States had been distributing formal and informal humanitarian aid, including food aid, “for decades by the mid-twentieth century,” but they do not look back earlier than the nineteenth century.41

When they do write about the nineteenth century, historians acknowledge that

Americans and Britons “metaphorically ‘devoured’ or ‘swallowed’ their empires.”42 But they remain too willing to interpret food sharing as a predecessor of hybridity, and too quick to conflate contempt of foreign foods with contempt of foreigners. As food studies scholars have demonstrated, eating the same foods does not always lead to the discovery of common ground.43 When policymakers talk about food diplomacy today they rely on a

Cold War definition in which a powerful United States strategically distributed food aid to stem the tide of Communism.44 In a modern-day context, a country offers food aid or practices food diplomacy in order to ensure the food security of another country. This type of food diplomacy also relies on the existence of a surplus.

40 B. J. B. Krupadanam, Food Diplomacy: A Case Study, Indo-US Relations (New Delhi: Lancers Books, 1985), 16. 41 Helen Zoe Veit, review of Kristin L. Ahlberg, Transplanting the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and Food for Peace, in Diplomatic History, Vol. 35, No. 5 (November, 2011): 945; for a comparative example, see Enrique C. Ochoa’s study of Mexico, which also asserts, “Prior to the 1930s the federal government did not consistently intervene in the markets of staple foods.” Enrique C. Ochoa, Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000), 8. 42 Andrew J. Rotter, “Empires of the Senses: How Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching Shaped Imperial Encounters,” Diplomatic History, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 2011), 13. 43 Here I am thinking of Donna Gabaccia’s work, which makes it abundantly clear that even though white Americans in the Progressive era gradually started to eat immigrant foods, the xenophobia and racism that attended the Progressive movement still remained intact. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat. 44 U.S. officials who feared that hunger and famine would lead to the spread of Communism supplied high- yield grains, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides to countries they deemed most at risk; this process ushered in an event dubbed the “Green Revolution.” Jennifer Cockrall-King, Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2012), (“Green Revolution”) 41, (for food security) 318. For examples that consider food diplomacy during other time periods, see Lawrence Busch and William B. Lacy, eds., Food Security in the United States (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984); Henk-Jan Brinkman and Masood Hyder, “The Diplomacy of Specialized Agencies: High Food prices and the World Food Program,” in James P. Muldoon, Jr., JoAnn Fagot Aviel, Richard Reitano, and Earl Sullivan, eds., The New Dynamics of Multilateralism: Diplomacy, International Organizations, and Global Governance (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2011), 267-282. 17 The eighteenth-century Atlantic world was different. During the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s the United States neither benefited from food surpluses nor enjoyed international power. Indeed, only several years previous those states had existed merely as a loosely-confederated, raucous, disharmonious group of colonies. While fighting a conflict from across the Atlantic the British suffered from major supply issues: they had so much trouble providing for their own army that bread imported from Cork, Ireland was, in the words of one commissary, “bad, unfit for Use, mouldy & shipped in bags short of weight.”45 The Americans possessed readier supplies before British campaigns destroyed them, but the Americans’ tardiness in centralizing food distribution meant that they too suffered from scarcities. Moreover, “Food and War” recognizes that to write about food as a way of making peace or easing tensions is to contemplate only half of the story. When victual warfare is coupled with food diplomacy, a new way of thinking about the Revolutionary Atlantic emerges. There is less of a methodological need for a Middle or a Divided Ground because food allows for the understanding of both types of frontiers.46

In summary, focusing on foodways beyond the Cold War context modifies the historiography of the Revolutionary era and elucidates the historical contingencies of diplomacy. This project took shape as I noted the absence of critical race studies in food scholarship, the dearth of eighteenth century food histories, the division between violence

45 Mr. Gordon, Commissary at Corke, to John Robinson, 20 August 1776, vol. 4, no. 56, photostat 249, British Headquarters Papers, Box 2, New York Public Library (hereafter NYPL). 46 As Richard White writes, the middle ground infrastructure could exist “only when there was both a rough balance of power and a mutual need between the parties involved.” Food is useful because the infrastructure of victual warfare takes over when the absence of a balance of power makes food diplomacy impossible. White, The Middle Ground, xiii; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). 18 and peacemaking in the historiography of Native America and histories of slavery, and scholars’ reliance on an antiquated definition of food diplomacy. We think of diplomacy today as a negotiation that takes place between parties of unequal power—gunboat diplomacy or dollar diplomacy, for example. Although bargaining groups in the

Revolutionary Atlantic rarely approached any state resembling equality, the distance between them was nevertheless shorter. My narrative offers a speculative prologue that explains how later, less compromising forms of negotiation evolved.

***

Food is especially pertinent to the Revolutionary Atlantic for four major reasons.

First, changes in foodways marked a major shift in Indian diplomacy and Indian-Anglo relations during the 1760s and 1770s. Numerous historians from Francis Jennings to

Timothy Shannon have written about Indian diplomacy, working primarily on fur trade diplomacy and the diplomacy of trade goods.47 Other scholars such as Eric Hinderaker, however, have pointed out that especially during the 1770s deer and beaver furs became significantly less available due to a scarcity of game.48 In a trade diplomacy model that focuses on furs, the flow of power appears clear: Europeans regulate demand, Natives

47 Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: the Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (W.W. Norton & Company, 1990); Jennings, Fenton, Druke, and Miller, The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy; Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy. On the fur trade see Arthur J. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Trappers, Hunters, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of the Hudson Bay, 1660-1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975); Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500-1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); White, The Middle Ground, esp. 96, 104. 48 Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 68. 19 answer with supply, and furs move in one direction from Indian Country to European markets.49 But by the 1770s furs were less readily available than corn, cattle, and pigs, and fur trade interactions start occurring less regularly in the records.

Trade goods are similarly unhelpful in adequately charting diplomacy between

Americans, Britons, and Indians in the 1770s because of the paucity of such goods, and because of analytical problems related to their distribution routes.50 Goods, like furs, decreased in availability after the Seven Years’ War. In the 1760s Britain became significantly less reliant on trade goods in general, so they possessed fewer goods to distribute.51 Natives, especially those who subscribed to the teachings of Neolin, the

Delaware prophet, also began to eschew European goods.52 Once the war against the

49 For an exception to this paradigm, see Catherine Cangany, “Fashioning Moccasins: Detroit, the Manufacturing Frontier, and the Empire of Consumption, 1701-1835,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 69, no. 2 (April 2012): 265-304, esp. 267-78. 50 Joseph Hall differentiates between trade goods and trade gifts. In his interpretation goods are exchanged for commodities of equal value, whereas gifts were prestige goods. Joel Martin, on the other hand, asserts that even gifts suffered from fluctuating values. I do not differentiate between goods and gifts because during the American Revolution people conflated the two. Similarly, food could be used as a form of exchange, such as payment for military services rendered, or people could employ it to confer prestige on specific people. ); Joseph M. Hall, Jr., Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 7; Martin, Sacred Revolt, 28. 51 This shortage manifested in North America after British commander-in-chief Jeffery Amherst instituted a strict ban on gift-giving (which extended to trade goods) to cut costs after the end of hostilities against the French. He rationalized that Indians should and would be able to support themselves by hunting—an argument that lost its persuasiveness once game animals became scarce. Linda Colley makes the point that after the Seven Years’ War “Britain’s empire no longer pivoted on commerce but was sustained by force of arms like earlier empires.” Although Amherst’s policies drifted into default in the 1770s, nonimportation policies made it difficult to broker diplomacy given the lack of requisite gorgets, glass beads, vermillion, and clothing. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 102. For British efforts to curtail trade relations see Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York: Viking, 2007), 32; Hall, Zamumo’s Gifts, 170; Martin, Sacred Revolt, 29; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 181.Whereas some historians have noted the decline in goods after Amherst’s 1763 policies, Richard White has observed a paucity of trade goods in the pays d’en haut as early as 1745. Of course, this scarcity existed among the French, but at least before the American Revolution such dearth allowed the British to seize on the opportunity to try to win the allegiance of the Indians living there. White, The Middle Ground, 199, 257. 52 Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14. 20 Americans began, British ships sank, or, on occasion, fell into the hands of the colonists.

Americans, obviously, experienced weightier difficulties obtaining trade goods from

Britain. After the Revolution, at least in the South, trade continued to suffer from disruption.53 Furthermore, in the same way that furs moved from Indians to Anglos, trade goods moved in the other direction from Anglos to Indians.54 Because officials sometimes presented these goods as gifts, and at other times offered them as a requisite form of currency, they present historians with the familiar problem of trying to assign agency to Indians.

Scholars acknowledge that after the Seven Years’ War and the War for

Independence goods were scarce, but my study is the first to show that by the time war broke out food diplomacy became as important as trade and fur diplomacy in Anglo-

Indian communications. Food diplomacy answers the question of how 1770s diplomacy differed from previous iterations, and how it allowed Americans, Britons, and Natives to continue to forge allegiances during the war. Even when all other goods failed, people could not do without food, and so food diplomacy stepped in to replace the gaps left by fur and trade diplomacy. Because food was essential in maintaining life, officials elevated it to a priority that was incomparable with its prewar status. This point is not to say that other types of diplomacy have no value, but rather to assert that an analysis involving food offers historians a fuller glimpse of the larger picture.

53 Many colonial traders had identified as Loyalists, and thus departed with the British. The terms of the Treaty of Paris forbade commercial interaction between America and Great Britain, thus circumscribing the flow of goods across the Atlantic. Finally, Americans (especially in the South) proved inept at observing the niceties of gift-giving. Ethridge, Creek Country, 11; Martin, Sacred Revolt, 84. 54 Mary A. Druke, “Iroquois Treaties: Common Forms, Varying Interpretations,” in Jennings, Fenton, Druke, and Miller, The History and Culture of Iroquois Diplomacy, 93-94. 21 The second reason food appears so central to the Revolutionary Atlantic is that food diplomacy and victual warfare offer a new analytical continuity necessary to better understand the Indians’ “War of Independence,” which continued beyond the formal conclusion of the American Revolution.55 In the 1780s and 1790s Natives resisted the encroachment of American land-grabbers by practicing the conventional forms of victual warfare that they had perfected during the war. Some historians, such as Gregory Evans

Dowd, have described the emergence during this period of what he calls a “pro-Nativist” movement that used religion to draw multiple tribes together in order to resist American imperialism. He has also argued, however, that militant religion between the outbreak of the Revolution and 1795 lost its potency during this time. If, as Dowd posited, religious impulses lost some of their persuasiveness, it seemed necessary to ask what it was that helped those groups cohere.56 Between the time of the Declaration of Independence in

1776 and the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the U.S. government conceived of a plan to dispossess Native Americans of their lands. This plan rested on the idea that

Indians did not farm, and needed to be converted from hunters to corn-planting, cattle- ranching husbandmen. Although the “Plan of Civilization” was one that fundamentally relied on changing Indians’ concepts of land use, it also tried to alter Native foodways. It seemed to me that the roots of this plan—which did not exist in 1776—possessed its roots in those two and a half decades of war. The fact that Indians resisted this plan using well-recognized forms of victual warfare, such as crop and animal destruction, seemed

55 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, xiii. 56 Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), xviii. 22 too pertinent to ignore, and so I asked how food might have functioned in tandem with militant Native religion.

The third reason to study food speaks to issues that writers have faced in trying to create cohesion throughout the sprawling geography of the Atlantic world. Although people thought about food differently from place to place, their experiences with foodways still provide a point of commonality. Scholars evince a tendency to investigate one region or area in North America, Latin America, Africa or the British Isles, and to put an Atlantic history label onto that study. Historians have not fully incorporated the countries of Africa or the various Native American nations into their stories.57 To these critiques I would add the additional point that too few people attempt to incorporate

Native Americans and enslaved peoples into a single study.

The fourth and final reason why this model matters is that a food diplomacy and victual warfare model creates a range from cooperation to violence. The American

Revolution was a conflict of changing alliances, as well as one that witnessed remarkable violence. During and after the war Natives, Britons, Americans, free blacks, and slaves all planted crops and raised domesticated animals for meat and dairy. Indians received foodstuffs from the British and American military institutions seeking their assistance— but Americans and Britons were also at times dependent on Natives for food. Food diplomacy and victual warfare, like power and dependency, are acted out by multiple

57 Trevor Burnard rightly concludes that although “Recognition of the importance of Africans within British American history has encouraged British American historians to take Africa seriously,” historians are more interested in charting African influences within the Americas. “Africa,” he concluded, “remains to be fully incorporated into British Atlantic history.” Trevor Burnard, “The British Atlantic,” in Greene and Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Reappraisal, 122; see also Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” esp. 754. 23 groups of people. I argue that food allows us to think of these things as separate sides of the same coin. I wanted to make sure I was looking at violence from all angles, and challenging the discourse of food studies scholars who overemphasize the idea that food brings people together. This adage is certainly true: people break bread, share food, and grow closer to each other. But foodways can also divide people.

By considering food as a form of historical analysis, it becomes clear that the outcome of the war was not a certainty; that Native dependency was by no means inevitable; that the American Revolution was fought just as much by Indian terms as it was by British and American ones; that tangible, well-established ideas about food followed people out of the colonies and across the Atlantic once the war concluded; and that foodways bound and broke ties in the Revolutionary Atlantic.

***

There are terms employed herein, besides food diplomacy and victual warfare, which stand in need of explanation. Three other essential terms are food security, food sovereignty, and culinary imperialism (which is an offshoot of cultural imperialism).58 In her recent book on food and the city, journalist Jennifer Cockrall-King defines food

58 John Tomlinson argues that the word “cultural imperialism” emerged in the 1960s. Kristin Hoganson has suggested that European observers accused the United States of practicing cultural imperialism as early as the turn of the twentieth century. Hoganson argues, “The narrative of U.S. expansion at the turn of the twentieth century serves the useful function of setting up later instances of Americanization,” as well as imperial expansion abroad. The idea of cultural imperialism holds true for even earlier periods of American history: Native Americans conceived of themselves as separate, foreign nations—and British and American colonial administrators reciprocated this notion, even if they were not always willing to acknowledge an Indian nation’s sovereignty. When Anglos expanded into and across Natives’ lands, all the while criticizing Indians’ ways of life, they were practicing cultural imperialism. John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: An Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 2; Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 2-4 (quote on p. 3); on indigenous peoples as sovereign nations, see James H. Merrell, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 69, no. 3 (July 2012), 479. 24 security as “a catchall term for the level of accessibility to fresh, healthy, nutritious food for a person, family, or community.”59 There are at least three components of food security: availability (which is dependent on an adequate, sustainable production system capable of withstanding natural and political disasters), accessibility (which means that all people must be able to get food regardless of class), and adequacy (meaning that the food is nutritious, and toxin- and disease-free). As Cockrall-King shows, what started out as foreign policy in the 1950s has evolved into problems with contemporary domestic food supply. Today, the industrialization of large-scale farm operations coupled with the rise of major supermarkets has resulted in a food system in which most cities contain only enough food to last for three days. This “three-day rule” means that all cities are only vaguely food secure when floods and major storms occur.60

When I use food security to discuss the eighteenth century, however, the term means something slightly different. In colonial America people did what they could to ensure that they remained well-fed, but they also accepted that drought and crop failure interfered with food security. Because enemies tended to pilfer movable food supplies, inhabitants deliberately made their towns and villages only minimally food-secure so that people passing through could not steal things. Those same colonists also fed their slaves only enough food as they had to: many Lowcountry slaveholders, for instance, expected

59 Cockrall-King, Food and the City, 318; Lawrence Busch and William B. Lacy, “Introduction: What Does Food Security Mean?,” in Busch and Lacy, eds., Food Security in the United States, 2. 60 Cockrall-King, Food and the City, 29-30. 25 slaves to produce supplemental vegetables on garden plots.61 In sum, people resigned themselves to a semi-permanent state of shaky food security.

Food sovereignty is “a person’s or group’s ability to choose their own foods and agricultural system of production.”62 Culinary imperialism is the way in which a person or group to interferes with the food sovereignty of another group or person.63 In the late eighteenth century, cultural imperialism took many forms, but culinary imperialism is one of the most perceptible because of the degree to which American policy-makers interfered with Natives’ land (and consequently food) sovereignty.64 Culinary imperialism occurred when the United States imposed its “Plan of Civilization” on the

Indians living within and along the borders of the new United States because the plan sought to alter what Americans saw as wrongheaded Indian practices of corn production

61 Ira Berlin, “Introduction,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1986 [1983]), xix. 62 Cockrall-King, Food and the City, 319. 63 Historians have of course written about sovereignty more broadly. Francis Jennings points out that Englishmen differentiated between their governments and Indians’ governments. English governments were “civil governments,” but Englishmen assumed Indians “could not become ‘civilized’” until they placed themselves under the sovereignty of a civil government “and obeyed all its regulations.” His distinction is particularly pertinent to this work. Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 37. 64 Other food scholars have been useful in helping me figure out what I mean by culinary imperialism. John C. Super has studied food and conquest in sixteenth-century Spanish America. He concludes that Spanish America’s excess of food paved the way for Spanish colonization. Kristin Hoganson acknowledges that American cookbook writers knew that the continental expansion of the United States in the late-nineteenth century resulted in greater access to foods such as chili peppers and tropical produce. Enrique Ochoa’s book describes how in mid- to late-twentieth century Mexico a welfare bureaucracy set about providing affordable food to the nation’s capital in order to maintain political support for the ruling political entity. The State Food Agency encouraged the development of huge agribusinesses, which in turn resulted in the termination of small farming and the influx of migrants to the city. Workers’ protests were limited by the availability of cheap food, which effectively kept power in the hands of the welfare bureaucracy. Charlotte Coté has demonstrated that when the U.S. government sought to stop Pacific Northwest Natives from hunting whale, they effectively set the stage for changes in Indian foodways that scientists believe are linked to staggering rates of diabetes and heart disease in Native nations today. John C. Super, Food, Conquest, and Colonization in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 88; Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium, 114-15; Ochoa, Feeding Mexico; Charlotte Coté, Spirits of Our Whaling Ancestors: Revitalizing Makah and Nuu-chah-nulth Traditions (Seattle: University of Washington Press, Capell Family Book series, 2010), 204. 26 and wild meat consumption. In Nova Scotia, white Loyalists’ lawmaking in the 1780s inadvertently interfered with the food sovereignty of black Loyalists. In 1790s Sierra

Leone, those same black Loyalists deliberately circumscribed the food sovereignty of the

Koya Temne in order to ensure their own food security.

I also use the word frontier or frontiers. The latter is more appropriate in this work, for I see the frontier as a fluid, permeable line that springs into place whenever two or more significantly different groups come to live near each other.65 My frontiers are lines that exist to the North and South, as well as the West, and they are mobile sites of contact, rather than fixed locations throughout American history. Although colonists crossed no saltwater to interact with Native Americans, most historians of colonial

America readily acknowledge that whites exercised imperial tendencies when Indians were concerned. Like Eric Hinderaker, I see empires as processes rather than structures.

Until the middle of the first decade of the 1800s Indians in a growing American empire and black Loyalists in a well-established yet transforming British empire retained room to maneuver as these processes unfolded.66

65 Frederick Jackson Turner is of course the historian one thinks of when one writes about the frontier. As Andrew Cayton and Fredrika Teute point out, colonists only began to use the word “frontiers” in the latter portion of the seventeenth century. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” available online http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/TURNER/; Cayton and Teute, “Introduction: On the Connection of Frontiers,” in Cayton and Teute, Contact Points, 1. See also Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 1675-1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 10. 66 Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, xi. For examples of Native American history as a history of imperialism (or colonialism), see White, The Middle Ground, esp. xxvii; Jeff Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). For more on how the American Revolution altered Britons’ concept of empire, see, for example, Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation; P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America c. 1750-1783 (Oxford University Press, 2005). 27 Thanks to the work of various historians of the American West, one cannot talk about frontiers without also thinking of Native Americans. Historians have gone back and forth about proper terminology for the indigenous. I use “Indian,” “Native American,”

“Native,” and “indigenous peoples” somewhat interchangeably, but refer to tribes specifically by name when the sources made it possible to identify them.67 I have chosen to employ the plural when talking about Indians: Creeks, rather than Creek, for example

(and Creek, rather than Muskogee).68 I do so because in my mind using the singular obscured the fact that tribes were often divided. In a similar manner, I switch between using “blacks,” “enslaved Africans,” and “slaves,” making note of when I know if a particular man or woman is free or not, and better yet, providing a name when the documentary sources have given me one.

For reasons that I discuss in greater depth in the Sierra Leone chapter, I do not use the term “African American” because the black Loyalists did not conceive of themselves as such; they tried to set themselves apart from indigenous Africans as well as American colonists. I use “Americans,” “rebels,” and “Whigs,” in similar ways, but I try not to use

“Loyalists” to describe Native Americans and blacks during the war itself. I avoid this

67 For more on issues of loaded vocabulary and the need for early Americanists to become careful wordsmiths, see James Merrell’s recent WMQ piece. I find his argument about settlers particularly convincing—that is, that historians too frequently essentialize Indians as non-farmers and white “settlers” as agriculturalists—and try not to use the word when writing about Anglo-Americans. Merrell, “Second Thoughts,” 473-77. 68 Here I acknowledge Joel Martin’s argument that the term “Creek” was an externally-imposed name, and is thus a less than ideal way to refer to Muskogee-speaking Natives. However, I agree with Angela Pulley Hudson’s point that especially by the 1790s—which play heavily in this dissertation—the Creeks were “increasingly defining themselves as a nation and defending their sovereign rights as such” (emphasis original). Martin, Sacred Revolt, 6-8; Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, 8. 28 word because for these peoples, loyalty was a slippery concept.69 I prefer to use “British- allied” or “American-allied” because these terms connote Indians’ and enslaved Africans’ abilities to switch from one side to the other as the situation suited. After the war, certainly, former slaves became black Loyalists as they emigrated out of the colonies and forged new identities.

In addition to quibbles over vocabulary, readers will also note my heavy reliance upon archival sources, in spite of the preponderance of edited document collections on the American Revolution. Upon beginning this project I worried that the editors of collections pertaining to the Revolution might not have believed that food was important, given the fact that many of those collections are now decades old.70 I thought it likely that they might have left out key sources for my work. Food historians have incurred perhaps more criticism than other scholars for their crimes of shallow citations, so I visited as many archives as I could obtain funding to visit, eventually spanning twenty institutions in seventeen towns and cities.71 As I researched it became clear that military sources—

69 For more on this idea see Edward G. Gray, “Liberty’s Losers,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 70, no. 1 (January 2013), 186. 70 I am thinking of collections such as Documents of the American Revolution, The Papers of Henry Laurens, and The Papers of Sir William Johnson. The Laurens volumes now stretch into the present-day, and despite my misgivings I did end up using a fair amount of sources from these collections. Nevertheless I felt that they had to act as supplemental evidence for what I found in the archives. K. G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution: 1770-1783 (Irish University Press, 1972-1981), 21 vols.; David R. Chestnutt, ed., The Papers of Henry Laurens (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1968- 2002), 16 vols; James Sullivan, ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson (Albany: The University of the State of New York, 1921-1965), 14 vols. 71 I spent at least a month at the British Library (London, UK); the David Library of the American Revolution (Washington Crossing, PA); the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA); the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA); the John D. Rockefeller Library (Williamsburg, VA); the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, MA); and the New York Public Library (New York, NY). I spent a day to two weeks at the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, PA); the Georgia Department of Archives and History (Morrow, GA); the Georgia Historical Society (Savannah, GA); the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Athens, GA); Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa, CA); the Library of Congress (Washington, DC); the National Archives (Kew, UK); the North Carolina State 29 letters of commanding officers, soldiers’ diaries, official papers relating to Indian affairs, and miscellaneous letterbooks—proved the most revealing. The daily necessity of feeding thousands of mouths pushed the men in charge to write about food with alarming frequency, and I am not sure that usage of edited document collections would have convinced me that such regularity existed to the extent that it does.

It also seems necessary to explain why I wrote about so many groups of people, and to explain how I chose them. After making sufficient progress in my research, my chapters emerged organically, in part from what I found in the sources, and in part from my readings in extant historical works. In his seminal monograph Empire of Fortune, the historian Francis Jennings framed it neatly: the Seven Years’ War, he wrote, “cannot be seen correctly from only the vantage points of imperial metropoles. Nor from the colonies. Nor from the tribes. Effectual decisions were made by thinking persons in all those places, and all must be considered.”72 Likewise, I was intrigued by Sylvia Frey’s claim that the Revolution was a triagonal event that took place between Americans,

Britons, and enslaved Africans, and I wanted to explore Eric Hinderaker’s portrayal of an

Ohio Valley comprised of mixes of people who lived their daily lives “driven by local concerns that cut across tribal identities.”73

Taking its cue from these observations, this dissertation considers a wide range of peoples: Six Nations Iroquois, Cherokee, Creek, and Western Confederacy Indians, free

Archives (Raleigh, NC); the South Carolina Department of Archives and History (Columbia, SC); the South Carolina Historical Society (Charleston, SC); the South Caroliniana Library (Columbia, SC); the Southern Historical Collection (Chapel Hill, NC); and the Virginia Historical Society (Richmond, VA). 72 Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988), 6. 73 Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 45; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 52. 30 blacks, enslaved Africans, indigenous Koya Temne, Americans, and Britons. None of these groups, it should be noted, was homogenous, and I try to pay mind to factions and fractures as they occurred. I have also organized my chapters to underscore that even as the former thirteen colonies solidified their borders and identities as Georgians, New

Yorkers, or Virginians, the opposite process was taking effect in Natives’ towns and villages. That is, after the Revolution, Indians moved about more frequently, lived in each other’s territories, and at times passed themselves off as members of different tribes.74

I picked the Six Nations because they probably figure most frequently in Indian histories of the Revolution, and because I believed that looking at food changed Iroquois historiography. I chose Creeks and Cherokees because the story of Southern Indians in the war had always seemed staggeringly confusing to me, and I wondered whether focusing on food would make the narrative any clearer. I added the Western Confederacy

Indians because I agreed with other scholars’ assertions that the end of the Indians’ war for independence occurred some twelve years after the Treaty of Paris. After I started trying to bridge the years from 1783 to 1795 I realized that Delawares, Miamis, and

Shawnees used food diplomacy and victual warfare in ways that tied them to Iroquois,

Creek, and Cherokee Indians. The story of American culinary imperialism seemed like an obvious way to bind the Revolutionary period to that of the Early Republic.

74 For more on this subject and ethnogenesis, see Merrell, The Indians’ New World, 217; James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 68, no. 2 (April 2011): 181-208, with responses by James H. Sweet, Claudio Saunt, Pekka Hämäläinen, Laurent Dubois, Christopher Hodson, Karen B. Graubart, and Patrick Griffin. 31 The black Loyalists were, to put it bluntly, a surprise. I was at Library and

Archives Canada in Ottawa, reading up on John Butler’s Rangers, when I got sidetracked by some microfilm reels on Nova Scotia. Once it became clear that the black Loyalists starved, struggled against food laws, and left present-day Canada in protest, I had to follow them to Sierra Leone. At James Sidbury’s prompting, I also began to consider their interactions with the Temne. Their stories demonstrate that the languages of food diplomacy and victual warfare functioned as palpable forms of communication that followed people out of the colonies and into increasingly transnational worlds. By writing about all of these people, I hope to present a more complete story of how and why food mattered to various people in the Revolutionary Atlantic and how it factored into the balance of political and military power during that era.

I begin my narrative in 1774 for a few reasons. Eighteenth-century food diplomacy and victual warfare were products of over a century and a half of Anglo-

Indian contact, but they changed in the 1770s due to the scarcity of game, the proliferation of white colonists and their encroachment on Indian hunting grounds, and the inability of British administrators to circumscribe colonists’ incursions and trading activities in Indian nations. Colin Calloway details how, even as colonists and Indians were working out new forms of diplomacy, “a world of violence” was emerging.75 The years leading up to the Revolution thus ushered in a new world of warfare, as well as diplomacy. Following the death of Superintendent Sir William Johnson in 1774, Northern

Indian affairs would enter a state of flux that dominated for almost four decades.

75 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 21. 32 My reasons for closing in 1812 are less concrete. If I could have taken this story up to the Civil War I might have done it, but my committee might have refused to approve my defense. So I offer these two (fairly) tangible reasons: the British Crown took over control of Sierra Leone in 1808, thus irrevocably changing diplomacy in that portion of Africa. In 1812, a new war began in North America, thus ushering in new opportunities for refined victual warfare and less compromising forms of food diplomacy.

These were thus two convenient, if artificial, stopping points, but I would urge my readers to go before 1774 and after 1812 to ask how early eighteenth and mid-nineteenth versions of food diplomacy and victual warfare departed from Revolutionary conventions.

The delineation of sources and subject matter should make it clear that there are many topics not addressed in this work. This is not a military history; I have used military sources, but it was not my intention to discuss every historiographical argument regarding specific actions, battles, or other such meetings of soldiers. I have followed the story of food, and concentrated on the peoples for whom foodways seemed particularly important. I am more concerned with the timeline preceding and following military action because those moments were the times when people wrote about eating. I have also confined my search to land action, and addressed the British navy only when its movements affected those onshore. This is a qualitative, not a quantitative history.

Documents relating to Indians and slaves are so scattered and incomplete that it seemed fruitless to attempt to glean percentages from long lists of provisions and trade goods. I sought to discern trends and trajectories from the documents, and to provide quotes that

33 best summarize a given situation. I must add that food alone is the main focus of this dissertation; I have dealt with drink only when it was impossible to ignore, because its otherwise sweeping historiography might have derailed the focus of this project.

I have written about animals, on the other hand, whenever I have encountered them, yet this is not an animal history. I will admit that I am willing to read my sources more broadly than some, and that I sometimes paint domesticated animals as food when other historians might see them simply as animals.76 I do so because people in the eighteenth century thought differently about animals than we do today, for few diners today look at a chicken or cow, and think “dinner!” One anthropologist observes that only in modern times are cows and pigs called “beef” and “pork” once they appear off the animal, thus linguistically distinguishing live animals from edible meat.77

During the eighteenth century a significantly smaller gap existed between animals-as-animals and animals-as-food. When people stole cattle, or listed them as necessary comestibles for a treaty, they referred to them as “beeves” or “beef cattle.”

76 Charles S. Elton was one of the first to write about “the ecology of invasion,” but his book portrayed the European introduction of plants and animals as more of an accidental process, rather than a deliberate choice. It was not until Alfred Crosby’s work came out that imperial undertones really began to show through in this sort of work. Since the publication of William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, there has been a wave of excellent recent scholarship on animals, though few of these works view animals as food sources, choosing instead to focus on them as indicators of environmental changes or symbols of Indian- colonist conflict. Ironically, out of this group of historians, Jon T. Coleman is the only one to think deeply about animals as food, even though he writes mostly about wolves. Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1958); Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Cronon, Changes in the Land; Silver, A new face on the countryside; Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2004), esp. 9-10 for food; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For an assessment of the state of environmental history, including animal history, see Peter C. Mancall, “Pigs for Historians: Changes in the Land and Beyond,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 67, no. 2 (April 2010): 374-375. 77 Nick Fiddes, Meat: A Natural Symbol (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), vii. 34 They were also more likely to consume horse flesh in times of scarcity, when people might be more willing to give up the horses that transported their goods.78 I wanted to engage with historians who had written about animals, but who did not usually think of these animals as meals. Colin Calloway, for example, asserts that Indians in seventeenth- century Maryland complained to the General Assembly that colonists’ hogs and cattle ate their corn. He suggests that when later generations of Indians adopted cows and pigs into their economies, this change altered Indians’ relationships with animals.79 This point is true even though Natives still carried out victual warfare against them: raising cows and pigs did not preclude Indians from destroying them. People raised, transported, and stole animals with the intention to turn them into a meal. Often people did not differentiate between the live animal and its butchered flesh because the pasture sat much closer to the table. Of course, I acknowledge that not everyone thought about animals as food all of the time, but I do encourage readers to consider these early modern meanings when they encounter cattle, pigs, sheep, and horses in the historical record.

People thought of animals as ways to procure sustenance even when the animals were not obviously forms of food. Secretary of War Henry Knox dearly wanted to train cattle to transport flour.80 Colonists and Indians alike used horses and cattle to plow

78 See, for example, Extract from Captain Gilbert Tice’s Journal, 3 November 1781, folder VI, R2779-0-7- E, William A. Smy collection, the Butler Papers, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, CA (hereafter LAC). For a discussion of hippophagy (horse-eating) among Europeans, see Harris, Good to Eat, 88-108, especially 88-89. 79 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 4. 80 Henry Knox hoped to obtain flour and beef in one trip by training cattle to carry flour, and was saddened to learn from a contractor that “we shou’d lose more by reducing the Cattle to poverty and death than we should gain by it,” and that forcing oxen to bear the weight of flour would mean “that the beef would not be fit for use.” Anthony Wayne went so far as to write up “a Comparative calculation” of the relative merits of “the purchase and use of Waggons with Ox Teams, and of Pack Horses.” He agreed with Knox that oxen would be better at carrying “food procured on the Way,” although neither oxen nor cattle could “be used in 35 fields, and thus grow crops. And through their words and actions, Natives demonstrated that by stealing colonists’ cattle and horses, they knew that they were depriving colonists of their means of producing wheat, corn, and dairy. Clearly, Indians also at times conceived of animals differently than Anglos. One Creek chief raised hundreds of animals yearly but refused to kill them for his own consumption; he gave them away as presents, or killed a few a day to feed the Indians who visited him.81 In this case, Natives conceived of animals as status symbols, but they still used them to feed people. I would like to reiterate: eighteenth-century foodways deviated from those of the present day.

***

All that remains is the task of explaining how I have organized this work. The first chapter of this dissertation addresses the domestic and military foodways of

Americans and Britons leading up to, during, and after the War for Independence. It suggests that food played a key role in bolstering allegiances, starting conflicts, and defining the idea of loyalty. The second chapter explores the wartime experiences of free blacks and slaves. The British stole or liberated slaves as a way of enacting victual warfare: convincing slaves to run away to the British side was as much as strategy designed to wreak starvation on the Americans as was the destruction of their crops or the theft of their animals. I argue that once Americans believed that the British were using

surprising an enemy.” For Knox’s proposal see Henry Knox to Anthony Wayne, War Department, 17 November 1792, f. 31, vol. XXIII; for the ultimate decision see Henry Knox to Anthony Wayne, War Department, 17 May 1793, f. 90, vol. XXVI, both in Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. For “a comparative calculation” see [Anthony Wayne], A Comparative calculation on the purchase and use of Waggons with Ox Teams, and of Pack Horses, 7 February 1793, f. 9, vol. XXV, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 81 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in H. Thomas Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810 (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2003), 30s. 36 their slaves against them, they ceased to supply food to the British ships that they had been allowing to pass through their ports. After being inducted into British and American military establishments, people of African descent used food as a way of acquiring and maintaining power.

Chapter three details the story of food for the Iroquois in the American

Revolution. Historians say that the Iroquois Confederacy shattered in the midst of the war, but I argue that Indians’ abilities to use food diplomacy after 1779 speaks to an anti- declension narrative.82 Six Nations Indians practiced a food diplomacy that set them apart from Britons and Americans, and by the end of the war their form of food diplomacy became the most frequent form in use. Natives made it clear that if their allies proved unwilling to undergo a shared experience of hunger, they would invoke victual warfare against their friends to equalize the state of power relations.

Food diplomacy and victual warfare were different matters in the Southern theater of war, as I demonstrate in chapter four. Food diplomacy failed because of the prevailing power of Spanish and British imperial officials. Thus, Creeks and Cherokees used victual warfare more frequently than they found common ground with food diplomacy. As

Indians burned crops and stole cattle, a “New Order” of cattle-ranching and property- holding Indians emerged, especially among the Creeks.83 The victual warfare of this time period helps to clarify burgeoning factions between different groups of Natives. After the

Revolution, Indians used food diplomacy in their dealings with the new United States as

82 For this declension narrative among the Iroquois, see Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 226, 267, Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy, 192-3. 83 Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 37 a way to retain power. Creeks’ and Cherokees’ wartime experiences allowed them to play the Southern states against each other. When food diplomacy failed, the instability of

Southern governments gave rise to new iterations of victual warfare in the form of more intense animal depredations and crop destruction.

Chapter five picks up again with the Iroquois after the war, with particular attention to the Senecas, in order to detail their role as brokers between the Western

Confederacy and the United States. After the Six Nations demonstrated their willingness to embrace American-style husbandry—sedentary crop-planting and raising animals for meat and dairy—the Americans trusted them to use food diplomacy with the Western

Confederacy. The continuing victual warfare of Delawares, Miamis, and Shawnees served as a powerful reminder that many Natives continued to oppose American imperialism, but their defeat at Fallen Timbers in 1795 effectively ended that battle.

Chapter six details how Creeks and Cherokees dealt with growing pressure to bow to American imperialism after the defeat of the Western Confederacy. Following a brief battle with the state of Georgia, the U.S. government stepped in to centralize contact with the Southern tribes. I also delineate the efforts that Native women made during the 1780s and 1790s to broker peace, and to become the newest contingent to request food aid from the Americans. I show how, even after Southern Indians agreed to raise crops and cattle, they used them in ways that troubled, and sometimes angered, American Indian agents such as men like Benjamin Hawkins. Crop failures and other environmental issues necessitated continuing gifts of food from U.S. agents, contrary to orders from the federal government. During the 1790s and 1800s, violent exchanges between Americans and

38 Indians frequently played out during mealtimes. Despite Indians’ continuing abilities to obtain provisions during the 1790s and 1800s, food diplomacy became more of a posture than an effective practice. When American agents practiced food diplomacy they employed a harsher, more regulated form than in previous years.

The jump to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone demonstrates the potential for future use of a model based on food diplomacy and victual warfare, because the model still works in these locations, but also because it definitely changes in time and across space.

Historians say that the black Loyalists who left the United States for present-day Canada gave up on Nova Scotia when land allotment failed. Chapter seven argues that only after land allotment issues were exacerbated by new food laws did black Loyalists find their foodways curtailed. Only when certain laws stymied the abilities of black Loyalists to eat, fish, and sell food in the markets of Nova Scotia did those Loyalists leave.

As I describe in chapter eight, once the black Loyalists arrived in Sierra Leone, they reinstated those food laws to exercise power over the local Koya Temne. The black

Loyalists usually thought of themselves as British subjects and not as Africans, and thus saw culinary imperialism and victual warfare as an acceptable way to exert authority.

They seized the opportunity to use food laws to change their moral economy into one that relied more on a protectionist ideology. When the white Sierra Leone Council sought to stymy their efforts, the Loyalists’ ensuing rebellion resembled colonial American revolts in the 1770s. As Jamaican Maroons and black Loyalists began trying to live together in the 1800s, British officials demonstrated that they too would use food to control the power of those peoples.

39 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is credited with saying, “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”84 Food diplomacy has played an undeniable role in maintaining national and international security, and to ignore the history of these policies is to do so at great peril. Crop failures, droughts, and earthquakes continue to affect food prices at the local and global level. Poor food conditions— especially in areas weakened by natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in New

Orleans, the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, floods in Thailand, and drought in the Horn of Africa—lead to instabilities in local government and international markets. American food aid has at times proved instrumental in recovery, but the United States has also proffered it with qualifications or withheld it entirely.

Even today discussions of eating are fraught with conflict. The decisions we make about what we eat, and what food we offer to other countries remains an instrumental tool—and weapon—of American foreign policy. Food is intrinsic to survival and global stability. In “Food and War,” readers will discover when this policy first came into being, and how it intimately reshaped the American Revolution, the Early Republic, and the

Atlantic World.

84 I have been unable to locate the precise citation to this quote, so use it cautiously. William F. Engdahl, Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (Montreal: Global Research, 2007), 42. 40 Cast of Characters1

Attakullakulla, or Little Carpenter (c. 1708-1777): A Cherokee (of the Wolf Clan), father of Dragging Canoe, son-in-law and cousin of Oconostota.

Hendrick Aupaumut (1757-1830): A Stockbridge Mohican who tried to make peace with the Western Confederacy on behalf of the United States in the 1780s and 1790s.

The Badger: A Cherokee, brother of Dragging Canoe.

Bloody Fellow: A Cherokee who split off with the Chickamauga faction during the American Revolution. He moved to headwaters of Coosa with Dragging Canoe around 1777.

Blue Jacket, or Weyapiersenwha (c. 1743-c. 1810): A Shawnee (of the Kispoko division) who led the Western Confederacy along with Little Turtle and Buckongahelas. He was among the first to sue for peace with Anthony Wayne after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. He died after succumbing to alcoholism. Although Blue Jacket is frequently confused with a man named Marmaduke von Sweringen, the two are not one and the same.

1 I have drawn on the following books and databases to compile these brief biographical sketches: Kathryn E. Holland Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 57, no. 4 (November 1991): 601-636; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1991]); Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991); Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in North American Communities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999); John Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 2006); Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York: Viking, 2007); Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775-1782 (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2008); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); Cassandra Pybus, “Mary Perth, Harry Washington, and Moses Wilkinson: Black Methodists Who Escaped from Slavery and Founded a Nation,” in Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael, eds., Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (New York: Alfred F. Knopf, 2011), 155-168; American National Biography Online, http://anb.org; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://oxforddnb.com/ 41 Boatswain, also known as Bosten, James Latson, or James Lawson: A Creek and war profiteer who owned a private plantation at Hitchiti, a Lower Creek town on the Chattahoochee River. His slaves became free if they married other Creeks.

William Augustus Bowles (1763-1805): A Maryland-born white adventurer who lived among the Creeks, pledging his loyalty to various empires at different times. In 1800 after the Seminoles and Lower Creeks chose him as the director of the new state of Muskogee, he led a war against the Spanish in Florida. He was captured by Creek leaders, Spanish, and American officials in 1803, and died in Havana in 1805. Before his death he also managed to turn up in Sierra Leone and meet Zachary Macaulay in 1798.

Joseph Brant, also known as Thayendenegea (1743-1807): A Mohawk Indian from the village of Canajoharie who decisively allied with the British during the American Revolution. His sister, Molly, bore eight children to Sir William Johnson. He first met Samuel Kirkland at Eleazar Wheelock’s school in Connecticut, where the two were trained as a paired missionary team that would try to convert other members of the Iroquois. Mohawk alliance with the British and the Oneida Indians’ alliance with the Americans would divide Brant and Kirkland.

Molly Brant, also known as Konwatsitsiaienni (c. 1736-1796): Sister of Joseph Brant and mistress of Sir William Johnson. She also allied with the British during the American Revolution. When she warned British soldiers about approaching Americans, she enabled the British to defeat the Americans at the Battle of Oriskany in 1777. In retaliation, a number of American-allied Iroquois Indians burned her village at Canajoharie.

Buckongahelas (c. 1720-1805): A Delaware, pro-British. Allied with Captain Pipe. During the Western Confederacy War he would become part of the triumvirate also led by Blue Jacket and Little Turtle.

John Butler (1728-1796): A Connecticut-born Loyalist who formed a group of combined Six Nations Indians and Loyalists called Butler’s Rangers in upstate New York. He became a lieutenant colonel in 1777. His oldest son, Walter, served with him.

Richard Butler (1743-1791): A Dublin-born colonist who moved to Pennsylvania as a boy and fought in the Continental Army during the Revolution. He was a trader among the Shawnees, and fathered two children with a Shawnee woman. His linguistic capacities served him well as an Indian commissioner at various treaties in the 1780s. He was killed in 1791 at St. Clair’s Defeat. He was not related to John Butler.

Alexander Cameron (?-1781): A Loyalist Scot and deputy to John Stuart of the British Indian Department. He married a Cherokee woman, and went to live amongst the Overhill Cherokees when the Americans attempted to seize him.

42 Lord William Campbell: A Scot, and the royal governor of South Carolina. He fled to a British warship in Charlestown harbor in September 1775.

Captain Johnny, also known as Kekewepellethe (Kekewepelethy), Great or Tame Hawk (c. 1726-c. 1810): A Shawnee (of the Thawekila division). He complained about American encroachment in 1785, but signed treaties with the Americans at the 1786 Fort Finney treaty.

Captain Pipe: A Delaware (Wolf Clan), originally a neutralist in 1778, but became pro- British. Allied with Buckongahelas.

Cheeseekau: A Shawnee (of the Kispoko division). He was the older brother of Tecumseh, and led a group of Shawnees to settle amongst the Chickamaugas in 1790.

Peter Chester (c. 1717/18-1799): Governor of West Florida. He was appointed in 1769, but only arrived in 1770. In 1772 he dissolved the Assembly, and during the Revolution he welcomed Loyalists into the colony. He governed until 1781, when the British surrendered Pensacola to the British, but in reality his power waned after 1778 when Brigadier-General John Campbell arrived to outrank him. He died back in England.

John Clarkson (1764-1828): A British Reverend, naval lieutenant, and abolitionist, younger brother to Thomas Clarkson. He became the superintendent and eventual governor of the colony at Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Thomas Clarkson (1760-1846): A British abolitionist and elder brother of John Clarkson. He was fond of sending his brother long, bossy letters filled with very small, neat handwriting.

Alexander Cornells, also known as Oche Haujo: The son of Creek woman and Englishman George Cornells (whose brother, Joseph, was Alexander McGillivray’s interpreter). After the Revolution he became Benjamin Hawkins’s assistant and friend, and married the daughter of Efau Hadjo (Mad Dog). He supported the New Order of property- and slave-holding.

Cornplanter (c. 1730-1836): A Seneca who was pro-British during the Revolution. In the 1790s, he voiced his willingness to adopt American-style husbandry. He also attempted to negotiate between Shawnees and Americans and to keep the Iroquois neutral.

Cornstalk (c. 1720-1777): A Shawnee (of the Mekoche division). He was a neutralist who attempted to keep the Shawnees out of the war. He was killed by Americans in 1777 at Fort Randolph at Point Pleasant, after being taken hostage and then shot by an angry mob in retaliation for the death of a militiaman.

43 Cowkeeper, also known as Ahaya of Cuscowilla: A Creek (Seminole). Pro-British, but demanded that they allow him to keep the cattle and slaves the Indians took in battle.

George Croghan (c. 1718-1782): An Irish-born Indian agent who brokered relations mainly with the Iroquois and Western Ohio Indians as deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs under William Johnson. He associated with Andrew Montour, and Alexander McKee was his assistant. He chaired the Pittsburgh Council of Safety during the Revolution, but the Americans also accused him of becoming too friendly with the British. He died nearly penniless at his home in Pennsylvania.

William Dawes (1762-1836): Governor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1792 to 1794; 1795 to 1796; and 1801 to 1803.

James Dean: An American interpreter who grew up among the Oneidas and served as assistant to Samuel Kirkland.

John Dease (c. 1744-1801): An Irish-born doctor who cared for William Johnson. He was appointed deputy agent of Indian affairs for the middle department when the Revolution began.

Volkert P. Douw (1720-1801): An American Indian commissioner.

Dragging Canoe, also known as Tsi’yu-gûnsi’ny (c. 1738-1792): A Cherokee, and younger son of the Little Carpenter. In 1777 he led a pro-British faction of the Cherokees in a split from the rest of the nation. They became the Chickamaugas, and later the Lower Cherokees. He would continue to lead the Chickamauga Wars long after the Revolution officially ended.

Lord Dunmore, also known as John Murray (1732-1809): Much-beleaguered governor of Virginia from 1771 to 1775. After encouraging enslaved Africans to desert their masters in November of 1775, Dunmore was obliged to flee the colony. He made a subsequent career as governor of the Bahamas.

Sophia Durant: Alexander McGillivray’s sister.

Matthew Elliott (c. 1739-1814): An Irish-born American colonists who went over to the British in 1778. He eventually became Alexander McKee’s assistant. Along with McKee and Simon Girty, he helped the British Indian Department mediate with the Shawnees during the war. As a go-between with a Shawnee wife, he was instrumental in continuing to aid Indians during the Western Confederacy War, but he also declined to fight alongside them.

44 Emistesigo: A British-allied Creek (Tiger clan) who died when the British lost control of Savannah 1782. He was a non-Muskogee Creek, and his mother or grandmother may have been a war captive or (non-African) slave adopted by the Tiger clan.

Fat King: A Lower Creek from the town of Cusseta. He favored accommodation with the Americans in 1780s.

George Croghan (c. 1718-1782): The Irish-born son of a Pennsylvania trader and a Shawnee woman. He acted as deputy agent to Sir William Johnson in the pre- Revolutionary period, and kept the Senecas and Delawares neutral during Lord Dunmore’s War. Although he chaired the committee of correspondence in Pittsburgh for the Americans, neither rebels nor Britons trusted him.

George Galphin (1707-1780): An Irish-born American trader-agent with the Creeks, who married a Creek woman named Metawney. They had two sons named John and Thomas. Galphin lived at Silver Bluff, on the Savannah River in South Carolina. During the Revolution he sided with the Americans, and competed with John Stuart to win the Creeks’ allegiance. He understood better than some Americans that Indian loyalties had to be purchased with diplomacy.

David George (c. 1743-1810): A slave born in Virginia. He ran from his Virginia master in 1762, and after spending time among the Creeks, came under custody of George Galphin. After meeting George Liele, he converted to the Baptist faith. Galphin let him become ordained as a pastor of the Baptist church, and allowed him to preach on his plantation. David George ran to the British in Savannah in 1778, working as a butcher and preaching with Liele. He went to Nova Scotia, and eventually, Sierra Leone, where he founded a Baptist church.

Simon Girty (1741-1818): An Scots-Irishman who was born in Pennsylvania. Because he was captured and raised by the Senecas, he became a capable go-between. He sided with the British during the Revolution, along with Alexander McKee and Matthew Elliott.

James Grant (1720-1806): Governor of East Florida, based at Fort in St. Augustine, from 1763 to 1771. During the war he served as a major general in the British Army.

Grenadier Squaw, also known as Nonhelema: A Shawnee, and Cornstalk’s sister. Major Ebenezer Denny compiled a vocabulary of Shawnee words using information she gave him during the Shawnee meeting with the Americans at Fort Finney in 1786.

Guy Johnson, also known to the Iroquois as Uraghquadirha (c. 1740-1788): An Irish-born military officer during the Revolution. As nephew and son-in-law to Sir William Johnson, he replaced him as Superintendent of Indian Affairs after Johnson’s death in 1774. In 1781, when the firm of Taylor and Forsyth was exposed for cheating the British

45 government out of supplies and money, Johnson found his honor impugned. His examination in Montreal significantly damaged his reputation.

William Johnson (c. 1715-1774): In 1756 Johnson became Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the north, though he is most well-known for his mediation between Britons and Iroquois Indians. His death in 1774 threw all of British-Indian diplomacy into upheaval.

Half King: A Wyandot.

Handsome Fellow: A Creek among the Oakfuskie Creeks.

Hanging Maw: A Cherokee who joined the Chickamauga faction with Dragging Canoe c. 1777.

Benjamin Hawkins (1754-1816): North-Carolinian who served as U.S. senator for North Carolina from 1789 to 1795. He became Principal Temporary Agent for Indian Affairs South of the Ohio in December 1796, and eventually Superintendent for American Indian Affairs from 1796 to 1818. He established the Creek Agency on his plantation in Georgia, and was instrumental in attempting to convince the Creeks to adopt American- style husbandry.

John Killbuck, also known as Gelelemend (1737-1811): A Delaware (Turtle clan). He sided with White Eyes to support the Americans during the American Revolution.

Kayashuta: A Seneca chief who tried to convince his tribe to remain neutral during the Revolution.

Samuel Kirkland (1741-1808): A Connecticut-born missionary among the Oneidas and Tuscaroras. He studied under Reverend Eleazar Wheelock at his Moor’s Indian Charity School in Connecticut, where he also met Joseph Brant. After the war he attempted to convert the Six Nations to American-style farmers as well as Christians.

Kitegiska: Cherokee, Chickamauga. Moved to the headwaters of the Coosa with Dragging Canoe c. 1777. He was also Oconostota’s brother.

Henry Knox (750-1806): He became Secretary at War in 1785, and then Secretary of War in 1789 once the United States created the War Department. He held that position until 1794, when Timothy Pickering replaced him.

Le Gris: Miami, occupied Miamitown. Blue Jacket’s brother-in-law.

George Liele (c. 1750-1820): A Georgia-born slave who was granted freedom by his Loyalist master. He lived in Savannah, where he worked with David George.

46 Little Abraham (?-1780): A neutralist Mohawk who eventually sided with the Americans. After a 1780 meeting of the Iroquois factions, the British-allied Six Nations threw him in jail, where he died.

Little Owl: A Cherokee, and brother of Dragging Canoe. He moved with him when the Cherokees split in 1777.

Little Turtle (c. 1747-1812): A Miami who joined Blue Jacket and Buckongahelas to lead the Western Confederacy War in the 1790s. After 1794, however, he counseled reconciliation with the United States, and thus ceded command to Blue Jacket. William Wells was his son-in-law.

Thomas Ludlum (1727-1811): Governor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1799 to 1800; 1803 to 1805; and 1806 to 1808.

Zachary Macaulay (1768-1838): Abolitionist, and governor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, from 1794 to 1795, and 1796 to 1799.

Mad Dog, also known as Efau Hadjo: A Creek, against the New Order of owning cattle and slaves. He was friendly with Alexander McGillivray, but not as wealthy. Once McGillivray died, he became the Creeks’ main representative to the United States, but he was not completely sympathetic to the Plan of Civilization.

Alexander Martin (1740-1807): Governor of North Carolina in 1782-84; 1789-92.

John Martin (c. 1730-1786): Governor of Georgia, 1782-83.

Josiah Martin: Royal governor of North Carolina, 1771-75.

Allen MacLean (1725-1798): Scots-born. Served for the British in the American Revolution.

John McDonald: A deputy in the British Indian Department living on Chickamauga Creek, where Dragging Canoe brought his faction in 1777.

Alexander McGillivray, also known as Good Child King (1750-1793): A Scots-Creek, son of Scots trader Lachlan McGillivray and a Creek woman (of the Wind clan). He succeeded Emistesigo as principal chief of the Upper Creeks. He was a property-owning wealthy man who led a pro-British/pro-Spanish schism of Creeks, before making peace with the Americans at the Treaty of New York in 1792. Thereafter, he still continued to negotiate between multiple imperial powers, and tended to overstate his pull with the Creeks when speaking to non-Natives. Before his death, he repudiated the Treaty of New York and sought protection from the Spanish.

47 Alexander McKee (c. 1735-1799): An Irish-American agent for the British Indian department. He worked with Simon Girty and Matthew Elliott in negotiating with the Western Confederacy.

Moluntha (c. 1692-1786): A Shawnee leader (Mekoche), who promoted neutralism during the Revolution. He signed the Treaty of Fort Finney, but was killed by the Americans.

John Moultrie (1729-1798): Lt. Governor of East Florida 1771-74.

Neolin: A Delaware prophet in the 1760s who preached anti-dependency through avoidance of British trade.

Nimwha: A Shawnee chief, and brother of Cornstalk.

John Norton: A Scots-Cherokee, adopted Mohawk, and member of the British Indian Department.

Arturo O’Neill de Tyrone: First Spanish Governor of West Florida, 1781-94.

Oconostota (c. 1710-c. 1782/3): A Cherokee military leader and father-in-law of Attakullakulla. Before the war, he was an accommodationist. He became principal chief of the Cherokee after Attakullakulla’s death.

Old Tassel: A Cherokee neutralist leader in 1780s, and uncle to John Watts. He was murdered by John Kirk under flag of truce in 1788 in the short-lived state of Franklin.

Outacite: A Chickamauga Cherokee who moved to headwaters of Coosa with Dragging Canoe c. 1777.

Pacanne (c. 1737-1816): A Miami. He lived at Kekionga, on the west bank of the St. Joseph at its junction with the St. Marys. He allied with the British after 1780, declared briefly for the Americans and tried to mediate between them and the Miamis in the mid- 1780s, and then declared for the British again after a band of Kentuckians attacked in 1788. He was one of Blue Jacket’s associates.

Painted Pole, also known as Red Pole: A civil chief of the Shawnees. He signed the Treaty of Fort Finney in 1786.

Timothy Pickering (1745-1829): He served as Secretary of War in 1795. His experience as a commissioner at Indian treaties led to his involvement with negotiations with the Senecas in the 1790s.

Red Hawk: A Shawnee, killed with the Cornstalk in 1777. 48

Red Jacket (c. 1750-1830): A Seneca orator, sent to negotiate for peace between Western Confederacy Indians and Americans in 1792.

Sayengeraghta, or Old Smoke (c. 1707-1786): A British-allied Seneca chief who competed with Joseph Brant for power.

Arent Schuyler De Peyster (1736-1822): British commandant at Forts Michilimackinac and Detroit during the Revolution.

James Seagrove: A U.S. Indian agent in the South. He mediated with the Creeks and Cherokees in the 1790s.

Silver Heels: A Shawnee, Cornstalk’s brother.

Arthur St. Clair (1737-1818): A Scots-Born American major general who fought for the Americans. He led an expedition against the Western Confederacy in 1791 that resulted in disastrous defeat, thus necessitating Anthony Wayne’s intervention. He became the first governor of the Northwest Territory.

Henry Stuart: John Stuart’s brother. He worked with the Creeks and Choctaws.

John Stuart: A Scots immigrant to South Carolina. He became agent to the Cherokees in 1762, and during the war acted as superintendent for the Southern district of the British Indian Department. His death in 1779 threw Southern Indian affairs into disarray.

The Swan: A Cherokee who acted as go-between between northern Delawares, Shawnees, and southern Cherokees.

David Taitt (c. 1740-1834): A Scots-born British agent who served as deputy superintendent to the Creeks during the Revolution.

Tallassee King, also known as the Tame King, Hopthole Mico, or Hoboithle Micco: An Upper Creek of the town of Tallassee, Son of the Old Tallassee King. He favored accommodation with the US in the 1780s, but allied with McGillivray in 1788. He would also join the Redsticks in the 1810s.

Tenskwatawa, also known as Lalawethika (1775-1836): A Shawnee prophet and brother of Tecumseh. He led a pan-Indian anti-accommodation movement against the Americans in the first decade of the nineteenth century, preaching avoidance of alcohol, wheat, and meat from domesticated animals.

Johannes Tekarihoga: A Mohawk chief.

49 Patrick Tonyn (1725-1804): Governor of East Florida from 1774-84.

Tuckasee, also known as the Terrapin: A Cherokee, and son of Oconostota.

Turtle at Home: A Cherokee, and son of Attakullakulla.

William Walker: Alexander McGillivray’s white overseer, whom McGillivray referred to as his servant.

Nancy Ward (c. 1738-182?): A Cherokee (Wolf Clan), niece of Attakullakulla, cousin of Dragging Canoe, and a War Woman of the Cherokees. She was pro-accommodationist during the Revolution, and warned the Americans of an attack by Dragging Canoe.

John Watts, also known as Young Tassel: A Chickamauga Cherokee. He took Dragging Canoe’s place after his death.

Anthony Wayne (1745-1796): A U.S. army general who became known as “Mad” Anthony Wayne due to questionable aggressive fighting during the Revolution. During the Western Confederacy War George Washington charged him with leading the new Legion of the United States against the Indians. Wayne defeated the Western Confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, and officially ended the war with the Treaty of Greenville in 1795.

Charles Weatherford: A Scot, married to Alexander McGillivray’s half-sister. He was pro-New Order of property- and slaveholding.

William Wells: Son-in-law of Little Turtle, and adopted member of the Miamis. He married Little Turtle’s daughter, Sweet Breeze (she was his second wife). When Little Turtle passed his command to Blue Jacket, Wells turned spy for the Americans.

George White Eyes, also known as Quequedegatha (c. 1730-1778): An accommodationist Delaware (Turtle Clan) who was killed by American treachery.

White Lieutenant: A part-Creek war leader from Okfuskee. He was pro- New Order of property- and slaveholding.

Moses Wilkinson: A slave from Virginia who, despite his illiteracy, took up preaching among the enslaved around Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp before fleeing to Dunmore in 1775. He would eventually end up in Sierra Leone.

Andrew Williamson (c. 1730-1786): He was originally named one of three American representatives to the Cherokees. He led an attack against them in 1779, and also served in various military campaigns for the Americans. They questioned his loyalties, however, and at times it seemed that he pondered supporting the British. 50

James Wright (1716-1785): Lieutenant Governor of Georgia in 1760, and governor from 1761 to 1775, when the rebels took over. He left in 1776 upon some of the British ships that attempted to obtain provisions in South Carolina and Georgia. He returned in 1778, and stayed until 1782.

David Zeisberger (1721-1808): A Moravian missionary to the Ohio Indians, especially the Delawares. He opposed Indian prophets in the 1760s and 1770s. During the Revolution he provided information to Americans at Pittsburgh, and British-allied Wyandots and Delawares captured him and took him to the British. He lived out the war among British-allied Indians around Detroit and Lake Erie, and eventually founded a Delaware Mission at New Fairfield, Ontario.

51 Chapter 1: “The pivot upon which all your operations turn”: Domestic and Military Foodways

Poor Joseph Plumb Martin. The Connecticut private had been at it again—eating something he had come upon by chance. This time, it was “an old ox’s liver,” which

Martin procured from camp butchers and blithely threw into his kettle. The more he boiled it, “the harder it grew,” he recalled, but he “soon filled [his] empty stomach with it,” anyway. The next morning, a sickly Martin visited a doctor who gave him “a large dose of tartar emetic.” After taking the medicine and adding in some exercise to encourage it to do its work, Martin suddenly felt the need to sit down, whereupon he promptly “discharged the hard junks of liver like grapeshot from a fieldpiece.”1 Not all soldiers possessed Martin’s predilection for offal (throughout the course of his service he sampled “A sheep’s head which” he “begged of the butchers,” and an ox’s milt, or spleen—which also made him vomit), but during and after the American Revolution they uniformly suffered from the curse of bad army food.2

This fare ranged from scanty provisions, to unconventional options, to things that everyone found disgusting. At one notable thanksgiving dinner, Martin remembered eating only “half a gill of rice and a tablespoon of vinegar!!”3 One man who escaped

1 James Kirby Martin, ed., Ordinary Courage: The Revolutionary Adventures of Joseph Plumb Martin, Second Edition (St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1999 [1993]), 114. 2 Martin, Ordinary Courage, (for the sheep’s head) 31, (for the ox’s spleen) 47. 3 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 62. Martin referred to thanksgiving in its eighteenth-century sense, as a celebratory meal consumed at various times of year to give thanks. Thanksgiving would not become a national holiday until 1863 following Sarah Josepha Hale’s successful campaign to convince Abraham Lincoln to declare it so during the Civil War. Ironically, Martin’s thanksgiving repast was accurate by seventeenth century standards, when people observed religious thanksgiving fasts as commonly as they feasted in thanks. On the invention of Thanksgiving see Diana Karter Appelbaum, Thanksgiving: An American Holiday, An American History (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1984), esp. 113-14, 153; Janet Siskind, “The Invention of Thanksgiving: A Ritual of American Nationality,” in Carole M. Counihan, ed., Food in the USA: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2002), 41-58. On Thanksgiving as a day of fast,

52 from his Loyalist captors survived on rattlesnakes.4 Britons in Niagara worried over poorly-pickled pork barrels.5 Men stomached corn that, as a result of poor transportation, was “impregnated with the Sweat of Horses,” and year-old butter, “somewhat rank.”6

Sometimes bread contained “some villainous drug...that took all the skin off” men’s mouths.7 During one particular siege, a group of American men and officers quaffed water “which Some of them Scooped out of Hog troughs.” One man said that “he drank of that decoction of Swine’s Dung more [eagerly] that ever he Sucked fresh Lime

Punch.”8 Provisioning issues continued into the period of the Early Republic. Nearly two months to the day before Anthony Wayne’s victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in

1794, Secretary of War Henry Knox wrote to him to say that he hoped that Wayne had

“taken effectual methods to secure...an abundant supply of provisions,” because food provisions, continued Knox, were “the pivot upon which all your operations turn.”9 Food shortages curtailed the military’s chance of carrying out successful operations.

see Appelbaum, Thanksgiving, 47; Jack Santino, All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 169. 4 22 June 1779, Andrew Hunter Revolutionary War Diary, M-2097, John D. Rockefeller Library, Williamsburg, VA (hereafter JDR), originals in Princeton University Library. 5 Allan Maclean to Frederick Haldimand, Niagara, 3 February 1783, f. 14, Add. MS 21763, the British Library, London, UK (hereafter BL). 6 For the corn, see [Illegible] Campbell, Wiliam Preston, T.E. Collins to [unknown], Fort Hamilton, 12 July 1793, f. 113, vol. XXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, Collection #699, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereafter HSP); for the butter, see Sebastian Bairman to Timothy Pickering, New York, 7 April 1793, f. 64, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, P-31, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA (hereafter MHS). 7 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 95. Martin reported this problem near New London, but British prisoners of war also complained about a similar instance near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. See Thomas Wileman, deposition to John Potts, Philadelphia, 18 February 1778, vol. 3, no. 126, photostat 948, box 4, British Headquarters Papers, New York Public Library, New York, NY (hereafter NYPL). 8 Henry Laurens to John Laurens, Charles Town, 6 December 1775, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 10, 543. 9 Henry Knox to Anthony Wayne, War Department, 21 June 1794, f. 23, vol. XXVI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

53

There is no need to repeat trite phrases about armies marching on their stomachs.

American and British soldiers marched, fought, and existed with their bellies in mind, but so too did the rest of the population immersed in the war. At a time when seaports closed to trading vessels and people made do without luxuries, food remained a constant concern because people could not live without it. The story of food during and after the American

Revolution, then, is about much more than inedible food—though bad food played an undeniable role in the way that events transpired. The war and the years thereafter are a tale of food and power, as are so many other narratives involving the things that people eat. This chapter takes as its premise the idea that by knowing what white soldiers requested and consumed, historians can posit an alimentary baseline. By comparing the foodways of white soldiers with free blacks, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans, shifts in power become readily apparent in the chapters that follow this one.

The goal of this chapter is to create four broad and overlapping pictures of the geographic areas I write about in the remainder of this work.10 The first part explores how

American colonists dealt with British limitations on their foodways, even as they hoped to remain closely tied to the mother country. It demonstrates that although the colonies anticipated a cooperative war effort, self-interested individuals attempted to hoard personal supplies of foodstuffs. The second portion suggests that American Whigs and

American Loyalists shared this personality trait of self-interest, and sought above all to feed their families. When historians consider that people pledged allegiance to the entities

10 Because of my focus on Cherokee, Creek, Iroquois, and Western Confederacy Indians, this chapter includes material on New York, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and the Ohio Valley. Readers should note that although subsequent chapters draw almost solely on manuscript sources, the source base in this chapter is considerably larger because I wanted to show just how frequently people living in the eighteenth century wrote about food and foodways.

54 least likely to threaten their food security, loyalty and Loyalism become muddier labels.

The third and fourth sections delineate British and American military efforts in order to describe attempts to provision armies. I trace how victual warfare became a standard aspect of military campaigns as military officers and commissaries sought to feed their troops. Finally, these pages also explain what, exactly, constituted a “normal” diet for white soldiers.

***

Despite British circumscription of Americans’ consumption habits, colonists hoped for reconciliation with Great Britain as late as 1774.11 People frequently invoked food and drink in symbolic and practical ways that allowed them to keep the idea of

England close to heart. Future Continental Congress delegate and governor of North

Carolina Richard Caswell impressively remembered 32 toasts he drank one night. The first went to the King, the second, to the Queen; they drank to the Duke of Gloucester, and the Prince of Wales and the Royal family for toasts three and four. The fifth toast expressed a hope for “Perpetual union to the Colonies.” Although Caswell and others drank to “The much Injured Town of Boston and province of Massachusetts Bay,” they followed with toasts that desired that “Great Britain be just and America Free,” and wished for “the happy reconciliation between Great Britain & her Colonies on a

11 As T.H. Breen points out, most colonists did not advocate revolution in 1763, 1765, 1768, or even early in the 1770s. They were enmeshed in and dependent on an “Empire of Goods” that inextricably tied them to the metropole. Only when the Revolution became inevitable did colonists’ consumption habits give them a common language with which to advocate for rebellion. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), xv- xvi.

55

Constitutional Ground.”12 The colonists masked their conflicted emotions with rituals associated with alcohol, thus praising the monarchy and the colonies at the same time.

Colonists also hoped that by offering food to England, which was struggling under the burden of immense rains, their practical gift of goodwill would highlight their importance as well as their loyalty. “About five or Six Weeks ago it began to Rain & has been dropping almost ever Since,” observed Henry Laurens, prominent South Carolina citizen and future president of South Carolina’s Council of Safety. These heavy rains had devastated much of the wheat, barley, and beans in England and Scotland. Laurens speculated that Maryland, New York, Philadelphia, and Virginia could send wheat to

England, mending the problem of British scarcity while potentially stymying the burgeoning quarrel between England and her colonies. He viewed England’s temporary weakness as a way for Americans to enhance their bargaining position. “As good

Sometimes is drawn out of Evil,” he wrote, “tis possible that from this bad English

Harvest we Americans may reap the fruits of Justice & affection which are due to us from the Mother Country.”13

It helps to recall that the thirteen American colonies were only a portion of a larger whole. By 1760 the British Atlantic housed twenty-three colonies of 1,326,306 whites and 646,305 blacks.14 As a major fracture between England and the North

12 The folders in the collection are unnumbered; I have supplied the title of the folder in place of a number. “Toasts Drank at the State House on Friday the 16 September, 1774...Containing 32 Toasts,” Caswell Journal, 1774, Miscellaneous, Richard Caswell Papers, 1733-1790, P.C. 242.1, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, NC (hereafter NCSA). 13 Henry Laurens to Lachlan McIntosh, Westminster, 27 September 1774, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 9, 578-9. 14 Trevor Burnard, “The British Atlantic,” in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 112.

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American colonies became imminent, the West Indian colonies tried to appease multiple sides by maintaining neutrality. To keep themselves and their slaves from starving, West

Indian planters engaged in food diplomacy. They invoked fears about scarcity, made sure that Britain knew the value of West Indian commodities, and begged the mainland colonies to make them the exception to their embargo decisions with respect to food provisions. The appeals they made to American and British officials emphasized West

Indians’ dependence on the mainland colonies for sustenance. Many of the wealthier

West Indian colonies relied on sugar monoculture for income, meaning that they imported most of their pork, beef, corn, and wheat from the mainland.15 Yet they could not join in rebellion because they needed to maintain the protection of the British navy— not only because they feared a slave uprising, but also because the potential absence of edible goods could lead to just such an event.16

Colonies such as Barbados could not rely on Britain to feed them from across the

Atlantic, but neither could they trust that American ships would reach them.

Consequently, they resorted to pleading with the mainland colonies to reconsider their

15 This shift in how the West Indian colonies fed themselves occurred late in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Richard Waterhouse observes that North Carolinians shipped only four tons of pork to the West Indies in 1680; by 1713, North Carolina sent 1,200 barrels of pork and 2,000 barrels of beef annually. Richard Waterhouse, A New World Gentry: The Making of a Merchant and Planter Class in South Carolina, 1670-1770 (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989), 31. 16 Andrew Jackson O’Shaugnessy has contended that it was the wealthiest colonies—Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Tortola, and Tobago—that did not rebel because they needed the military protection of the British navy in the event of a slave rising. Yet he does not consider that perhaps the British navy also served the more necessary purpose of shuttling food to those West Indian colonies once the British blocked West Indians’ communication with North America. Sidney Mintz helpfully points out that almost all food in Jamaica, for example, had to be imported or grown by slaves. When imports from the mainland colonies stopped, slaves weakened by lack of food would be unable (or unwilling) to produce more food for hungry white planters. A food shortage would thus engender rebellion. Andrew Jackson O’Shaugnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), xi, xv; Sidney W. Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 52.

57 rebellion. In July 1775 Barbadians sent a letter, which the Virginia Gazette printed, which worried that “the resolves of the late American Congress will in effect destroy them by famine.” They regretted that they possessed “no power to join the Americans in the present struggle for freedom; but their sincere and hearty wishes for their success in the cause are continually heard, at the same time that they are heaping imprecations on the heads of the Great Ones at home.”17 Barbadians described their inability to provide military aid to the mainland colonies as a sense of powerlessness; they could only try to verbally influence British officials in London.

On a more practical, self-interested level Barbadians turned their attention to preventing food shortages. By summertime planters stated their unwillingness to

“purchase any more new Negroes, lest they should not be able to find them provisions.”

The current slave population was “already...in danger of starving.”18 Reluctance to enslave more Africans did not necessarily mean that West Indians felt concerned about the well-being of their slaves. The fact that the cost of some provisions had risen by fifty percent made them apprehensive “of our Negroes, who, in general, at the best of times, are but too poorly fed.”19 Planters feared famine because they worried that it would encourage a slave insurrection. Such concerns may have proved so pressing because

17 Virginia Gazette, July 1, 1775, No. 1247, 110. Virginia Gazette, March 18, 1775, no. 1232. N.B.: There are three different newspapers named the Virginia Gazette. I am citing the one commonly known as “Virginia Gazette 1,” which was published successively by William Parks, William Hunter, Joseph Royle, Alexander Purdie, Alexander Purdie and John Dixon, John Dixon and William Hunter Jr., and John Dixon and Thomas Nicholson. The Virginia Gazette was bound in separate volumes, usually by year. Sometimes the volumes have page numbers, and sometimes they do not; sometimes the numbering stops halfway through a volume. I have supplied page numbers when they were available, and omitted them otherwise. 18 Virginia Gazette, August 12, 1775, no. 1253. 19 “Extract of a letter from a WEST INDIA planter, dated the 5th of June last,” Virginia Gazette, October 14, 1775, no. 1262.

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Tacky’s War (a 1760 slave rebellion in Jamaica) still lingered in their minds.20 Planters’ reluctance to buy more slaves meant multiple things to various readers: to the British, it meant that Barbadians would stop producing sugar and rum; and to Americans, it painted a bleak picture of future scarcity and slave unrest in the event that their rebellion failed.

While some West Indian colonists used the threat of a slave rebellion to ask for assistance from the British navy, others tried a different tack. Jamaicans who sensed the impending conflict wanted to remind Britain of their value, as well as their need for protection. In December 1774 the Jamaica Assembly sent a petition to Britain, reminding them that Jamaican plantations, which included “647 sugar plantations,” produced 68,160 hogsheads and 7029 tierces and barrels of sugar, and 12,142 puncheons of rum. The

Assembly also mentioned the pimento (allspice), ginger, and cotton they grew, along with the 137,773 cattle they raised. Jamaicans also, however, laid claim to “190,914

Negroes,” and herein lay the rub.21 By sending the British an account of the goods they could hypothetically produce in the ensuing year, Jamaicans proclaimed their own importance, but also sent a subtle reminder that such production would cease if their slaves went hungry.

By summer of 1775 decisions about neutrality meant that West Indians and the enslaved on their plantations were both short on food, and slaves began to die first. In

Antigua, for example (before the Revolution was over), several thousand slaves would

20 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo- Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 10. 21 “Jamaica, December 28. To the KING’S most Excellent Majesty in COUNCIL. The humble PETITION and MEMORIAL of the ASSEMBLY of JAMAICA,” Virginia Gazette, March 11, 1775, no. 1231, 40.

59 die from starvation and diseases related to a lack of food.22 The West Indies may have retained ties to both Britain and America, but during the Revolution they starved by themselves. Americans and Britons, meanwhile, set about trying to avoid similar situations.

Although the Americans would not officially sever ties until July of 1776, hostilities commenced at the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. Shortly thereafter, Britons sought to begin blocking Americans’ access to food. British strategies against and control of American colonists included two food-related tactics. First, British ships began blockading American ports and seizing ships loaded with goods. By so doing, Britons deprived Americans of edible goods and tried to drive a wedge between the colonies. In July 1775 British men of war in Providence, Rhode Island seized “vessels in a fair trade, loaded with rum, sugar, molasses, and provisions.”23 Bostonians ran out of beef, malt, and cider by July, and relegated their “fresh provisions” for the consumption of “the sick and wounded.”24 By August General Gage had granted permission for colonists to leave the city, “thinking he must be obliged to furnish them out of the King’s stores, or let them starve.”25 This strategy of stealing provisions out of the mouths of rebellious Americans in Rhode Island and Boston served more than one purpose. It decreased Americans’ potential military power by depriving cities of ready troops; it challenged the unity between the colonies by making colonists unsure that the other

22 Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 206. 23 “Providence, July 1,” Virginia Gazette, July 22, 1775, no. 1250. 24 “PHILADELPHIA, August 2...Extract of a letter from BRAINTREE, Massachusetts Bay, July 16,” Virginia Gazette, August 19, 1775, no. 1254. 25 Virginia Gazette, August 19, 1775, No. 1254; Virginia Gazette, August 26, 1775, no. 1255.

60 colonies would assist them; and it fed British troops, which meant that the British could spend less money on sending provisions from London or present-day Canada. In large part, aggressive moves against one colony reverberated throughout the colonies because their food production was linked so closely together.26

The second aspect of the plan involved ensuring that in British-controlled areas such as Boston, British officers and officials did what they could to superintend (and thus manipulate) the distribution of consumables. Part of this strategy related to the first goal of intercepting Americans’ food supplies; after they seized such goods, the British could charge as much for them as they pleased. But the British also did what they could to control how Americans who still possessed foodstuffs went about selling them. General

Gage “ordered all the molasses to be distilled into rum for the soldiers.” He also revoked

“all licenses for selling of liquors,” and reissued them “to his creatures” as he saw fit.27

By dictating that all molasses would become liquor rather than a caloric supplement, and making it impossible for American colonists to sell rum on their own terms, Britons increasingly interfered with Americans’ food security and sovereignty.

The effects of this plan appeared readily discernible by January 1776. “I am happy to have it in my power to inform your Lordship,” wrote John Murray, governor of

Virginia and 4th Earl of Dunmore to William Legge, 2d Earl of Dartmouth, that he had

26 When the British first considered restraining the trade of the American colonies, testimonies in Parliament revealed just how much each colony depended upon the others for sustenance. One colonist gave information “that the colonies of Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, did not collectively produce sufficient for the subsisdence of their inhabitants.” They relied upon on supplies from North and South Carolina, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Although the bill they discussed referred to fisheries, it demonstrated the interconnectedness of colonial foodways. “Parliamentary Proceedings,” Virginia Gazette, April 29, 1775, no. 1238. 27 “PHILADELPHIA, August 2...Extract of a letter from BRAINTREE, Massachusetts Bay, July 16,” Virginia Gazette, August 19, 1775, no. 1254.

61 been “depriving the Rebels of every supply of Salt, Rum, or Sugar, in my power.”28 Salt had jumped from one to fifteen shillings per bushel, rum from two shillings and six pence to twelve shillings and fourteen pence per gallon, and sugar from five or six pence per pound to four or five shillings.29 Dunmore’s use of the word “power” twice in one sentence conveyed his sense of control over Virginian colonists. Expensive salt and sugar supplies posed particular problems for military suppliers who needed to preserve pork and beef for the troops. Britons hoped to force the colonies’ collective hand by circumscribing their access to essential supplies.

Instead, American colonists reacted against British attempts at domination in a myriad of peaceful and violent ways. Their acts of nonimportation and non-consumption will be familiar to most scholars, but they bear repeating because they were so thoroughly tied to discourses about food and power. Americans made symbolic and practical protests against British control by engaging in fasting, producing their own consumables, and stockpiling food supplies. In February 1775 Lieutenant-Governor of South Carolina

William Bull II reported that “a Day of General Fasting...was observed very strictly throughout this province.” The British Loyalist could not condone such actions “by men assembled without legal authority and for purposes derogatory to the King’s government,” but he acknowledged that he was unable to interfere. Bull staged a

28 Dunmore to the Earl of Dartmouth, On Board the Ship Dunmore off Norfolk, Virginia, 6 December 1775, 688, Dunmore Correspondence Jan 1771-Jun 1774, TR 13.1, JDR. 29 I am relying on Vincent Carretta’s summary of British monetary usage here: “British money was counted in pounds sterling (£), shillings (s.), and pence, or pennies (d.), and farthings. One pound sterling = 20 shillings; 5 shillings = 1 crown; 1 shilling = 12 pennies; 1 farthing = 1/4d. One guinea (so-called because the gold from which it was made came from the Guinea Coast of Africa) = 21 shillings...The price of a four-pound loaf of bread ranged from 5.1 to 6.6 d. between 1750 and 1794.” Vincent Carretta, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 18.

62 lukewarm protest by ignoring the fast and by deciding to entertain “company at dinner as usual.”30

Anti-British colonists began to encourage protective legislation, to endorse food hoarding, and to redefine food security. In April 1775 delegates of Richmond and

Henrico counties in Virginia unanimously resolved to encourage colonists to grow hops and barley, because “brewing malt liquors in this colony would tend to render the consumption of foreign liquors less necessary.”31 In the meantime, colonists sought to conserve extant supplies. In July 1775 Virginia resolved “that no flour, wheat, or other grain or provisions of any kind, be exported from this colony...until the Convention, or

Assembly, or the Honourable the Continental Congress, shall order otherwise.”

Virginians made it clear that they would take orders only from bodies they recognized as

American; the British deserved no say about where provisions went. Furthermore, the colonists also knew enough to expect future conflict: they ordered “that no quantities of the said articles, more than are necessary for the use of the inhabitants, be brought to, collected, or stored in the towns, or other places upon or near navigable rivers.”32 They made sure that in the event of a British attack no moveable goods remained for British raiders—but in an eighteenth-century reimagining of food security, they also deliberately reduced food supplies in the colony.

30 Lieutenant-Governor William Bull [II] to Earl of Dartmouth, Charleston, 22 February 1775, in K.G. Davies, ed., Documents of the American Revolution: 1770-1783 (Irish University Press, 1972-1981), vol. IX, 55 (hereafter DAR). 31 “The WHOLE proceedings of the Convention of Delegates at the town of RICHMOND, in the county of HENRICO: At a meeting of Delegates for the counties and corporations in the colony of Virginia, at the town of Richmond, in the county of Henrico, on Monday the 20th of March 1775,” Virginia Gazette, April 1, 1775, no. 1234. 32 “In CONVENTION, July 24, 1775,” Virginia Gazette, August 5, 1775, no. 1252.

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Colonists also used food to engage in a war of words with British officials in order to depict themselves as virtuous, non-consuming participants in a colonial order that stood in stark contrast to the corruption of Great Britain.33 Virginians responded vehemently to Dunmore’s assumption that nonimportation and nonexportation would quickly “produce a Scarcity,” “ruin thousands of Families,” and cause “the middling and poorer Sort” to starve along with their slaves while the upper echelon of society enriched itself.34 This “heavy charge,” said the House of Burgesses, “must have proceeded” from

Dunmore’s “giving too easy credit to ill-founded reports.” “People of fortune” had for the most part avoided the lure of such self-interest, they argued, drawing Dunmore’s attention to their continuing integrity.35 Yet the harsh realities of war would soon test colonists’ claims that they would be able to share food and cooperate.

When peaceful protests failed, Americans turned to more aggressive ones.

Colonists’ victual warfare underscored the degree to which Americans had started to use foodways to act out against their enemies, and the degree to which Britons recognized those actions as forms of rebellion. Virginians in Williamsburg decreed that furnishing

Britons “with arms, provision, or naval stores” were actions as nefarious as “enlisting

33 Americans proclaimed their virtue by avoiding consumption of foreign goods. Avoiding consumption obviously included the eschewal of foreign foods. Furthermore, it is possible that Americans conceived of crop destruction in England in 1774 as evidence of the moral corruption and decay they feared were rampant in England. On the fear of corruption, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992 [1967]), 34-5; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1975]), 507. 34 Dunmore to the Earl of Dartmouth, Williamsburg, 24 December 1774, 449, Dunmore Correspondence Jul 1774-March 1776, TR 13.2, JDR, 35 To be sure, the Burgesses undermined their argument in no small degree by admitting that large slaveholders would suffer more than “the middling and poorer sort.” What mattered, however, was that they were denying Dunmore’s threats that they would starve. Address of House of Burgesses of Virginia to Governor Earl of Dunmore [19 June 1775], DAR, vol. IX, 182-3.

64 soldiers” or “giving intelligence” to the enemy. Friends kept food within the colony; enemies allowed it to pass through the colony’s borders. People guilty of any such crimes

“shall, upon being convicted...be liable to be imprisoned, or otherwise confined in such a manner as the Committee of Safety may direct.”36 People in neighboring colonies acted quickly to hurt those who wanted to deprive them of food supplies. When a customs collector in Savannah, Georgia attempted to seize sugar and molasses, a crowd tarred and feathered the men sent to guard the goods, and threw the men into the river—one of them

“was seen in the water begging for mercy,” but probably drowned. The crowd made off with the sugar and molasses.37 Such actions may have belied the virtuous behavior to which colonists ascribed.

A month after colonists denied Dunmore’s ability to starve them, Virginians vented their anger by hurting his domesticated animals. “A great number of people...have taken possession of the Park”—the piece of land adjoining his former residence, the

Governor’s house—he wrote in July 1775. He described in dismay how colonists set about “wantonly cutting and maiming my Cattle which they found there.”38 As historian

Virginia Anderson has noted, maiming animals, or “agents of empire,” was one way to symbolically indicate displeasure or to engage in violence against another group.39 Given the fact that Virginians’ decree about decreasing movable comestibles within the colony

36 “An ORDINANCE for establishing a MODE of PUNISHMENT for the ENEMIES in AMERICA in this colony, passed at a CONVENTION held in the city of WILLIAMSBURG on Friday the 1st of December, 1775,” Virginia Gazette, January 27, 1776, no. 1277 37 “Charlestown (South Carolina) March 7,” Virginia Gazette, April 22, 1775, no. 1237. 38 Dunmore to Dartmouth, The Fowey in York River, 12 July 1775, 591, Dunmore Correspondence Jul 1774-Mar 1776, TR13.2, JDR. 39 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 211.

65 occurred just shy of two weeks later, it seems likely that Virginians were trying to do more than send a symbolic message; they were also trying to ensure that only a bare minimum of animals remained for slaughter, or for the purpose of transporting edible goods.

Colonists also began to withhold food from British soldiers. When the rebels took possession of Norfolk, Virginia in December 1775, and British men aboard ships of war asked whether “they meant to allow His Majesty’s Forces to be supplied with fresh provisions,” the Americans answered, “that they should do every thing in their power to prevent His Majesty’s Troops from being supplied with any of the Necessarys of Life.”40

By acknowledging that they were depriving Britons of necessaries, Americans made it clear that British starvation did not concern them, as the British had forced colonists to deal with fears about scarcity for the greater part of the year. Denying foodstuffs to

Britons also provided the Americans, who possessed comparatively fewer ships of their own, with a way to control the movements of a much larger and threatening adversary.

Without provisions, such ships had to stick to the coast.

Unfortunately, what started as an attempt to prevent Britons from stealing colonists’ food turned into colonists’ unwillingness to assist neighboring colonies with supplies of provisions.41 At first, colonists proclaimed food embargoes with seemingly good intentions in mind. When North Carolina placed an embargo on “all Beef Pork

40 Dunmore to the Earl of Dartmouth, On Board the Ship Dunmore off Norfolk, Virginia, 6 December 1775, 679, Dunmore Correspondence Jan 1771-Jun 1774, TR 13.1, JDR. 41 Virginians temporarily repealed their decision to cease exports when Maryland refused to follow suit. Given the fact that other colonies had to continue requesting food from Virginia during the war, however, it seems likely that they eventually decided to continue withholding food. “WILLIAMSBURG, August 12. In CONVENTION, TUESDAY August 8, 1775,” Virginia Gazette, August 12, 1775, no. 1253.

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Bacon & Common salt” leaving the state in April 1778, except for “such as might be sent...for the support of the Continental Army, or any Troops sent out of this State,”

North Carolinians clearly meant to reserve food for American or North Carolinian troops.42 Eventually, however, other states took the embargo so seriously that they had to be ordered to supply provisions to other states. Thus in 1781 North Carolina resolved

“That the several States southward of Pensylvania be and hereby are required to furnish their respective quotas of supplies to the southern army timely and regularly.”43 Yet their orders to do so lacked the power of enforcement; North Carolinians could only choose to

“recommened [sic] to the executives of” Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina, and

Virginia that they “agree upon and settle an arrangement for supplying the southern

Army with provisions.”44 Even when Revolutionary governments tried to command that individual colonies (and eventually, states) send provisions, the precedent of food embargoes made it difficult to force compliance.

***

Problems with food supply reached down from the administrative levels of government, and into the day-to-day existence of people living through the war. The plans of Revolutionary governments failed to account for the not insignificant portion of the population that sought, above all, to ensure that it did not go hungry. Throughout the duration of the American Revolution, individual colonists demonstrated aspects of self-

42 At a Council held at Newbern, 7 April 1778, folder: “1778 Apr-Aug,” Governor’s Office, Minutes of Council, 1777-1780, G.O. 119, NCSA. 43 In Congress, 20 February 1781, folder: “correspondence, February 20, 1781,” Abner Nash Papers, Correspondence, May 24, 1780-June 30, 1781, n.d., G.P. 6, NCSA. 44 In Congress, 20 February 1781, folder: “correspondence, February 20, 1781,” Abner Nash Papers, Correspondence, May 24, 1780-June 30, 1781, n.d., G.P. 6, NCSA.

67 interest concerning food supply.45 The Continental Congress issued orders for provisions; individual colonies requested food from their neighbors; and British officials tried to control the flow of provisions—but many of these strategies failed because colonists’ self-interest ensured that food supplies remained immobile. People were loyal not to the

King, or to the Continental Congress, but to themselves, because they trusted few others to keep food in the mouths of their families. This point makes the distinction between rebels and Loyalists more difficult to pin down.46 As readers will see in future chapters,

Native Americans, free blacks, and slaves shared this interest in avoiding hunger, albeit in subtly different ways.

45 I am not the first to make the observation that the colonies were self-interested. Bernard Bailyn’s Ideological Origins discussed how from 1776-1780 the colonies were responsible for managing themselves as small-scale governments, and “made no claims to the power of nation-states.” They looked out for themselves. In his case study of Maryland, Trevor Burnard demonstrated that planters preferred “risk- averse, conservationist strategies” which privileged “a comfortable sufficiency” over profit. Burnard’s book is helpful for my interpretation because it explains why Marylanders might have been more inclined than others to do what was best for their food security. Finally, Michael A. McDonnell’s work has done much to explore why Revolutionary Virginians balked at giving their service to the Continental Army: middling farmers had no one else to farm their crops, and although richer Virginians could leave their plantations they still risked losing profits. Though none of these interpretations have much to do with food, they elucidate the general milieu that pervaded colonial thought. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, vii; Trevor Burnard, Creole Gentlemen: The Maryland Elite, 1691-1776 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 30; Michael A. McDonnell, “‘Fit for Common Service?’: Class, Race, and Recruitment in Revolutionary Virginia,” in John Resch and Walter Sargent, eds., War & Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization and Home Fronts (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 103-131; McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), esp. 109. 46 Maya Jasanoff has recently suggested that the “spirit of 1783”—which was characterized by Loyalists’ desires to resist centralized, hierarchical government—was actually a spirit that Loyalists and rebels shared. Thus the gap between the two was less wide than expected after the war. By exploring the similarities between the two groups’ foodways, I seek to explain how the day-to-day happenings of wartime life shaped some of these similarities. With respect to numbers of Loyalists in the American colonies, estimates range from one fifth to a full third. I am disinclined to offer my own estimate precisely because the term “Loyalist” is so slippery with respect to Native Americans and slaves; as I discuss in my introduction, I think that “British-allied” or “American-allied” are better terms for these disparate groups of peoples. Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 8, 13, 364n16. For her excellent summary of literature on Loyalists, see Jasanoff, “The Other Side of the Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, Vol. 65, No. 2 (April 2008), esp. 206-07.

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Whig and Loyalist colonists alike—even those Loyalists dubbed “the crawling

Reptiles of America”—used food to privilege their needs and the requirements of their families in three significant and sometimes contradictory ways.47 Inhabitants tried to sell food to nearby armies to earn money (because they knew that roaming soldiers would steal the food stores they did not hawk); they engaged in shameless price-fixing in order to receive the highest returns; and finally, they often refused to aid the military with food or physical assistance when their farms and cattle seemed at risk.

These various strategies allowed Revolutionary participants to give in to the inevitable actions of pilfering soldiers when necessary, but they also enabled colonists to retain a say about how they relinquished or guarded their crops and domesticated animals. In short, these strategies imbued them with a continuing sense of power. In light of the way that I have defined food diplomacy—as the use of food to gain or maintain peace between two or more groups—I do not think that the colonists’ actions that I have described qualify as such. People who sold crops to prevent soldiers from using violence to steal more, who fixed food prices to rake in money, and who declined to join military entities so as to better protect their cattle were not using food diplomacy because they were not seeking to represent larger cohesive groups; they sought to protect their personal interests. These choices prevented them from identifying as rebels or Loyalists. Their decisions mattered for future food diplomacy, however, because they helped to entrench

British and American bargaining positions. Colonists thus helped to create the playing

47 John Nixon to John Sullivan, Camp White Plains, 25 July 1778, 5, vol. 3, John Sullivan Transcripts, Ms. N-995, MHS.

69 field of food supply, which determined whether troops would negotiate from positions of military might or weakness.

Colonists viewed the initial gathering of British and American military units in

1776 as an opportunity to sell their food stores, but such decisions sometimes forced them to declare their allegiance in one way or another. “I have Bread and Flower,” wrote

Robert Wormeley Carter, eldest son of Landon Carter, to an American captain in

Richmond.48 When Carter anticipated the arrival of Lord Dunmore’s fleet in July 1776, his loyalty to the Americans led to his refusal to accept British money for provisions, even though he agreed to furnish them with foodstuffs.49 Carter’s wealth meant that he could afford to lose a bit, but his acquiescence may have been a ploy to avoid losing much more. Men such as Carter took did not want to support British troops, but nevertheless felt obligated to protect their personal interests. Those who refused British demands risked future thefts of property.50

This lack of choice became apparent as troops began to confiscate or destroy peoples’ food stores. In times of need it became common for those in command to order

48 Robert Carter to Captain Burges Ball at Richmond Courthouse, 5 March 1776, Robert Carter Letterbook, vol. III, Robert Carter Letterbooks 1772-1793, TR 7.2, JDR, originals in Duke University Library. Likewise, a Loyalist in Georgia penned a letter to the Lords of the Treasury in London and offered 4,000 head of black cattle, which he promised to herd to the banks of St. Marys River in East Florida, along with a quantity of corn. Thomas Nixon to the Lords of the Treasury, 7 march 1776, vol. 4, no. 32, photostat 134, box 1, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. The Lords of the Treasury considered the offer, but not very closely before they left it up to William Howe to make a final decision. Nixon’s offer of 4,000 head of cattle was designed to feed 12,000 mouths, but when John Robinson wrote to Howe to inform him that they had received the plan, he referred to “12,000 Head of Live Cattle.” They cited the distance and their uncertainty of conditions on the ground to explain why they thought Howe was most capable of making the choice. John Robinson to General Howe, 1 May 1776, vol. 4, no. 21, photostat 171, box 1, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 49 13 July 1776, Robert Carter Letterbook, Vol. III, Robert Carter Letterbooks 1772-1793, TR 7.2, JDR. 50 The British, for example, raided Henry Laurens’s Mepkin Plantation in Moncks Corner, taking corn, and his Santee plantation, taking corn, cattle, and liquor. Samuel Massey to [Henry Laurens], Charles Town, 12 June 1780, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 15, 305-6.

70 that soldiers “impress” domesticated animals and other food articles.51 In theory such claims promised Whig inhabitants compensation at some point in the future; in reality it meant that almost no one received anything. Loyalists may have been likelier to lose crops and cattle, but British as well as American hands wrought theft and destruction.

Such was the case in March 1778 when Americans “totally ruined” Loyalist plantations in New Orleans, and in June 1782 when British troops in Schenectady, New York burned

Loyalist Robert Ellice’s grist mill (for grinding grain and flour) to the ground.52 In 1781, on the brink of defeat, the British needed supplies more urgently, and Charles Cornwallis had to order Virginian colonists “to Bring to Market the Provisions they can Spare.” He promised that inhabitants “Will be Paid,” but also warned that those who failed to comply

“Will be Imprisoned When taken and their Cattle and Corn will be seized for the use of the Troops.”53 The notion that one could offer goods and save some for personal use must have appealed to colonists whose only alternative was losing everything.

Fear of loss also made people more likely to pass information about movable provisions if that information drew attention away from their own farms. People thus used intelligence about food to subtly influence the movement of soldiers. “A friend of government” informed John Graves Simcoe, British leader of the Queen’s Rangers, about

51 For examples, see Abner Nash to Colonel Wootten, 16 March 1781, folder: “correspondence, March 11- 23, 1781,” and Henry Murfee to Abner Nash, Pitch Landing, 8 June 1781, folder: “correspondence, June 1- 8, 1781,” Richard Caswell Papers, 1733-1790, P.C. 247.1, NCSA; 6 October 1781, folder: “1781-1784,” Governor’s Office, Minutes of Council, 1781-1790, G.O. 119.1, NCSA; In the House of Representatives, 15 February 1783, General Assembly Committee Reports 1783, 31-40, box 27, South Carolina General Assembly Committee Reports, 1776-1879, S165005, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC (hereafter SCDAH). 52 For March 1778 see William Wilton to John Stuart, New Orleans, 8 March 1778, vol. 29, no. 238, photostat 997, box 5, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; for 1782, see Robert Ellice, Memorial to Frederick Haldimand, Quebec, 3 July 1783, f. 145, Add. MS 21735, BL. 53 8 August 1781, ff. 16-17, Charles Cornwallis Orderly Book, 1781, 28 June to 19 October, JDR.

71

Washington’s “supplies of fat cattle” on their way from New England to Philadelphia in

1778.54 The man may have been doing Great Britain what he thought was his selfless duty—or he may have sought to usher the troops quickly and harmlessly through lands where he grazed his own cattle. Indeed, perhaps he belonged to the population of

“disaffected inhabitants” who, according to John Laurens (son of American Henry

Laurens), found “means to conceal their teams and cattle, so that the country appears more naked than it really is.”55 At other times colonists did not bother to conceal the fact that they cared more about protecting their property than about aiding the army.

In January 1780 one such group of disaffected inhabitants refused to assist the

British when Lord Stirling led the Americans in an invasion of Long Island. The

Loyalists preferred to ensure “the temporary security of their cattle and effects,” and refused to lend aid to British soldiers.56 In the main, people did what they could to keep cattle and corn on their farms, and out of sight. In this case it is also possible that the future fear of hunger seemed more worrisome than the imminent arrival of American troops.

Colonists’ self-interest became more apparent still when army commissaries attempted to obtain provisions, and when people went to markets to sell their foodstuffs.

“If we were as virtuous as we ought to be,” commented John Laurens, “those who are enriching themselves by Commerce, Privateering and Farming” would instead want to

54 John Graves Simcoe, A Journal of the Operations of the Queen’s Rangers, From the End of the Year 1777, to the Conclusion of the Late American War (Exeter: Printed for the Author, 1787), 30. 55 John Laurens to Henry Laurens, 17 February 1778, in John Laurens, The Army Correspondence of Colonel John Laurens, in the years 1777-8, with a Memoir by WM. Gilmore Simms (New York: 1867), vol. II, 128. 56 Simcoe, A Journal of the Operations of the Queen’s Rangers, 82.

72 supply the army “with every necessary and convenience at a moderate rate.57 The increasingly high prices people charged for supplies suggested a distinct lack of

American virtue. When Congress passed a resolution “directing the purchase of 20,000

Barrels of Flour to be shipped to the New England States, a number of Speculators” raced through Maryland and Virginia, buying up “a great part of the Wheat and all the Flour.”

Henry Laurens received a letter that begged him “to put a Stop to the practices of those miscreants the Monopolizers of Food.”58

These food “monopolizers” came to markets with their ill-gotten produce, and tried very hard to bleed people dry, regardless of whether they identified as British or

American. In January 1778 when the British held Philadelphia, Sir William Howe had to issue a proclamation forbidding price-fixing. “It has become a common practice of the butchers and others attending the markets, to purchase at the wharfs and other places, the provisions brought from the Country for the use of the inhabitants...and afterwards to sell the same at very exorbitant prices,” he complained. He forbade people from reselling beef, lamb, pork, mutton, veal, poultry, or vegetables; one could buy foodstuffs for private use only.59 A month later he issued further regulations that stipulated that only a designated importer could sell rum, molasses, or salt, and then only in small quantities— no doubt to limit consumption to “one time for the use of one family.”60 In a similar vein

57 John Laurens to Henry Laurens, Valley Forge, 11 April 1778, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 13, 101. 58 Jeremiah Wadsworth to Henry Laurens, Philadelphia, 29 September 1778, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 14, 368. 59 General Sir William Howe, Proclamation, Philadelphia, 22 January 1778, photostat 902, box 4, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 60 General Sir William Howe, Regulations and Proclamation, Philadelphia, 11 February 1778, vol. 34, no. 164, photostat 939, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

73

June 1777 witnessed “a considerable number” of North Carolina merchants making “it their business To deny up all the necessaries of life in order to fix what price they please.”61 American and British officials alike complained about the inhabitants’ tendencies to take advantage of wartime fears in order to turn a profit. Both military entities started trying to circumscribe colonists’ freedoms in the marketplace in order to guarantee food security.

The notion of food-related loyalty also permeated British and American military culture. While individual inhabitants used food scarcities to seize opportunities to profit, officers and soldiers conceived of ways to use food to undermine the enemy’s allegiance.

After the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, the Americans retreated to Prospect

Hill—also known as “the citadel”—and the British gained Bunker Hill (which was really

Breed’s Hill) after sustaining heavy losses. Following this slim British victory, the

Americans distributed a paper to the British ministerial troops. They divided the paper into two columns, one labeled “Prospect Hill,” and the other, “Bunker’s Hill.” It stated that at the American-held Prospect Hill one could enjoy “Seven dollars a month,” “Fresh provisions in plenty,” “Health,” and “Freedom, ease, affluence, and a good farm.” By contrast, men at Bunker’s Hill would earn “Three pence a day,” eat “Rotten salt pork,” suffer from “The scurvy,” and fall prey to “Slavery, beggary, and want.”62 The notice was printed in the Virginia Gazette, which meant that people at least as far south as Virginia had access to it. In this instance the American military proved their capacity to use food

61 John Penn to Richard Caswell, Philadelphia, 25 June 1777, folder: “correspondence, 1770-1786,” Richard Caswell Papers, 1733-1790, P.C. 242.1, NCSA. 62 Virginia Gazette, August 26, 1775, No. 1255.

74 to try to entice individual British soldiers to switch sides—or, perhaps, to persuade wavering Americans to throw in with the rebel army. Winners not only received excellent provisions; they also (hypothetically) would receive a farm on which they could produce food in the future. The pamphlet may also have been at attempt to keep Loyalists at home, where they, too, could protect their farms and eat well for the time being. The pamphlet’s distribution also marked a shift as larger entities began to manipulate individuals’ needs for food to achieve larger, wider-reaching goals. It set the stage for future, more deliberate uses of food diplomacy and victual warfare.

Soldiers proved likely to switch sides especially when food provisions ran low.63

When the British found themselves “straitened for provisions” near White Plains in 1778,

Americans expressed little surprise at “The spirit of desertion” that “prevail[ed] much amongst the Enemy, some of whom are daily coming to us.”64 The converse proved true in North Carolina in 1780, when Americans were so “much Distressed for want of

Provisions,” that they “could scarce keep the troops from starving, which occasioned a vast number of men to Desert to the Enemy.”65 Just as non-military inhabitants staked their choices on their abilities to feed themselves, so too did soldiers seek out the entity best able to feed them. Obviously, soldiers were less likely to desert because they understood that scarcity and bad food came attached to the hardships of military service, but at times the lure of better conditions still tested their resolve. In order to better

63 I will address the issue of food and mutiny below. 64 John Nixon to John Sullivan, Camp White Plains, 25 July 1778, 5, vol. 3, box 1, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS. 65 Journal of William Seymour, Sargent Major of the Delaware Regiment. In the Southern Expedition from April 16th 1780 to January 17th 1783, 000243, Transcripts of papers relating to South Carolina in the American Revolution, 1780-1782, Peter Force Collection Series 7E, reel 42, RW3379, SCDAH.

75 understand soldiers’ food, it is necessary to examine the provisioning plans that Britons and Americans made during the war.

***

At first, and indeed by second and third glance, Americans’ and Britons’ attempts to feed their soldiers did not go well. Joseph Plumb Martin put it most memorably when he bemoaned “the old system of starving,” but his words failed to acknowledge that no one agreed on a universal definition of starvation.66 Men frequently complained about it; officers, commissaries, and quartermaster generals constantly wrote panicked letters asking those in power for more provisions, and men in charge either responded to their requests or ignored them. Thus a caveat about starvation is necessary.

People described the term in a myriad of ways. Sir Henry Clinton defined “the danger of starving” as being “reduced to less than three weeks’ provisions,” and Anthony

Wayne began to worry when he ran out of “Salt Spirits Bacon or flower,” even when he possessed “new Indian corn & water.”67 Daniel Richter explains that Enlightenment thinkers “posit[ed] starvation” as the “normal condition” of those who subsisted by hunting. He also observes, however, that despite European observers’ careful categorizations, they still struggled to accurately describe Indians’ abilities to feed themselves—in part because Indians imbued the term “starvation” with different

66 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 31. 67 William B. Willcox, ed., The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775-1782, With an Appendix of Original Documents (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 111; Anthony Wayne to Governor Nelson, Camp New Castle, 19 August 1781, f. 39, vol. XIV, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

76 meanings.68 When men feared starvation during this time, it seems likely that what they really worried about was an absence of meat and their ability to preserve it (though to be sure scores of men did die from lack of food). Starvation became more of a word men used to describe their sense of powerlessness, rather than a way of accurately depicting conditions on the ground. The fact that those who “starved” still enjoyed various types of food, as well as varying degrees of power suggests that they employed the idea of starvation as a way to bargain.

The British Army struggled to feed its troops at the outset of the war for three reasons.69 First, the Seven Years’ War left officers accustomed to expecting food assistance from the countryside. Colonists’ self-interest guaranteed that British commissaries encountered trouble procuring supplies from that venue. Second, protracted ambivalence and confusion from officials in Britain ensured that it took some time to

68 Daniel K. Richter, “‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 19, no. 4 (Winter, 1999), 608 (“starvation”), 602-3 for Anglo-American misconceptions, 624 for Algonquian-speakers’ usage of “starving.” For an in-depth essay that examines Natives’ definitions of starvation in the Canadian subartctic, and colonists’ misunderstandings of them, see Mary Black-Rogers’s useful article. She describes three different types of starvation vocabulary that Indians employed: literal (“the simple situation of literal lack of food”), technical (the technical fur-trade message that fur supplies were low because food had been scarce”), and manipulative (messages beyond these literal and technical ones,” which Indians employed “in speech events such as greetings, jokes, and other ritual routines”). Mary Black-Rogers, “Varieties of ‘Starving’: Semantics and Survival in the Subartic Fur Trade, 1750-1850,” Ethnohistory, vol. 33, no. 4 (Autumn, 1986): 353-383, (quote) 354. 69 It should be noted that I am writing about different British Armies, depending on what point in the war I am discussing. From 1775 to the end of 1779, the British focused the majority of their attention on the North. But “From the end of 1779 to the end of 1780 the British force was divided, for a defensive in the north and an offensive in the south; the two parts depended entirely upon the sea for supplies and mutual support. Then Cornwallis broke away from his base at Charleston to invade North Carolina, and thereby created a third independent army; Clinton, trying to assist him, gradually built up a fourth on the Chesapeake, which Cornwallis joined in the late spring of 1781. Thereafter there were three again, at New York, in Virginia, and in South Carolina.” Willcox, The American Rebellion, xxxiii.

77 articulate a definitive policy regarding food supplies.70 Third, and related to the first problem, was the fact that British officers had to remain tied to port cities and rivers in order to continue receiving food shipments.

Transport by water proved nearly impossible because grain spoiled and animals died, because it was expensive, because Americans attacked British ships when they could, and because the British treasury remained ill-informed about how long ships would take to reach America and how much the troops would eat once ships docked.

Further inland, at least in the Southern theater, transportation was relegated to overland routes because rivers proved unnavigable.71 Spoiled food was just the start of British shipping difficulties, but it paved the way for future problems. Initial shipments of flour were actually “American Flour,” probably shipped from the colonies before British-

American relations soured.72 The flour was already quite old when British contractors shipped it back to America for the use of the British troops; naturally, it went bad.73

Similar issues presented with bread, which was sometimes “very bad in quality,” and

“mixed with old bread, musty, and much broken.”74 Meat transports suffered, too. A vice- admiral aboard the Preston in Boston reported that it took a full five days to transport

70 Responsibility for military planning shifted three times before 1775 came to a close. Lord North was in charge first, but was replaced by Lord Dartmouth and then Lord George Germain. Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775-1782 (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 36. 71 Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 121-22. 72 John Robinson to General Howe, 1 May 1776, vol. 4, no. 21, photostat 171, box 1, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 73 Sometimes it went bad just by virtue of sitting too long; at other times, flour “got wet on the Wharfs” and was then “sold & bought again by the Commissaries and served out to the Troops.” John Robinson to General Sir William Howe, Treasury Chambers, Whitehall, 8 April 1777, vol. 4, no. 76, photostat 482, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 74 John Robinson to General Sir William Howe, Whitehall, Treasury Chambers, 14 January 1777, vol. 4, no. 67, photostat 376, box 2, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

78 sheep from Tarpaulin Cove on present-day Naushon Island in Massachusetts. “Fifteen of them died” due to the “very small quantity of hay,” and several additional animals did not survive.75 Attempting to ship live animals from longer distances seemed foolish.

Officials in London possessed no way to accurately estimate the amount of time a ship required to make the voyage from England to America, nor did they anticipate how much food the troops could consume. The Treasury was thus not sure what to prepare. At times no ships arrived because the enemy attacked them. In September 1779 “a Vessel laden with 300 Barrels of Provisions and a considerable Quantity of Rum, on her way to

Manchac by the River Mississippi...unquestionably” fell “into the Enemy’s Hands.”76

British officers began to request the aid of Men of War to patrol shipping harbors, and to accompany provisions ships as guard convoys.77 In April 1776 a contract with Arnold

Nesbitt, Adam Drummond, and Moses Franks arranged for four months’ provisions for

12,000 men.78 By May the Treasury’s “Concern and Distress” was “almost Inexpressible on finding...that no Ships had reached [Howe] from England,” especially because the army’s demands thus far had “drained this Country of Ships,” making future transport impossible.79

75 Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves to Philip Stephens, Preston, Boston, 22 June 1775, Davies, DAR, vol. IX, 192. 76 John Campbell to Henry Clinton, Pensacola, 14 September 1779, 2289, vol. 19, reel 7, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers, 1747-1783, film 57, David Library of the American Revolution (hereafter DLAR), Originals in the Public Record Office, Kew (now the National Archives). 77 Brigadier-General Augustine Prevost to Sir Henry Clinton, St. Augustine, 16 September 1778, vol. 8, no. 14, photostat 1361, box 6, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 78 Treasury Contract with Arnold Nesbitt, Adam Drummond, and Moses Franks, 2 April 1776, vol. 4, no. 24, photostat 153, box 1, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 79 John Robinson to General Howe, 2 May 1776, vol. 4, no. 26, photostat 177, box 1, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; John Robinson to General Howe, 1 May 1776, vol. 4, no. 21, photostat 171, box 1, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

79

Even when the Treasury became organized enough to decide that shipping from

Cork, Ireland might provide the army with a solution, bread continued to arrive “bad, unfit for Use, mouldy & shipped in bags short of weight.”80 When the Southern campaign opened up, men considered purchasing provisions from Jamaica, but given the West

Indian colonists’ earlier worries about food supplies, they doubtless possessed little to spare except in the way of sugar and rum.81 Rum, of course, kept soldiers happy, but full bottles mixed poorly with empty stomachs. Something had to change, because the current shipping options did not breed reliable results.

In spite of shipping difficulties, Whitehall officials’ early willingness to exercise lenience regarding military spending for food transportation subsequently gave way to pressure. In June 1776, for example, William Howe received word that “No dependence” would be “placed as yet in any resources that you may draw from America, for the support of the Army.”82 London officials expressed their preparedness to supply the bulk of soldiers’ provisions by sea while they waited to see what Howe and others could gather from the countryside. Yet by September 1777 the Treasury begged William Howe

“to relieve this Country from this burthen” of “The expence of freight.” They would continue to ship him foodstuffs, such as the oats he had recently requested, only so long as Howe encountered “a total inability to be otherwise supplied.”83

80 Mr. Gordon, Commissary at Corke, to John Robinson, 20 August 1776, vol. 4, no. 56, photostat 249, British Headquarters Papers, box 2, NYPL. 81 Brigadier-General John Campbell to General Sir Henry Clinton, Pensacola, 10 February 1779, vol. 13, no. 1, photostat 1737, box 8, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 82 John Robinson to General William Howe, Whitehall Treasury Chambers, 24 June 1776, vol. 25, no. 71, photostat 220, box 2, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 83 John Robinson to General Sir William Howe, Whitehall, Treasury Chambers, 25 September 1777, vol. 4, no. 94, photostat 678, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

80

Moving provisions by land proved no easier than by sea. Suppliers encountered difficulties droving cattle in large numbers, and could only offer them for purchase during certain seasons. In the winter of 1782 the roads around Niagara became so muddy,

“that the Cattle are knocked up”—or hurt—a report a Briton heard first by word of mouth, but was later “obliged to Confirm...from Occular demonstration.”84 In West

Florida in 1779 the British could procure no cattle because March was “the breeding

Season for Stock in general,” and because the local rivers were so high that they prevented “what Cattle is in the Country [from] being hunted up.”85 Suppliers encountered trouble finding ground corn in the South, because it was “either ground by

Negroes on the Plantations or by those kept for Domestick uses.” The war deprived many

Southerners of their slaves, and those who managed to retain them jealously hoarded the ground corn those slaves produced. None could “be bought Ground in a Markett.”86

British commissaries had to resort to buying cumbersome bushels of corn, and erecting campgrounds near grist mills for the purpose of grinding grain.

British food supplies also suffered from winter ice, summer heat, and plagues of insects. In June 1781 Charles Cornwallis had to threaten that men who left “Putrid Meat or anything else that may be Offensive...lying about” would have their rum rations stopped, most likely because rotting supplies fostered disease and attracted vermin.87 The cold wrought equally harsh conditions, and the Detroit winter of 1779-80 “killed most of

84 Allen Maclean to Frederick Haldimand, Niagara, 6 and 16 November 1782, ff. 208, 213, Add. MS 21762, BL. 85 Extract of a letter from Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Dickson to Brigadier-General John Campbell, Manchack Fort, 12 March 1779, vol. 13, no. 6, photostat 1820, box 8, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 86 Thomas Nixon to John Robinson, 1 March 1776, vol. 4, no. 31, photostat 131, box 1, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 87 Orders, 29 June 1781, f. 2, Charles Cornwallis Orderly Book, 1781, 28 June to 19 October, JDR.

81 the Hogs and numbers of Cattle.”88 “A Failure of the Crop throughout this

Province...menasses the Country with the greatest Distress,” wrote Frederick Haldimand from Quebec in 1779. He also acknowledged that Detroit suffered in kind.89 In July 1781

Quebec suffered a drought, which in turn made insects more likely to attack British stores. Northern food caches were “devoured by Caterpillars,” and “Hay, Corn &

Vegitables...suffered in common.”90 Because caterpillars destroyed most of the hay on hand, little remained to feed cattle and horses. Rather than saving the animals for future slaughter, men were forced to consume them or let them starve (an act that would threaten their food security for the ensuing winter).91 Mass slaughters of domesticated animals could prove disastrous if salt for preservation also ran short. Supplies of crops and cattle were tied together; when one failed, Britons worried about the other.

Britons had their hands full contending with shipping issues, ground transportation problems, and unpredictable weather, but they had to find a way to make it work so that they could turn their attention to the more pressing matter of winning victories. They addressed shipping flaws by inspecting provisions more frequently, and figuring out just what they could send in one transport.92 What had been a shipment of provisions for four months in April 1776 became a shipment of provisions for twelve

88 Major Arent Schuyler de Peyster to H. Watson Powell, Detroit, 17 March 1781, f. 22, Add. MS 21761, BL. 89 Frederick Haldimand to Henry Clinton, Quebec, 28 September 1779, 2334, vol. 19, reel 7, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers, 1747-1783, film 57, DLAR. 90 Frederick Haldimand to Guy Johnson, Quebec, 22 July 1781, f. 203, Add. MS 21767, BL; see also Robert Mathews to John Butler, Quebec, 21 July 1781, f. 227, Add. MS21765, BL. 91 See, for example, Alexander McDougall to Henry Laurens, Fishkill, N.Y. 23 April 1778, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vo. 13, 172. 92 For bread inspection see Mr. Gordon, Commissary at Cork, to John Robinson, 20 August 1776, vol. 4, no. 56, photostat 249, box 2, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

82 months by October 1776.93 By 1778, Whitehall and its contractors had agreed that six months provisions per shipment would feed the troops for a respectable amount of time if the vessels sailed on schedule, but not result in devastating loss if Americans captured the ships.94

Because food supplies from the sea and countryside were so unreliable, the

British engaged in victual warfare. They stole food to prevent the Americans from eating and to feed themselves; they attacked the Americans when they were in the midst of doing the same, and they invaded other colonies for food. As Britons swept through

American farms, towns, and villages, they left a trail of destroyed food stores in their wake. When the British abandoned Philadelphia in June 1778, Joseph Plumb Martin described the “cattle killed and lying about the fields and pastures,” some “with a small spot of skin taken off their hind quarters and a mess of steak taken out...wells filled up and mechanics’ and farmers’ tools destroyed,” and cherry trees cut down.95 British destruction told a two-fold tale, in which soldiers sought to feed themselves, but also to mock the Americans they left behind to starve. American inhabitants and soldiers could find no use for a dead, rotting cow with a hunk of meat removed, but the practice of mutilating cattle allowed British men to eat without the trouble of herding slow-moving domesticates. Their demolition of farm tools, wells, and fruit trees served a purpose very

93 John Robinson to Sir William Howe, Whitehall, Treasury Chambers, 22 October 1776, vol. 4, no. 52, photostat 292, box 2, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 94 John Robinson to Arnold Nesbitt, Adam Drummond, Moses Franks, John Henniker, Williams Devaynes, and George Wombell, Whitehall, 17 April 1778, vol. 2, no. 122, photostat 1103, box 5, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 95 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 74.

83 similar to this secondary goal: it showed the Americans that the British were pursuing a campaign of total war designed to demoralize as much as to starve.

British commanders began combining military movements with pillaging trips so that troops could simultaneously attack the rebels and obtain food supplies. Sir Henry

Clinton dubbed his strategy of stealing cattle while on the move, “feeding the army gratis on the resources of the enemy.”96 When Americans went into fields looking for corn they found the British hiding amongst the cornstalks, hoping to force an American retreat in order to make off with the spoils of grain.97 On August 17, 1780, Americans around

Charleston stole “36 Waggons Loaded with Rum, Stores &c.” On August 18, the British stole them all back.98 And as early as 1778, Henry Laurens could predict the results of a

British invasion of South Carolina in terms of lost food stores: 2,000 men, he said, would plunder “not less than 5000 Barrels of Rice in three Weeks...immense quantities of Indian

Corn Pease, Flour &c...[and] horned Cattle Sheep [and] Hogs.”99 Military campaigns, he understood, resulted in devastated crops, stolen cattle, and uncertain food security.

The Americans, meanwhile, began to fight their own battles against food scarcities. The Continental Congress established the Continental Army on June 14, 1775, but differences between that army, state troops, and militia meant that it became a

96 Willcox, The American Rebellion, 243. 97 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 18-19. 98 Charles Town became Charlestown, and then turned into Charleston in 1783; for the sake of continuity I use Charleston throughout this dissertation. Journal of William Seymour, Sargent Major of the Delaware Regiment. In the Southern Expedition from April 16th 1780 to January 17th 1783, 000245, Transcripts of papers relating to South Carolina in the American Revolution, 1780-1782, Peter Force Collection Series 7E, reel 42, RW3379, SCDAH. 99 Henry Laurens, Notes for a Speech to Congress, [December 1778], The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 14, 545.

84 difficult business to regulate food supply and distribution.100 Although the Americans did not suffer overmuch from the shipping issues that plagued the British, many of the same environmental concerns and transportation complications posed conundrums. “I could weap tears of blood” to say it, John Laurens wrote to his father in December 1777, when

“the want of provisions render’d it impossible for us to march.”101 That missive foreshadowed the American army’s difficult winter at Valley Forge, when Washington seriously thought that the army faced only three options: “Starve, dissolve, or disperse, in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.”102 Scarcity plagued the

Americans, too, and small wonder, given their lack of inter-colony communication, lapses in transport, and uncooperative weather.

The long winter at Valley Forge remains the most memorable in terms of bad luck regarding weather, but it stands in good company with other environmental blights. In

1778 Virginia and Maryland wheat fell prey to “the Fly,” most likely the Hessian Fly.

100 In his delineation of Connecticut service, James Kirby Martin states that there, as in most colonies, “virtually all able-bodied males between the ages of 16 and 60 belonged to militia units for the purpose of providing home defense. No one expected militiamen to perform service beyond their colony’s borders. As the war progressed, the distinction between state troops and the militia blurred. State troops more often came to represent detachments of militiamen called up for short-term Continental service. Their purpose was to augment the fighting strength of long-term, hardcore regulars who formed the backbone of Continental forces.” In a separate article he also describes how there were “at least two” Continental armies. The first, of 1775-76, had a “militialike appearance” because it was comprised of citizens of some means, who expected a short campaign. The second group of Continentals “represented ne’er-do-wells, drifters, unemployed laborers, captured British and Hessians, indentured servants, and slaves.” Though this group was motivated more by financial gain than by ideas of virtue and moral superiority, they were also better prepared for battle. Martin, Ordinary Courage, viii, 12n2; Martin, “A ‘Most Undisciplined, Profligate Crew’: Protest and Defiance in the Continental Ranks, 1776-1783,” in R. Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1984), 122-5; see also Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 73-4. 101 John Laurens to Henry Laurens, Headquarters, Valley Forge, 23 December 1777, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 12, 190. 102 George Washington to Henry Laurens, Headquarters, Valley Forge, 23 December 1777, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 12, 192.

85

Violent storms compounded the problem by destroying Virginian mills.103 Obviously, some of the same droughts that the British suffered also affected Americans’ crops and cattle. Heavy snow, driving rain, hungry pests, and stifling summers made life uncomfortable for all—but more importantly, such conditions interfered with efforts to obtain and store food.

The significantly larger size of the theater of war—when compared to Dunmore’s

War or even the Seven Years’ War—meant that everyone needed to range farther for food. In 1777 George Washington warned Henry Laurens that he and his troops had exhausted all of the forage around Philadelphia, making it difficult to continue feeding domesticated animals. American soldiers complained about the “many inconveniencies” in “moving from one plantation to another in search of provisions” because it made it difficult to monitor “the motions of the Enemy.”104 Bringing the food to the soldiers, on the other hand, proved no easier. Whereas tardy ships bothered the British, bad, frequently “impassable” roads stymied the Americans.105 At other times they lacked the cash “to pay for carting provisions.”106 And during still other moments, military suppliers

103 Jeremiah Wadsworth to Henry Laurens, Philadelphia, 29 September 1778, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 14, 369. For more on the Hessian Fly’s origins in western Asia and transportation to New York during the war, see Brooke Hunter, “Creative Destruction: The Forgotten Legacy of the Hessian Fly,” in Cathy Matson, ed., The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives & New Directions (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), esp. 242-3 104 Major Fras. Moore to [Anthony Wayne], 11 March 1782, f. 90, vol. XV, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 105 Jeremiah Wadsworth to Henry Laurens, Philadelphia, 29 September 1778, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 14, 369. 106 James Caldwell to General Lee, Turkey, 12 December 1776, 226-7, vol.1, box 1, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS.

86 possessed “neither faith, honor, or integrity,” a failing which made the arrival of succor uncertain.107

Thus the Americans had to articulate a means for keeping themselves fed. In addition to imposing on inhabitants in much the same way as their British counterparts, the American army also conceived of a set of rules for food distribution, and encouraged a state of preparedness among the soldiery. Rather than risk unduly angering colonists

(and thus hurting their base of moral support), in 1775 the army turned to imposing stricter internal rules and regulations for controlling food supply. Non-commissioned officers and soldiers were not to sell or waste “ammunition, arms, or provisions, or other military stores, delivered out.” Whereas these two types of men faced a court martial if they violated this rule, officers faced a reduction of their rank “to a private centinel.”

Anyone who aided “the enemy with money, victuals, or ammunition” would suffer punishment by court martial. These rules charged officers with the task of keeping a watchful eye on suttlers (people who sold stores). “Persons permitted to suttle shall supply the soldiers with good and wholesome provisions at a reasonable price,” the regulations stated, no doubt as a precaution against the distribution of rotting stores.108

These rules also seemed designed to encourage cooperation between the colonies.

One important regulation stated the colonies should share the spoils of war equally. It read, “All public stores taken in the enemy’s camp or magazines, whether of artillery, ammunition, clothing, or provisions, shall be secured for the use of the united

107 John Sullivan to George Washington, Providence, 27 November 1778, 119, vol. 4, box 2, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS. 108 “REMAINDER of the RULES and ARTICLES begun in our last, for the better government of the TROOPS raised, or to be raised, and kept in pay by and at the joint expence of the twelve united ENGLISH colonies in NORTH AMERICA...” Virginia Gazette, July 29, 1775, no. 1251.

87 colonies.”109 This point was clearly an attempt to make certain that no soldiers starved while others ate well. Like so many colonial-era rules and laws, these regulations did not always work, and so the American army’s back-up plans entailed squirreling away food supplies, learning to make do with the foodstuffs at hand, addressing flaws in transportation, and sending soldiers out for food rather than transporting provisions to soldiers. When things were quiet, especially during the winter, commanders sent men such as Joseph Plumb Martin out to forage for food so that they would not remain in camp and deplete meat stores.110 Like the British, the Americans eventually settled on providing estimates for six months of provisions at a time, when possible.111

When these strategies for obtaining food proved unsuccessful, the American military resorted to victual warfare. In characteristic fashion, Joseph Plumb Martin unrepentantly reflected on his many little acts of pilferage. Although one might argue that these instances of Martin’s thefts do not seem like victual warfare, they matter because of the logic Martin employed to explain his actions. In describing a fellow soldier who stole food for him—“some boiled hog’s flesh” that Martin suspected “was not pork” at all—

Martin argued that “Necessity drove him to do it.”112 He recalled how officers forbade the soldiers access to 2,500 barrels of flour they were charged with guarding. “We used, however, to purloin some of it to eat and exchange with the inhabitants for milk, sauce,

109 “REMAINDER of the RULES and ARTICLES begun in our last,” Virginia Gazette, July 29, 1775, No. 1251. 110 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 65n1. 111 See, for example, W.R. Davie to Thomas Burke, Halifax, 4 September 1781, folder: “Governor Thomas Burke correspondence, July 13, 1781-May 2, 1782, box 2, Governor’s Papers, Series Two, NCSA. 112 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 33.

88 and such small matters as we could get for it,” he wrote.113 Sheer need was vindication enough for soldiers’ crimes of stealing, even when they committed these actions against the orders of their commanders. His reasoning is important because it is representative of the military’s mindset regarding more significant thefts (call them impressments) of colonists’ crops and cattle: the necessity of hunger vindicated those who commited acts of theft and violence, and set a precedent that excused Native Americans’ thefts on similar grounds.

And the Americans were certainly guilty of more notable thefts of food. In June, when provisions in Boston were slim, General Thomas Gage reported that the rebels employed themselves “driving sheep off an island,” presumably to keep them from

British mouths.114 Henry Clinton remembered that during this time the Americans confined “the King’s troops...within a circle of scarcely two miles diameter,” and “seized every avenue from the surrounding country, whereby” they deprived the British of “all supplies of fresh provisions.”115 During other instances they made incursions into

Georgia to burn rice, and as the British feared, “to destroy all [their] Provisions.”116 One colonist hoped that the British army under General Howe would “in the Course of this

Winter be Starved out” by the end of the 1777-78 winter, indicating Americans’ rosy

113 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 20. 114 Thomas Gage to the Earl of Dartmouth, Boston, 12 June 1775, Davies, DAR, vol. IX, 170-1. 115 Willcox, The American Rebellion, 18. 116 For rice-burning see Major General Augustine Prevost to Sir Henry Clinton, Savannah, 30 March 1780, vol. 15, no. 24, photostat 2664, box 12, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; for “destroy all our Provisions,” see Governor Sir James Wright to Lt. Governor John Graham, Savannah, 20 April 1780, vol. 15, no. 267, photostat 2693, box 12, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

89 optimism, but more notably, their acknowledgement of the fact that military bodies attempted to force victories by threatening their enemies with starvation.117

Food shortages provided men with a rationale for rebelling against their senior officers, as well as an organized venue for voicing their complaints.118 In South Carolina in July 1775, the “want of Provissions” caused “much Murmuring” among the soldiery.119 By August officers had addressed the soldiers’ complaints, and assured them that “the Public meant to do all that could be done for them consistent with the nature of discipline & the calamitous situation.” This encouragement obviously proved insufficient, because around midnight on the night of the 6th “a most dangerous mutiny had broke out in & prevailed throughout the whole Camp.” The officers wisely waited until the next morning, when the men appeared quieter. Then, the men in charge promised the soldiers that their officers “would endeavour to encourage People, of whom many were willing” to “supply the camp” with food.120 These sorts of promises worked in 1775, before both armies stripped the countryside bare, but it grew more difficult to address soldiers’ complaints as the war continued.

117 Cornelius Harnett to Thomas Burke, York, Pennsylvania, 20 November 1777, folder 3, box 1, Thomas Burke papers, Collection 104, SHC. 118 For the phenomenon of rebellion more broadly, see Martin, “A ‘Most Undisciplined, Profligate Crew’: Protest and Defiance in the Continental Ranks, 1776-1783,” in Hoffman and Albert, Arms and Independence, 119-40. 119 William Thomson to Henry Laurens, Granby, 29 July 1775, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 10, 254. 120 To be sure, part of the soldiers’ complaints stemmed from a reduction of their pay, but the following events also make it clear that the men complained about provisions shortages. William Henry Drayton and William Tennent to Council of Safety, Congaree Store, 7 August 1775, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 10, 280-83.

90

Provisions scarcities continued to cause discontent among the rank and file.121 In

1777 at Valley Forge Washington found “that the Men were unable to stir on account of provision, and that a dangerous mutiny, begun the night before and which with difficulty was suppressed by the spirited exertions of some Officers, was still much to be apprehended.”122 Over time officers’ abilities to quell dissent decreased. In May 1780 the

Connecticut line mutinied because of their trials with “the monster Hunger.” They gathered into their regiments and paraded in protest, and refused promises from their officers. After hearing about the arrival of “a large drove of cattle,” the men responded,

“Go and butcher them” without standing down. After a group of Pennsylvania men almost joined the mutineers, an officer attempted to comfort the men: “Your officers suffer as much as you do,” he reasoned. “I had not a sixpence to purchase a partridge that was offered me the other day.” The officer ignored the fact that few of the ordinary soldiers encountered the chance to purchase partridges, and equated his hunger with theirs. It was not his words, but rather the arrival of “provisions directly after” that quieted the troops.123 Similar repetitions of soldiers mutinying over food shortages occurred in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey lines early in 1781 (the British even tried to win the men over to their side with promises of food), and in Virginia in 1783.124 The

121 I do not want to understate the extent to which these mutinies were frequently accompanied by violence. During the 1781 Pennsylvania line revolt “two of the officers of it lost their lives,” and the messengers Sir Henry Clinton sent to sway the Americans to the British side were hanged. Ralph Izard to Richard Henry Lee, Philadelphia, 16 January 1781, reel C23, Lee Family Papers, 1638-1837, Mss 1 L51f 215-684, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, VA (hereafter VHS). 122 George Washington to Henry Laurens, Headquarters, Valley Forge, 23 December 1777, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 12, 192. 123 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 109-112. 124 For The Pennsylvania line issues see 7 January 1781, Copy of Proposals from New York, to the Penn. line, vol. XII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP; for New Jersey as well as Pennsylvania, see Willcox, The American Rebellion, 240-1; for Virginia see Major P. Swan to Nathanael Greene, [location illegible], 28

91 uncertainties of war and the constant fear of scarcity sometimes led to revolt as those feeling powerless sought out a way to voice their discontent.

***

After traversing the mountains of words that people wrote about food and eating during the American Revolution, a few patterns become apparent. From these conventions, scholars can set forth a description of what white soldiers ate during the war and how victual warfare functioned, in order to understand how the foodways of black soldiers and Native Americans deviated. Although this chapter is more concerned with how people dealt with scarcity, rather than in describing the types of food people actually ate, it seems necessary to describe a soldier’s basic diet for the purpose of future comparisons. It should be noted that prescription and practice diverged heavily, as evidenced by the fact that soldiers complained frequently about hunger.

A British ration, which suppliers figured by the week, consisted in theory of seven pounds of bread (or seven pounds of flour), seven pounds of beef (or four pounds of pork), six ounces of butter (or eight ounces of cheese), three pints of peas, and half a pound of rice (or oatmeal).125 Britons included a ration of spruce beer as a safeguard

March 1783, General Correspondence, vol. 3, reel 2, Nathanael Greene papers, MSS24026, microfilm shelf no. 13,421, LOC. 125 This information is compiled from a few separate contracts. Note that sometimes the British army dispensed peas in lieu of oatmeal, rather than peas in addition to oatmeal. Treasury Contract with Arnold Nesbitt, Adam Drummond, and Moses Franks, 2 April 1776, vol. 4, no. 24, photostat 153, box 1, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; John Robinson to Arnold Nesbitt, Adam Drummond, Moses Franks, John Henniker, William Devaynes, and George Wombell, Whitehall, 17 April 1778, vol. 2, no. 122, photostat 1103, box 5, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; John Robinson to Messrs. Nesbitt, Drummond, and Franks, Treasury Chambers, 7 November 1778, vol. 33, no. 56, photostat 1534, box 7, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

92 against scurvy.126 Soldiers considered camp cooking an unsavory chore. Each morning men who messed together pooled their money, and sent a few men “to market to buy

[the] provisions” they lacked, such as fresh vegetables, if available. They then drew lots to determine “who should cook.” When men had kettles they made soups or stews. “I managed this affair indifferently,” recalled one British soldier. Once the meal was ready the cook brought it to his comrades, who gathered in a circle around the divided portions.

One man covered his eyes, and another called out “who shall have this?” The portions fell to whomever the first man named. A few of the men possessed knives, “while others had none; as to spoons and forks, we were all in one case, destitute, and [had] no porringers or bowls.” They solved this problem by using their canteen tops as spoons.127

The American ration was similar, but also varied in a few ways. Some colonies calculated their ration by the day, rather than by the week. Joseph Plumb Martin stated that he and other enlistees “were promised...One pound of good and wholesome fresh or salt beef, or three fourths of a pound of good salt pork, a pound of good flour, soft or hard bread, a quart of salt to every hundred pounds of fresh beef, a quart of vinegar to a hundred rations, [and] a gill of rum, brandy, or whiskey per day.”128 Martin’s ration slightly exceeded the British one for pork, and made mention of other commodities such as salt and rum—the last two of which were definitely included in British planning, but

126 John Robinson to General Howe, Whitehall, Treasury Chambers, 10 August 1776, vol. 4, no. 46, photostat 238, box 2, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; John Robinson to Gen. Sir William Howe, Whitehall, Treasury Chambers, 22 October 1776, vol. 4, no. 52, photostat 292, box 2, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 127 [Anonymous], A Soldier’s Journal, containing a particular description of the several descents on the coast of France last War; with an entertaining account of the Islands of Guadaloupe, Dominique, etc. and also of the Isles of Wight and Jersey. To which are annexed, observations on the present state of the army of Great Britain (London: Printed for E. and C. Dilly, in the Poultry, 1770), 10-13. I am grateful to William P. Tatum III for pointing me to this source. 128 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 164.

93 which they dealt with separately from food rations. Georgians’ rations demonstrate the greater flexibility that Americans enjoyed depending on the region in which they fought; in addition to a beef or pork option, Georgia also allowed for a substitution of a pound of salt fish. Suppliers could swap beans or vegetables for peas. In addition, men were supposed to receive milk rather than cheese, as well as spruce beer or cider.129 Before campaigns, soldiers often cooked two days’ provisions beforehand, and ate their fare cold when an opportune moment presented itself.130 Both sides ate horses as a precaution against starvation.

In 1793, by the time the war was long over, officers expected Americans soldiers to abide by regulations that governed their cooking and diet. They were to breakfast at eight in the morning, and eat lunch (or “dine,” as they called it) at one. “Meat shall be boiled & soup made” of it, because in this manner, they believed “the greatest possible nourishment is to be obtained.” Good soldiers “never attempt to wast or fry” their meat, because they believed that in using this mode of cookery, the meat lost “a great part, of its nourishment by drying up.”131 Whether men abided by these regulations or ignored them is difficult to say, but the fact that they existed points to the American military’s efforts to standardize diet and prevent waste.132

Britons and Americans struggled to keep their troops healthy and well-fed, but these three goals sometimes clashed with each other due to conflicting views of what

129 26 June 1776, folder: “volume 3, Minutes, Aug. 1776-Feb. 1777,” Georgia Council of Safety, MS 282, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, GA (hereafter GHS). 130 1 September 1776, Andrew Hunter Revolutionary War Diary, M-2097, JDR. 131 General Orders, 1 December 1793, f. 39, vol. XXXI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 132 I am inclined to believe that the soldiery ignored these rules more often than they followed them, because of the fact that many commanders complained about the absence of camp kettles. Without a cooking vessel for making soup, roasted meat seems like a more realistic option.

94 constituted healthy and tasty food. Americans in the North tended to save rice “for the use of the Sick.”133 In the South, by contrast, men expected rice “as an addition” to a ration that included salt pork.134 One historian’s observation that Southern plantation owners in Charleston preferred rice to flour with their meals may help account for this difference.135 Notwithstanding regional differences within the colonies, Americans serving in Northern campaigns sometimes interpreted British consumption of rice instead of bread as a sign of weakness. When the British occupied New York City in 1778,

American scouts saw the fact that “they serve their Troops with Rice and Peas” as an indication of their “straitened” state.136 And indeed, they probably observed correctly: the

British preferred flour to rice for a few reasons. The troops “frequently murmured” when given rice, indicating their feelings that flour was superior—they may have looked down on a food grown primarily in North America. Those higher in command, such as

Brigadier-General Augustine Prevost, explained that rice was less convenient “for want of Kettles.” Soldiers could mix flour with water to make flatbread baked on rocks heated in the fire, but without a cooking vessel, rice was useless.137

Other types of food differed by value from place to place, but getting used to this sort of fare took some time for all soldiers, regardless of their location. In the Northern

133 22 February 1778, Head Quarters, Valley Forge, George Weedon, Orderly Book, MS 973.3.W41, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter APS). 134 General Orders, 27 January 1776, f. 22, Orderly books of William Moultrie, 1775, June 20-1780, Dc. 15, HM 681, the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA (hereafter HL). 135 Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 50. 136 John Nixon to John Sullivan, Camp White Plains, 25 July 1778, 5, vol. 3, box 1, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS. 137 Brigadier-General Augustine Prevost to Sir Henry Clinton, Ebenezer, 15 March 1779, vol. 15, no. 173, photostat 1829, box 8, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; see also Brigadier-General Augustine Prevost to Sir Henry Clinton, Savannah, 16 April 1779, vol. 15, no. 179, photostat 1925, Box 8, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

95 theater of war freshly-killed livestock would keep longer because of the cold weather. In the South, the “Hot Climate” meant that fresh meat required “serv[ing] out every Day,” a fact that forced the army to rely more on unhealthy salt provisions—hence, perhaps, the addition of rice because people believed that eating it kept sickness at bay.138 In 1793— after the official end of the Revolution, but at a time when the country was still embroiled in war with the Western Confederacy Indians—General Anthony Wayne observed that it usually took a full three years for a soldier to become accustomed to living off his ration.139

Some types of provisions—namely alcohol and meat—presented problems for both armies from the 1770s all the way to the 1790s. People were fond of drinking, as

Richard Caswell’s 32 toasts might testify, but alcohol consumption frequently impeded the troops.140 After a draught of whiskey on an empty stomach, Joseph Plumb Martin wryly complained, soldiers were not fit to climb a fence: “many or most of them, to keep a regular balance between head and heels...would pile themselves up on each side of the fence, swearing and hallooing, some losing their arms, some their hats, some their shoes, and some themselves.”141 Soldiers sent out for specific purposes “forgot the Business they went upon” after finding “a concealment of Rum” and drinking “much off” it.142

Men braved desertion by drinking heavily, and then arrived in the enemy’s camp “too

138 Brigadier-General Augustine Prevost to Sir Henry Clinton, Savannah, 16 April 1779, vol. 15, no. 179, photostat 1925, box 8, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 139 Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Hobsons Choice, 9 May 1793, f. 77, vol. XXVI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 140 For a comparative example to Caswell’s pre-Revolution toasts, see [Lieutenant John Jenkins], 4 July 1779, A Journal of the West Expedition Commanded by the Honorable Major General Sullivan began at Eaton, June 18 1779, vol. 5, box 2, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS. 141 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 49. 142 John Campbell to Captain Robert Mathews, Montreal, 22 February 1781, Add. MS 21772, BL.

96 drunk to give any satisfactory answers” regarding the other side’s intended campaigns.143

Alcohol also caused dissention within the ranks. A reverend had to accusingly ask a soldier whether his “too large a dose of the Balsam of Sugar cane” provided the explanation for that soldier’s emergence from his tent “like a Mad-Man” at ten o’clock at night, only to “wantonly, brutally & cruelly...plunge [his] Bayonet into the Body of a

Heifer that unluckily” ambled by.144 Alcohol made men incompetent, disloyal, and unruly.

Domesticated animals, and especially cattle, presented their own set of problems because the armies transported them live.145 Some suppliers refused to move more than

400 oxen at a time.146 En route, the cattle required a guard at night, and had to be

“collected in proper places...and held ready to be driven off at a moment’s warning” in the case of attack.147 It was hard work maintaining live cattle, and not an easy task to kill

143 John Laurens to Henry Laurens, Charles Town, 14 March 1780, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 15, 252. 144 Reverend T[homas] C[harles] H[eslop] Scott to Barry St. Leger, Sorel, 13 October 1781, Add. MS 21734, BL. 145 Despite problems, the American army observed a fairly standardized method for allotting cattle for rations, and attempting to use all parts of the animals they butchered. A “Common beef” weighed approximately 400 pounds, “besides the 5th quarter,” weighing 30 pounds, which the army used for tallow, and another 25 pounds from the hide. “84 Beeves” “computed to Twenty Thousand Rations,” meaning that one animal provided 238 rations, or 238 pounds of consumable beef. For “Common beef” see John Belli to Henry Knox, 12 July 1792, f. 22, vol. XXI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP; for “84 Beeves” see D. Hillhouse to [George Walton], 12 August 1789, 285, Georgia Military Affairs, Volume I, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow, GA (hereafter GDAH). For standardization of weights of oxen, butchered beef and pork, bacon, and barrels of flour, see Forms Adopted for the regulation of the Books of Account & Returns of the Commissary of Issues at the post of Pittsburgh, 1 January 1795, box 1, United States War Department records, MSS76072, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (hereafter LOC). 146 Elliott & Williams to [unknown], Fort Washington, 16 June 1794, f. 5, vol. XXVI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 147 John Sullivan to Major Porter of Colonel Wigglesworth’s Regiment, Head Quarters, Providence, 2 January 1779, 181, vol. 4, box 2, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS.

97 them. British butchers sometimes started their work at four in the morning.148 An

American observed that after pulling down the horse, cow, and hog pens in his camp, his men carted off “sixty six cart load[s] of dung.”149 Large amounts of forage proved necessary to produce such stupendous amounts of excrement, and British cattle were sometimes especially picky eaters; one man reported that the maize for the cattle was “so extremely Hard the Cattle will not eat it unless ’tis broken.”150 This case recalls Britons’ difficulties in obtaining ground corn in the South. Apparently the state of grain affected men and beasts alike.

***

At the same time that Americans and Britons wrangled with supply, health, and taste issues, food gradually became a way of understanding, communicating, and fighting. The practical aspects of food emerged early in the war; the symbolic and metaphorical meanings associated with food are trickier to pin down, and harder still to explain. In December 1775 the British in Boston used food to summarize the first months of battle against the Americans. Referring to a losing skirmish against General Israel

Putnam on November 17, an unnamed Irish officer “humourously said on the occasion, that indeed we have gained by the loss...all you have sent by way of troops to this continent are but a mouthful. If you send more to add to us, we may make them a dinner, and you may continue to supply them with a supper, and then it will be a good night!”

The Irishman used black humor to bemoan the fact that the Americans figuratively fed

148 6 August 1781, f. 16, Charles Cornwallis Orderly book, 1781, 28 June to 19 October, Special Collections, JDR. 149 John Lowrey to Anthony Wayne, 6 November 1792, f. 96, vol. XXII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 150 Thomas Nixon to John Robinson, 1 March 1776, vol. 4, no. 31, photostat 131, box 1, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

98 off of British blood. He concluded his soliloquy by citing Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I:

“Indeed we may say with Falstaff with great propriety, that ‘they make us here but food for gunpowder.’”151 This officer’s speech conveyed his sense of hopelessness and fear that British men were being cut down needlessly without advancing the military’s position. His use of food to make his point suggests that by this time, soldiers were enmeshed in a world of food scarcity, and readily recognized the irony that British bodies

“fed” the Americans, even as both sides went hungry in reality.152 The same was true in

August 1776, when Henry Laurens wrote about British enemies, “who talked of nothing less than eating us up.”153

After months of victual warfare—stealing crops and domesticated animals, and wreaking starvation on their enemies—food shortages began to play a key role in ratcheting up tensions. Though any number of instances serve to highlight the role of food in this respect, the best, perhaps, may be an exchange between British General

Henry Clinton and American Charles Lee regarding the exchange of American prisoner of war Ethan Allen. “I am extremely desirous of redeeming Allen,” wrote Lee. In order to sweeten his entreaty, Lee took “the liberty to request” that Clinton would “accept a small quantity of fruit and vegetables,” which he assumed “are not easily procured” in the

151 “Extract of a letter from an officer of the army in BOSTON,” Virginia Gazette, December 2, 1775, no. 1269. 152 The Irishman’s sentiment was accurate, but he was misquoting Shakespeare. The correct quotation is Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I:

Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better: tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.

William Shakespeare, King Henry IV Part I, IV. ii. 67-69. 153 Henry Laurens to Martha Laurens, Charles Town, 17 August 1776, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 11, 253.

99

British camp.154 After Lee noted British scarcities and sarcastically offered the eighteenth-century equivalent of a fruit basket, Clinton refused his request. Lee’s disingenuous offer of extra provisions turned out to be a misstep. Although Lee intended the gesture as a way to display American strength, it proved too ineffective to redeem an important prisoner. Small wonder that Ethan Allen remained a prisoner until 1778.

When British and American soldiers met unofficially on roads and in fields without explicitly planning to fight, discussions of food frequently preceded violence. In

1777 John Laurens explained that a group of American militia and a British detachment made “a practice of firing at each other without com[in]g to any action.” The Americans had “call’d to the British soldiers...promising them Beef and Flour.” The “Red-coats in return ask’d them to come and partake of their Salt.” The two groups then “proceeded to abuse” each other, and eventually began “discharging their pieces...without any other effect as far as they know than wounding a Hessian Yager.”155 A similar instance occurred in 1781, when Joseph Plumb Martin encountered a group of British horsemen near Harlem River, New York. “They advised me to come over to their side, and they would give me roast turkeys. I told them that they must wait till we left the coast clear, ere they could get into the country to steal them.” The British “then said they would give me pork and ’lasses.” After Martin insulted them some more, the British fired at him, and

154 Copy of a letter from Charles Lee to Major General Clinton, Charleston, 3 July 1776, f. 20, Charles Lee Letterbook, 2 July-27 Aug. 1776, South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, SC. 155 John Laurens to Henry Laurens, Headquarters, White Marsh, PA, 7 November 1777, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 12, 33; the same letter appears with slight variations in John Laurens to Henry Laurens, Head Quarters, 26 November 1777, Laurens, The Army Correspondence of Colonel John Laurens, vol. I, 70-71.

100 he escaped unhurt.156 Given the ways in which scarcity encouraged desertion, it is also possible that another layer of communication occurred in these instances: perhaps the soldiers used the lure of food to encourage their enemies to desert because they were reluctant to wound each other. Although in times of peace the act of sharing food could indicate a sharing of cultures and a way to effect diplomatic goals, the connotations of food sharing during war became more complicated.

***

Early on in 1774, when many people still hoped for reconciliation, colonists could read signs of hope in British crop failures and in patriotic toasts to the mother country. As a peaceable way to express their discontent, Americans fasted, produced their own liquor, and began to stockpile food in the event that war broke out. Some people proved less willing than others to participate in activities meant for the good of the colonies as a whole. Other colonies, such as those in the West Indies, found themselves imposing on mainlanders when supplies ran short and they feared a slave rebellion. Ultimately, people tended to pledge their loyalty to the entity that did not threaten their food security. Yet peoples’ pledges of loyalty to a steady food supply tell only a portion of the story, and elides those moments of agency when people acted to control their food choices.

Uncertainties about food supply gave way to victual warfare. Colonists reacted against people responsible for blocking their access to food; they punished those whose decisions to supply food to the British marked them as untrue to the patriot cause; and they killed and maimed the domesticated animals of British officials. Britons deprived

156 Martin, Ordinary Courage, 127.

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Americans of food in order to starve them physically and challenge them mentally. By seizing and reselling stolen food, Britons reminded colonists that rebellion led to starvation. Americans fought back by safeguarding their stores of provisions and producing alternative ones, and by making sure that towns and villages remained at the bare minimum level of food security in case the British attacked. As war became imminent, Americans and British alike began to set up rules for provisioning, while their troops showed the first signs of discontent in the face of hunger. Once military actions commenced, British and American troops frequently faced the prospect of food shortages as a result of transportation hiccoughs and unpredictable weather. Troops stole and destroyed crops and animals, and common soldiers frequently stole provisions. Scarcities challenged soldiers’ loyalty, and throughout the Revolution troops threatened to mutiny when a state of hunger prevailed for too long.

The vicissitudes of wartime food supply created a number of channels through which power flowed. Colonists’ self-interested behavior initiated American and British battles over food and other goods. Military suppliers alternately begged and coerced people into giving up their meat and grain. Although they did not really appeal to colonists diplomatically, both militaries definitely exercised nascent forms of victual warfare. On a more metaphorical level, soldiers began to use foodways to talk to enemies. Americans in Boston pointed out their camp comforts in an attempt to contrast them to British soldiers’ sufferings, and started to suggest that soldiers could obtain better food by switching sides. Idealistic depictions of steady rations obviously contrasted with

102 reality, and the rank and file had to test the authority of more important officers when those men failed to deliver sustenance.

As Americans and Britons would discover, the methods they used to obtain food and allegiance from colonial inhabitants and soldiers did not work as consistently for their other allies. White soldiers may not have eaten particularly well, but they possessed the luxury of rioting over inadequate food supplies. Although Indians could also revolt against food scarcities, the same did not necessarily hold true for the free blacks, and slaves who served in the British and American militaries. For these groups of peoples, the outcome of power struggles over foodways remained much more unpredictable.

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Chapter 2: “What he now related he heard the Officers talk over at Table”: Black Food Networks

In his seminal 1961 monograph The Negro in the American Revolution, Benjamin

Quarles relates a local legend of a slave cook named Dinah, who “on a June morning in

1781, prepared such a succulent fried chicken breakfast for British officer Banastre

Tarleton and his staff, and served it in such leisurely fashion, that a messenger found time to ride to Charlottesville” and warn the Americans of the imminent arrival of British troops.1 In another tale, George Washington visited Fraunces Tavern in New York City, where a free black girl named Phoebe—the tavern owner’s daughter—“supposedly thwarted an assassination attempt against Washington by throwing a plate of poisonous peas out the window to the chickens.” The birds ate the peas, “and immediately died.”2

The reliance on chicken as a plot device in these stories highlights the incredibility of the tales, given the long and troubled mythology of foods such as fried chicken and watermelon in African American foodways.3 And indeed, Quarles discounts the legend because of the dearth of sources to confirm its veracity, and the story about Phoebe is merely that: a story.

What matters, however, is that during the American Revolution the myth of black people using food to sway the course of events turns into a reasonable representation of reality: free blacks and slaves did use food in ways that set them apart from white soldiers, and foodways enabled them a say in the ways in which the Revolution unfolded.

1 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1961), xi. 2 Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, & Power (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 19. 3 Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs.

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Given the alacrity with which slaves ran to the British, it should not appear surprising that

Britons considered using formerly enslaved Africans as supplemental forces to their armies. Their decision to include blacks eventually forced the American military to do the same. The food scarcities that plagued both military entities affected black forces in unique ways. When food ran short, commanders frequently sent former slaves out first to raid for food because those men knew where on the plantations of previous masters they could find it. This strategy engendered two simultaneous effects. It put free blacks and escaped slaves at greater risk, because Americans did not differentiate between free and enslaved British allies when they caught them in the act of raiding. On the other hand, blacks’ abilities to venture out on such pillaging expeditions also imbued them with comparatively greater mobility.

White colonists’ fears about Britons’ thefts of their slaves also reflected their worries about assaults on plantation foodways. Because Southern planters conflated the loss of slaves with the loss of other property, it became easy for colonists to equate the absence of slaves with other forms of victual warfare that decreased their access to foodstuffs. Only after the British explicitly stated that they would continue encouraging slaves to abscond from plantations—thus threatening Southern food security—did

Southern colonists rise against the British. Only after Lord Dunmore said that he would keep harboring slaves did Carolinians and Georgians make a concerted effort to withhold food from British troops, thus curtailing the ease with which British ships and sailors traveled upriver.

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Once they entered the theater of war, people of African descent used food to leverage their positions as cooks, waiters, and consequently, as informers. As a result of the fact that blacks in British and American military establishments served sporadically and without the same degree of attention accorded to white soldiers, slaves and free blacks found themselves distinctively positioned. Blacks inhabited multiple roles: they were laborers, bearers of arms, and obtainers and producers of food. Their military responsibilities forced them to range farther from military forts, but also made them privy to meetings of higher-ranking officers when they remained in or returned to camp. Blacks used their positions—in the sense of their physical location, as well as with respect to their military stations—to become purveyors of news. Free blacks and slaves used food during various moments as means of declaring allegiance, fighting back, and simply surviving; they served Americans and Britons in ways that allowed them to use food to obtain and retain power.

***

Historians agree that writing about free blacks and slaves in the American

Revolution is a difficult task. Gary Nash’s recent and aptly-titled The Forgotten Fifth suggests that too many historians remain unaware of the roles that a not insignificant portion of the black population played in the war.4 Benjamin Quarles attributed this difficulty in tracking blacks to the fact that the American regiments were not segregated.5

Some scholars such as Judith Van Buskirk have systematically compiled lists of known

4 Gary B. Nash, The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 5 Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, xi.

106 black soldiers, using the pensions that former soldiers filed after the war.6 Although such records provide a starting point, they only offer details about the records of black soldiers who managed to survive the war, and do not tell the story of British-allied blacks. In the main, historians must resort to combing through manuscripts in order to piece together a representative sample of blacks’ service. Although mostly black units saw action at the

Battle of Rhode Island on the American side, and Lord Dunmore possessed his own

“Ethiopian Regiment,” free blacks and slaves pop up unpredictably and intermittently in the historical record. Based on names alone it is difficult to tell when someone is slave or free, and whether they served as a soldier allowed to bear arms, or as a wagoner, cook, waiter, or camp follower.

The work of previous scholars has been useful in thinking about the challenges of mapping blacks’ military service, and also in allowing me to see how foodways can fill in some of the remaining gaps. Sylvia Frey’s claim that the American Revolution was a

“triangular process,” or a triagonal war, has proved helpful, though I disagree with her delineation of the three groups of Southern actors: “two sets of white belligerents and approximately four hundred thousand slaves.”7 As I hope I have made clear, I think that

6 Judith L. Van Buskirk, “Claiming Their Due: African Americans in the Revolutionary War and Its Aftermath,” in in John Resch and Walter Sargent, eds., War & Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization and Home Fronts (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 132-60. 7 Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 45; For other works, see Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Alan Kulikoff, “Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790-1820,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Urbana, IL: The University of Illinois Press, 1986 [1983]), 143-171; Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,

107 at least six heterogeneous sets of belligerents fought against and alongside of each other: rebel American inhabitants, Loyalist inhabitants, British troops, American troops, Native

Americans, and blacks. Frey suggests the idea of a triagonal war to emphasize the continuing power of those thousands of current and former slaves; battles over food further clarify this picture by illuminating the additional ways in which various groups leveraged their access to edible commodities as a bargaining tool. Whereas food is a useful analytical tool for charting white soldiers’ changing loyalties, it becomes absolutely essential for writing the histories of groups who leave behind even fewer written records.

With the advent of British-American fighting, colonists’ fears about a slave uprising quickly manifested themselves because violence threatened eighteenth-century food security in a myriad of ways. The memory of Tacky’s War was less than two decades old, and slaveholders feared resurrection closer to home, given the fact that only recently colonists had unearthed conspiracies in Colleton, Loudon, and Fairfax counties in South Carolina.8 In April of 1774, South Carolinian Henry Laurens worried about the state of his plantations and the slaves he had recently purchased. Having bought about a hundred “Grumetas” slaves—skilled laborers, otherwise known as “Island” slaves—he reflected that he “would not land one of these Negroes in Charles Town except Such of

1998); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Arming Slaves:From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 180-208; Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 88. 8 Egerton, Death or Liberty, 50.

108 them as are to continue there by their own Choice.”9 Like their West Indian counterparts,

Southern planters evinced their unwillingness to house new slaves when the threat of war loomed at their doorsteps. Northerners also feared rebellions. By March 1775 colonists had received word of a planned rebellion in Ulster County, New York, including the towns of Hurly, Keyserick, Kingston, and Marbleton. Although the story concluded that it did “not appear that there is any good foundation for this report,” such apprehensions only served to aggravate tensions.10

Worries about a slave uprising also exacerbated colonists’ fears about uncertain

Indian affairs and the possibility of a combined attack from Natives and slaves. When

Henry Laurens pondered whether or not to bring new slaves to Charleston, he indicated that the possibility of an Indian attack influenced his decision-making process. He would import slaves as long as the “Neighbouring Indians [were] quiet.” In the case of “an

Indian War in Carolina,” however, he asked his friend (and future Continental Congress delegate) John Lewis Gervais, to “dispose of” his “Negroes in the best manner you can.”11 Laurens’s missive demonstrates that colonists found it difficult to separate their ideas about the state of slave relations from fears about Indian violence in neighboring areas. Indeed, colonists feared Indian-slave alliances and did what they could to encourage hostility between the two groups by employing Indians to catch runaway

9 Henry Laurens to John Lewis Gervais, Westminster, 9 April 1774, George C. Rogers, Jr. and David R. Chestnutt, eds., The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 9, 396; see also At a Council, 5 July 1776, vol. 2, Georgia Council of Safety, MS 282, GHS. In West Africa the term “grumetas” referred to castle or fort slaves. Philip D. Morgan, “Africa and the Atlantic, C. 1450 to C. 1820,” in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 224. 10 Virginia Gazette, March 18, 1775, no. 1232. 11 Henry Laurens to John Lewis Gervais, Westminster, 9 April 1774, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 9, 396.

109 slaves and using slaves to defend against Indian attacks.12 Colonists sporadically encouraged some slaves to draw upon military traditions that hearkened back to previous lives in Africa.13 More frequently, colonists employed Indians to fight slaves. In 1776, for example, South Carolinians wanted to use Southern Indians to stop slaves who ran. In

February the Council of Safety asked the Catawbas to scout for runaways in the parishes of St. George, Dorchester, St. Paul, and St. Bartholomew.14 In March, South Carolinian

Stephen Bull opined that runaway slaves “had better be shot by the Creek Indians, as it...will establish a hatred or Aversion between the Indians and Negroes.”15

Despite colonists’ efforts to foster antipathy, however, slaves and Indians sometimes found common ground, a process which resulted in the forging of syncretic

12 Relationships shifted from accommodating to hostile and back again, at different times and for different reasons. Furthermore, Kathryn Braund has discussed how Indian slaveholding differed significantly from Anglo-American slaveholding. The Creeks, for example, initially took Apalachee, Floridian, and Choctaw Indians as slave captives; only with the influx of the deerskin trade did slaveholding become a racially charged institution, and even then Creeks treated African slaves differently than Americans did. Kathryn E. Holland Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 57, no. 4 (November 1991), 601-636, esp. 601. See also James H. Merrell, “The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 50, no. 3 (August 1984), 364; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 477; Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 263; Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 9; Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72-5; Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775-1782 (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 63; Piecuch, “Incompatible Allies: Loyalists, Slaves, and Indiansin Revolutionary South Carolina,” in Resch and Sargent, War & Society in the American Revolution, 195; for a comparative example, see Matthew Restall, ed., Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2005). 13 Frey, Water from the Rock, 48. 14 In the Council of Safety, Tuesday, 20 February 1776, Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society (Charleston: Published by the South-Carolina Historical Society, 1859), vol. III, 263-4. 15 Stephen Bull to Henry Laurens, Savannah, 14 March 1776, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 11, 163. The British also employed Indians to capture slaves, whom they either resold, or, as the war continued, allowed into service. See for example Frederick Haldimand to John Campbell, Quebec, 16 July 1781, f. 211, Add. MS 21773, BL; Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 16 September 1779, f. 69, Add. MS 21774, BL.

110 foodways. Slaves who spent time living among Indians, such as John Marrant with the

Cherokees and David George with the Creeks, received support from them in the form of food and shelter.16 Some escapees ran to the Creeks and became Seminoles in Florida, where Britain and Spain encouraged Seminoles and slaves to ally together in order to form a buffer zone that protected against American expansion.17 A slave named Ketch escaped to Southern Indian agent George Galphin’s post among the Creeks. There, he served as an interpreter and conveyor of essential diplomatic speeches between Cusseta and Coweta Creeks and the Americans.18 Indeed, escaped slaves who ran to Indians such as the Creeks became adept at translating multiple languages, thus paving the way for new iterations of food diplomacy.19 And obviously language was not the only form of exchange: Natives also introduced slaves to new foods, such as marsh marigold, milkweed, and pokeweed boiled with corn bread for extra sustenance.20

Colonists’ fears were so potent not only because they worried about violence, but also because at least in the South, assaults on slave labor threatened food production and, consequently, food security. Enslaved Africans plowed fields, grew rice, cooked their

16 “A NARRATIVE OF THE LORD’S wonderful DEALINGS WITH JOHN MARRANT, A BLACK,” (London, 1785), and “An Account of the Life of Mr. DAVID GEORGE, from Sierra Leone in Africa; given by himself in a Conversation with Brother RIPPON of London, and Brother PEARCE of Birmingham,” (London, 1793-1797), in Vincent Carretta, ed. Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 126, 334; For David George receiving food from Creeks, see Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 617. 17 Historian Jim Piecuch has asserted that even though the British wanted to employ Loyalists, Indians, and slaves as support, their failure to conceive of a plan for concerted service made Indian-slave alliances (as well as other types of alliances) difficult, if not impossible to achieve. Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 334; see also Frey, Water from the Rock, 80. 18 Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 71. 19 Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 607, 623. 20 William C. Whit, “Soul Food as Cultural Creation,” in Anne L. Bower, ed., African American Foodways: Explorations of History and Culture (Urbana: IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 48.

111 masters’ dinners, and brought food to market.21 When possible slaves also used their private pelicula to produce and sell food to whites and free blacks in local marketplaces.22 Slaves planted gardens that produced vegetables, raised chickens for meat and eggs, and supplemented their diet with hunting and fishing. Especially in the

Lowcountry, what Ira Berlin has called a “local provision economy” prevailed.23

Although differences in foodways existed between the Lowcountry and the

Chesapeake—Lowcountry slaves ate less maize and meat from domesticated animals, and thus grew more vegetables, foraged more frequently, and were likelier to incorporate

African influences into their foodways—slaves in both of these regions produced some of the food that made it to their masters’ tables.24 Slaveholders probably worried about losing property when slaves ran away, but the actions of the British military also threatened slaveholders who depended on slaves to produce their food.

21 The original, now outdated work for slave foodways is Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross. Although cliometrics came under fire some time ago, their research still serves to highlight the range of foods that the enslaved might have produced. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), esp. 111. For more recent works, see Usner, Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy, 277-78; Robert L. Hall, “Food Crops, Medicinal Plants, and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” in Bower, African American Foodways, 23; Whit, “Soul Food as Cultural Creation,” 45-58; Bower, African American Foodways; Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs. 22 Sidney Mintz notes that Bryan Edwards, an eighteenth-century Jamaican writer, used the term peliculum to refer to “land held by a slave as private property.” The word “continued to appear in descriptions of the slaves’ customary, (as opposed to their legal) claim on resources in which their own labor had been invested.” I am grateful to Marc-William Palen for helping me to sort out the correct Latin plural usage. Sidney W. Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 53. On the market as a place where men sold slaves versus the market as a place for slaves to sell produce, see Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 145; Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs, 20. See also Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, NC: the University of North Carolina Press, 2003), ch. 2, esp. 46-49. 23 Ira Berlin, “Introduction,” in Berlin and Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, xix. 24 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 134, 145.

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Nowhere was this connection between slaves and food production more apparent than in the ways that colonists and British officials talked about losses of slaves as losses of food. Sometimes they talked about crop failures and slave losses in tandem; at other times they explicitly valued slaves no differently than edible commodities. In 1778 John

Lewis Gervais wrote to Henry Laurens and acquainted him with the state of Laurens’s affairs. A boat laden with rough rice “arrived last Week,” wrote Gervais, but I am sorry to acquaint you that Tom Peas is also dead.” Gervais reflected, “Poor Tom Peas, I am sorry you have lost him, upon the whole he was a good Negro,” before he immediately continued his letter: “The Ruff rice sells...but not readily, it has been a little damaged for want of Care,” he wrote.25 The juxtaposition of the damaged rice with the death of Tom

Peas demonstrates how Southerners spoke of their produce and their slaves in one breath.

Even Tom’s name associated him with produce—and the type of produce a slave might grow in his garden, at that. Gervais voiced sympathy for poor Tom Peas, but that sympathy did not distract him from the more pressing issue of Laurens’s rice. To say that

Tom Peas was, like the rice, “damaged for want of Care,” does not accurately depict Tom

Peas’s treatment.

In other instances, Britons and colonists encountered difficulties in separating thefts of slaves from other forms of victual warfare, such as thefts of cattle or horses; they depicted slaves as mere food sources whose loss by theft was lamentable.26 August of

1776 witnessed British and unidentified British-allied Southern Natives making

25 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, Charles Town, 16 July 1778, John L. Gervais Letters, 1772-1810, Copies, Call number 43/0096, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC (hereafter SCHS). 26 On Americans’ tendencies to conflate losses of slaves with losses of horses, see Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 626.

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“alarming incursions into Georgia, carr[ying] off a considerable number of Negroes and not less than two thousand head of cattle.”27 In October 1777 Georgians’ “Domestics” ran to the British while “Their Scouts & Indians...carry off our Stock.”28 When future governor of South Carolina Arnoldus Vanderhorst reported his damages in the wake of a

British attack, he recorded “Stock of Cattle sheep Hogs Horses” at £2,000, and “30

Negroes 2/3 grown” as well as “Negro Men” valued at £1,200 total.29 People lost slaves and animals in one attack, and remembered their absence at the same time. March 1778 witnessed “Planters totally ruined by the Negroes being taken by the Rebels” in New

Orleans.30 South Carolina resident Paul Trapier, who died before the war was won, lost

“10 young Negroe men.” Immediately after listing his slaves taken, his losses detailed

“Almost the whole produce of...Rice, Corn, Oates &ca,” as well as “Cattle & sheep,” and other “Cattle, Hogs & Goats.”31 Thefts of slaves resulted in further losses of crops, because no slaves remained to grow them, and in losses of animals, because no slaves remained to guard them. Whites detailed their losses by listing so many horses, cattle, and slaves missing, in addition to bushels of corn burned, liquor stolen, and buildings destroyed.

As the threat of a British invasion loomed nearer, British governors began to consider making appeals to colonists’ slaves—a fact that further threatened Southerners’

27 Copy of a letter, Charles Lee to Richard Peters, Charleston, 2 August 1776, f. 52, Charles Lee Letterbook, 2 July-27 August 1776, South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, South Carolina. 28 Joseph Clay to Henry Laurens, Savannah, 16 October 1777, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 11, 560. 29 Losses of Arnoldus Vanderhorst by the British, 1780, folder: “12/194/33,” Arnoldus Vanderhorst papers, 1763-1817, 1169.02.01, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC. 30 William Wilton to John Stuart, New Orleans, 8 March 1778, vol. 29, no. 238, photostat 997, box 5, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 31 Losses sustained by the underwritten, during the British War in America, Paul Trapier, Losses sustained during the British war in America, c. 1783, 43/0508, SCHS.

114 food security. The London metropole initially voiced no intention of arming slaves; rather, British officials on the ground periodically proposed swaying blacks to their side when their forces required additional aid. During the time the British held Boston, John

Graves Simcoe, commander of the Queen’s Rangers, requested that a friend “ask of

General Gage” whether Simcoe “might enlist such negroes as were in Boston.” Gage declined, pointing out that “the negroes were not sufficiently numerous to be serviceable.”32 At the time, the British were managing to superintend the government of

Boston, and thus control the distribution of foodstuffs, without receiving additional assistance. That policy would change by the end of 1775.

In the spring of 1775 colonists feared slaves’ growing awareness of the increasingly unstable nature of the American countryside, and they also worried about the

British army’s potential ability to induce their slaves to run away or revolt. The possibility that slaves could take foodstuffs with them when they absconded may have worried American colonists, especially those newly invested in the practice of stockpiling food or trying to avoid reliance on foreign commodities. In mid-April Lord Dunmore infuriated Virginians with his decision to remove a quantity of gunpowder from the

Williamsburg powder magazine. He unconvincingly claimed that he had moved it to protect white Virginians in the event of a slave rebellion. Virginians argued that the absence of powder would encourage revolt, rather than stymy it. “Some wicked and designing persons have instilled the most diabolical notions in the minds of our slaves,” they responded. Casting their eyes toward future uncertainties, they implied that “the

32 John Graves Simcoe, A Journal of the Operations of the Queen’s Rangers, From the End of the Year 1777, to the Conclusion of the Late American War (Exeter: Printed for the Author, 1787), ii.

115 utmost attention to our internal security is become the more necessary.”33 Although the colonists did not accuse Dunmore of fomenting rebellion, they implied that he made it easier for their slaves to rise.

And indeed, by May Dunmore was admitting privately that he intended to encourage rebellion. The Earl of Dartmouth referred to a May letter sent by Dunmore in which Dunmore claimed, “that with a Supply of Arms and Ammunition [he] should be able to collect from amongst Negroes Indians and other persons a force sufficient if not to subdue Rebellion at least to defend Government.”34 Here then, were colonists’ fears about Indian-slave revolt realized—but the situation was even worse than they could have imagined: rather than acting independently, Britons themselves would pull the strings, and induce slaves and Native Americans to attack together.

Historians have acknowledged the fact that Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of

November 1775 effectively severed good relations with Virginia colonists, but the announcement also resulted in Virginia’s decision to alter its food policy with respect to supplying enemy ships.35 In his Proclamation Dunmore invited “every person capable of bearing arms to resort to his Majesty’s STANDARD,” including “all indented servants,

Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms.”36

By specifying that he would receive only slaves belonging to rebels, Dunmore may have

33 “The humble ADDRESS of the Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen, and Common Council of the city of Williamsburg,” Virginia Gazette, April 22, 1775, no. 1237. 34 Earl of Dartmouth to Dunmore, Whitehall, 2 August 1775, 603, Dunmore Correspondence Jul 1774-Mar 1776, TR13.2, Special Collections, JDR. 35 Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 18; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2006 [2005]), 7; Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: Capricorn Books, 1976), 24-5; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 81-2; Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects, 238. 36 For the proclamation, see “Williamsburg, Nov. 25,” Virginia Gazette, November 25, 1775, no. 1268.

116 hoped to maintain good relationships with Loyalists. The fact, however, was that determined slaves could and did run from Loyal and rebel masters alike. Slaveholders possessed good reasons to be nervous, because Dunmore’s Proclamation produced palpable results. Slaves ran to the British in unprecedented numbers. By 1777, planter

Robert Carter estimated that 1,500 slaves had “availed themselves” of Dunmore’s offer.37

One historian has estimated that 20,000 slaves fought for the British.38 Another puts their numbers at 15,000, citing an additional 5,000 who fought for the Americans—mainly in

New England.39 Eventually, 5,000 Virginia and Maryland slaves departed from the

Eastern Shore and the lower James River; approximately 13,000 escaped from South

Carolina. Combined with runaways from North Carolina and Georgia their numbers comprised about five percent of all blacks in the South.40 South Carolina and Georgia lost the most—almost a fourth of their pre-Revolutionary slave populations.41

Numbers alone do not convey the effects of Dunmore’s words, which encouraged the British to accept other runaways and to arm them. Britons eventually conceived of other plans to enlist blacks. In April 1778 the British in Boston contemplated raising a regiment to welcome runaways.42 At the Siege of Savannah in 1779, armed slaves, who

37 Robert Carter to Messrs. Thomas and Rowland Hunt, Merchants London, 18 April 1777, Robert Carter Letter Book, Vol. III, Robert Carter Letterbooks 1772-1793, TR 7.2, JDR. 38 Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 8. 39 Egerton, Death or Liberty, 6. 40 Alan Kulikoff, “Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790-1820,” in Berlin and Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 144. 41 Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 666. 42 Major-General Robert Pigot to General Sir William Howe, Newport, 10 April 1778, vol. 9, no. 180, photostat 1083, box 5, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

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“did wonders in the working way and in the fighting...shewed no bad countenance.”43

Henry Clinton’s 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation promised “full Security” and “any

Occupation which he shall think proper” to “every Negroe who shall desert the Rebel

Standard.”44 Not all of these efforts worked to Britons’ advantage; Clinton’s decision in particular pushed otherwise-loyal inhabitants into supporting the Americans.45

Southern colonists demonstrated their displeasure with the British by withholding food from them, which precipitated hostilities in 1776.46 Only after slaves continued to run to Dunmore did Southern colonists decide that they no longer needed to provide the

British with provisions. In December 1775 the South Carolina Council of Safety resolved that if British ships “continue[d] to receive and detain slaves,” they would order that the supplies of provisions for the British navy “be discontinued.”47 A week and a half into the month, the Council subsequently resolved that the British practice of sheltering runaway

43 Major General Augustine Prevost to Sir Henry Clinton, Savannah, 2 November 1779, vol. 15, no. 219, photostat 2402, box 11, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 44 General Sir Henry Clinton, Proclamation, Head Quarters, Philipsburg, 30 June 1779, vol. 15, no. 132, photostat 2094, box 9, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 45 Frey, Water from the Rock, 141; James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783-1870 (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1976), 2. 46 Sylvia Frey asserts that in the South the Revolution became “a war about slavery, if not a war over slavery.” Similarly, Ira Berlin suggests that the Revolution “divided planters among Patriots and Loyalists and forced both to employ their slaves in ways that compromised the masters’ ability to invoke state authority.” Jim Piecuch argues against Frey’s claim that Britons’ use of American slaves polarized the South completely, stating that because “British officials tried to disrupt the system of slavery as little as possible,” some of Frey’s claims are overstated. I am inclined to believe that concerns in the South stretched far beyond a war over slavery, but am not particularly interested in tracing the formation of Loyalist and rebel allegiances to the British call for runaways. Rather, I am asking how the British quest for slaves’ service ended Americans’ willingness to supply them with food, because it seems to me that Americans felt as if their refusal to withhold food was a logical response to British actions. Frey, Water from the Rock, 326; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 219; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 10. 47 In the Council of Safety, Charles Town, 8 December 1775, Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, vol. III, 66.

118 slaves justified their decision “to cut off all communication” with the British.48 By

December 18th, Henry Laurens had written to the captain of the British ship Tamar, and told him that South Carolinians saw “less reason...for supplying provisions at this time” because of the “robberies and depredations committed” by “black armed men, from on board some of the ships under your command.”49 As colonists had feared, the practice of sheltering runaways gave way to the practice of allowing former slaves to plunder their masters’ plantations. Colonists heartily disapproved. In January 1776 the Cherokee joined the Tamar, plus another armed schooner and an unnamed sandwich packet, and the ships made sail from South Carolina to Georgia in search of foodstuffs. “Since the practice of harbouring & protecting our Negroes on board the Cherokee,” wrote Henry Laurens, “we have refused to Supply them” with provisions, thus verifying that South Carolina had indeed ceased to provision British ships. He expected that the British were bound for

Georgia “to obtain provisions of Bread.”50 It was a victory of mixed emotions for South

Carolina rebels. Their refusal to provide food forced the British to move elsewhere—but it also probably guaranteed that their missing slaves would remain at large after they gained passage on the departing ships.

By the end of the month the British transformed the provisioning issues into a question that forced people to take sides. Andrew Barclay, the commodore of those ships, decreed that inhabitants who refused “to Supply provisions or attempt an hostile defence”

48 Henry Laurens to Captain Thornborough of the Tamar sloop of war, In the Council of Safety, 18 December 1775, Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, vol. III, 95. 49 In the Council of Safety, 18 December 1775, Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, vol. III, 95. 50 Henry Laurens to Archibald Bulloch, Charles Town, 2 January 1776, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 10, 607; the same letter appears in Extract of a Letter from Henry Laurens to Archibald Bullock, 2 January 1776, vol. I, Georgia Council of Safety, MS 282, GHS.

119 would “be deemed & treated as Rebels.”51 Barclay warned Governor Wright of Savannah

“That if they coud not be Supplyd with provisions they certainly” would take Savannah

“by Force...& will if in their power attack this Town & destroy it.”52 Wright had no choice but to acknowledge that the British could cause considerable damage, and furthermore, his continuing loyalty to Great Britain probably made him willing to allow the British entry into Savannah. Given the fact that by this time Georgia inhabitants had forced Wright to flee the colony, however, he could do nothing to prevent inhabitants from monopolizing food stores: in February Barclay wrote to Wright and angrily complained that anyone residing in “his Majesty’s Dominions” should be able to obtain provisions at “the Market Price.”53 After losing their food producers, Southern colonists regained control of the marketplace by refusing to provide Britons with provisions at fair prices. Stealing American slaves had been in part a British act of victual warfare; the

Americans responded in kind by withholding food from former friends.

As the British became more willing to welcome slaves into their ranks, Americans made it clear that slaves who ran would suffer. Colonists threatened their slaves with execution, transportation out of the colonies, and whipping. They may have envisioned some punishments as a way to stop escaped slaves from enacting victual warfare against former masters during their raids for the British army. In July 1775 North Carolinians decided to appoint patrollers to search for slaves away “from their masters Lands without

51 Henry Laurens to Georgetown Committee, Charles Town, 25 January 1776, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 11, 70. 52 Conversation & information to the Town of Savannah from Govr. Wright by Doctr. Jones & Jos. Clay, 18 January 1776, folder 7, Joseph Vallence Bevan Papers, MS 71, GHS. 53 Andrew Barclay to James Wright, Scarborough, 19 February 1776, vol. I, Georgia Council of Safety, MS 282, GHS.

120 a pass,” and gave these patrollers the power “to take the said slave or slaves and give them thirty nine lashes or less if they think proper.” A slave “found with any fier arms or aminition in his or her possession,” and who did not “willing surrender their arms” was liable to be shot, and patrollers received permission to “seise and take away any such arms and sell them at Public sale.”54 Slaves who possessed arms, colonists reasoned, could have received them from the British. Guns marked blacks as British-allied men, and consequently, as possible enactors of victual warfare. In December 1775, the

Virginia Committee of Safety decreed that any slave found “in arms against this colony, or in the possession of an enemy, through their own choice” would suffer transportation

“to any of the foreign West India islands.”55 By the 14th of that month, an act of the

General Assembly proclaimed, “that all Negro or other slaves, conspiring to rebel or make insurrection, shall suffer death, and be excluded all benefit of clergy.”56 As time went on, Virginians, along with other Southerners, instituted more and more strident punishments for slaves throwing their lots in with the British.

Americans’ punishments of escaped slaves reached a new height when colonists sought to carry out expeditions against former slaves who stole food. In 1775, the approximately 500 black runaways living on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, learned how aggressively the Americans castigated former slaves who engaged in raids of

54 8 July 1775, Pitt County, copies of records of the County Committee dealing with taxation and other matters, Folder 1, 1774-1779, Revolutionary War Papers, 1774-1779, 2194-Z, SHC. 55 “An ORDINANCE for establishing a MODE of PUNISHMENT for the ENEMIES in AMERICA in this colony, passed at a CONVENTION held in the city of WILLIAMSBURG on Friday the 1st of December, 1775,” Virginia Gazette, January 27, 1776, no. 1277. 56 Virginia Gazette, December 16, 1775, no. 1271.

121 plantations.57 In December Colonel William Moultrie planned “a Secret Expedition” against the island comprised of a detachment of 150 men.58 Moultrie instructed the major in command to seize the blacks, set fire to their buildings, and drive off or destroy all the livestock.59 Moultrie’s orders were in keeping with other concomitant campaigns in which aggressors burned what they could not carry. The expedition was initially delayed, but took place later in December. Many of the blacks received warning beforehand, and so absented themselves. On December 19th, Henry Laurens reported “such a check yesterday morning, as will serve to humble our negroes in general.” He described how a company of 54 foot rangers under the command of a lieutenant descended on Sullivan’s

Island, “burnt the house in which the banditti were often lodged, brought off four negroes, killed three or four, and also...destroyed many things which had been useful to the wretches in the house.”60 Such expeditions against escaped slaves served as a warning to would-be runaways: colonists would kill those who ran, and destroy their means of supporting themselves and their families.

Eventually, however, American colonists realized that unless they wished to risk all of their slaves running, they would need to reconsider blacks as viable additions to military units. The inclusion of slaves into British and American military affairs foreshadowed changes in blacks’ foodways. In their postwar pension records, African

57 Schama, Rough Crossings, 88. 58 General orders, 7 December 1775, f. 17, Orderly books of William Moultrie, 1775, June 20-1780, Dec. 15, HM 681, HL. 59 Major Pinkney’s Instructions, 9 December 1775. Signed Wm. Moultrie, Charles Town, 7 December 1775, f. 17, Orderly books of William Moultrie, 1775, June 20-1780, Dec. 15, HM 681, HL. 60 Henry Laurens to Col. Richardson, Charles Town, 19 December 1775, in Journal of the Council of Safety, Appointed by the Provisional Congress, November, 1775, Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, Volume III, 102.

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American veterans recalled serving most frequently in the Battles of Monmouth, Stony

Point, and Yorktown.61 Typical soldiers served with the infantry as privates, and sometimes without arms. Approximately 250 slaves bet their lives on the chance for freedom and joined Rhode Island’s black battalion. Connecticut, too, formed an all-black company, the Second Company of the Fourth Regiment. Massachusetts and New

Hampshire also sent slaves to war. For the most part, slaves serving in the American military worked in mixed regiments throughout the Northern states, and sometimes in tandem with Indians, such as in Rhode Island and Connecticut.62

The inclusion of blacks rose and fell with the tides of war: immediately after

Lexington and Concord the Americans began to accept slaves into military units, but by early 1776 state militias passed acts that excluded blacks, mulattoes, and Indians. By the end of that year, however, Dunmore’s Proclamation had forced Americans to reconsider.63 By early 1777, even the Southern states were partially on board: Virginians recruited free blacks, and many of the enslaved passed themselves off as free in order to join.64 In 1778 John Laurens proposed taking some of his father’s “able bodied slaves” to form a group he conceived of romantically as “defenders of liberty.”65 Henry Laurens initially refused his request, but John Lewis Gervais proposed a similar slave regiment, thus demonstrating that at least a few prominent South Carolinians took the notion

61 Van Buskirk, “Claiming Their Due,” 137. 62 Frey, Water from the Rock, 79; Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 12, 74-75. 63 Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 13-19. 64 McDonnell, “‘Fit for Common Service?’: Class, Race, and Recruitment in Revolutionary Virginia,” in Resch and Sargent, War & Society in the American Revolution, 108. 65 John Laurens to Henry Laurens, Head Quarters, 14 January 1778, and John Laurens to Henry Laurens, Head Quarters, 2 February 1778, The Army Correspondence of Colonel John Laurens, vol. II, 108, 116; the first letter also appears in The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 12, 305.

123 seriously.66 Laurens himself would give voice to his son’s proposal in public, but the

Continental Congress declined the plan in 1779.67 Americans Anthony Wayne and

Nathanael Greene followed suit with similar ideas in 1782.68 The enthusiasm of the

Southern colonies, however, should not be overstated: rather than recruit blacks, South

Carolina considered bribing potential white enlistees with the promise of one slave per year of service, and offering a slave “to all & every person & persons who shall procure

Twenty Five Recruits to Inlist.”69 Americans’ adoption of slaves as soldiers occurred piecemeal, when it happened at all. Once Americans and Britons allowed blacks into their armies, they needed to decide how to feed them.

***

Before the Revolution, slaves prepared meals for themselves and their masters.

But whereas before the war slaves’ feet carried them from big house kitchens to masters’ tables, and sometimes, to market, during the Revolution blacks’ responsibilities in procuring food lent them a greater degree of physical mobility. They traveled from forts to plantations to steal food, and from camp to camp to transport it. Although some slaves in the prewar period did leave their masters’ plantations to engage in religious worship at night, they had to return by daybreak. During the war, by contrast, military commanders expected the blacks in their militaries to absent themselves at all times of day. Free blacks

66 For Henry Laurens’s disapproval of his son’s plan, see Henry Laurens to John Laurens, York, 6 February 1778, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 12, 412; for Gervais, see John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, Charles Town, 16 March 1778, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 13, 5. 67 Egerton, Death or Liberty, 81-83. 68 Anthony Wayne to Governor Martin, Head Quarters, Ebenezer, 19 February 1782, 4, Force Transcripts, Georgia Records, Council Correspondence 1782-1789 & Governors Correspondence, GDAH; Nathanael Greene to Governor Mathews, 11 February 1782, f. 76, reel 1, Nathanael Greene papers, MSS24026, microfilm shelf no. 13,421, LOC. 69 4 February 1781, folder: “General Assembly Committee Reports 1782, #11-13,” box 27, South Carolina General Assembly Committee Reports, 1776-1879, S165005, SCDAH.

124 and escaped slaves leveraged their relationship with food to become the butchers who wandered roads and markets, the wagoners with easy access to extra provisions, and the cooks and waiters who overheard key information that they could convey to curious ears.

That Americans and Britons at times welcomed blacks into their militaries does not negate the fact that at other times they complained about feeding them. Slaves who ran away of their own volition, as well as blacks taken in raids had to be fed, and thus appear in the sources as receivers of food. Dunmore reported possessing “four Ovens and pretty good Barracks for our Ethiopian Corps” in 1776.70 In 1779 the British felt “obliged to victual almost all of the Loyal Inhabitants and many Negroes,” even though the cost

“bore hard upon our Provisions,” given the fact that food stores for the troops stood in a state of “urgent distress.”71 In 1780 Henry Clinton decreed that “those Negroes who belong to Rebels...are to work in the Departments with adequate Pay, Provision, and

Cloathing.”72 The Black Pioneers from South Carolina and Georgia who served the

British received weekly rations, a point which some white Loyalists found difficult to accept.73

People in charge of provisioning rarely articulated a regimented plan for feeding blacks in the same way that they did for white soldiers (and eventually, for Native

Americans). In 1778 when John Lewis Gervais proposed a black regiment, he suggested

70 Dunmore to Lord George Germain, Ship Dunmore in Elizabeth River, Virginia, 30 March 1776, Dunmore Correspondence Jan 1771-Jun 1774, TR 13.1, JDR. 71 Augustine Prévost to Henry Clinton, Savannah, 2 November 1779, vol. 15, no. 219, photostat 2402, box 11, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 72 Sir Henry Clinton, Memoranda for the Commondant of Charleston and Earl Cornwallis, Head Quarters, Charles Town, 3 June 1780, vo. 19, no. 11, photostat 2800, box 13, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 73 Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 32.

125 that these men could survive on one pound of meat and a quart of rice per day.74 Their meat ration was the same as white soldiers, but contained no bread, no flour, no alcohol, and less starch than a white soldier’s ration. Gervais’s ideas were merely hypothetical; other sources reveal that such disparities came to pass. Black refugees serving in the army found their own food and built their own shelters.75 Charles Cornwallis’s orderly book shows that blacks in the Southern campaign received peas instead of flour, which, like rice, proved less convenient to cook if supplies of kettles ran low.76 Given the fact that this switch occurred in 1781 near Yorktown, it is safe to assume that everything was in short supply, and black diets suffered first. Although the lines of the orderly book are at times difficult to decipher, one can see, scrawled in-between general orders, an admission that “Grat abusses” were observed “in vitling the Nigroas.”77 With the exception of the Black Pioneers’ rations, blacks’ foodstuffs stand in marked contrast to the set amounts of food that white soldiers received. After the Americans began using blacks in their armies, however, it became strategically advantageous for both militaries to feed slaves well. In 1775, former slaves had no choice but to stay with Dunmore after they ran; by 1780 they possessed a wider array of options.

On the other hand, perhaps there is another explanation for the shoddy state of blacks’ provisions. Perhaps provisioners felt fewer obligations to take the time to ensure that blacks received proper rations because free blacks and slaves were partially

74 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, Charles Town, 16 March 1778, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 13, 5. 75 Egerton, Death or Liberty, 86. 76 Head Quarters, York, 4 September 1781, f. 36, Charles Cornwallis, Orderly book, 1781, 28 June to 19 October, Special Collections, JDR. 77 Head Quarters, York, 13 September 1781, f. 44, Charles Cornwallis, Orderly book, 1781, 28 June to 19 October, JDR.

126 responsible for obtaining food for the army—and such tasks made it relatively easier to find food. Although blacks’ service comprised other tasks such as building earthworks and making grapeshot, these men also appear in the records of British and American military archives in the capacity of food providers. Women worked as cooks and maids, men cooked, foraged for food, pillaged the countryside for crops and cattle, and waited on officers in army camps.78 Bands of Dunmore’s followers—called “Dunmore’s banditti”—descended on the plantations of former masters, carrying off livestock and crops.79 Titus, a slave of a man named John Corlies, ran to Dunmore in 1775, and though he died before the end of the war, 1778 witnessed his emergence as Colonel Tye, leading raids in New Jersey for food and other necessaries.80 William Allen, aged 23, a “Stout

Man” bound for Halifax in 1783, cooked for the British on board the Nancy.81 After his stay with the Creeks, David George spent time butchering meat for the British around

Savannah, and weeding corn while his compatriot George Liele plowed.82 Charles

Grandison cooked for the Americans, and Shadrack Furman offered provisions to the

British. Levi Burns and James Coopers waited on American officers and served them food.83 Scipio Handley sold fish in Charlestown.84 Given the dearth of cattle, corn, and

78 Sylvia Frey observes a division of labor between black men and women during the war. She says that women were cooks, while men foraged; I am inclined to disagree, having seen evidence of men cooking just as frequently. Frey, Water from the Rock, 169. 79 “WILLIAMSBURG, December 2,” Virginia Gazette, December 2, 1776, no. 1269; Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 29. 80 Egerton, Death or Liberty, 67. 81 Book of Negroes Registered & certified after having been Inspected by the Commissioners appointed by His Excellency Sr: Guy Carleton K.B. General & Commander in Chief, on Board Sundry Vessels in which they were Embarked Previous to the time of sailing from the Port of New York between the 23d April and 31st July 1783 both Days Included, photostat 10427, box 43, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 82 “An Account of the Life of Mr. DAVID GEORGE,” 336; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 38-40, 48. 83 Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 91. 84 Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 21.

127 provisions in various places and at various times, food purveyors would have had to travel to find food.

Most blacks used their abilities as suppliers of food to obtain choice items, pilfer supplies, and travel more widely than other men. Joseph Plumb Martin remembered staying with a Loyalist and speaking with “a Negress” who kept the man’s house. Martin possessed “a fine roasting pig”; the woman had “a number of pies.” After a short discussion they made a trade, and together Martin’s cohort, the woman, and the Loyalist

“made an excellent thanksgiving dinner,” one that Martin described as “the best meal I had eaten since I left my grandsire’s table.”85 At times sustenance trumped declared loyalties—in this case, the woman leveraged her power as a cook to obtain fresh meat, which was rare during wartime. And she must have needed to employ no small degree of persuasiveness, as Martin did not usually part willingly with food in any form.

The military tasks assigned to blacks also offered them key opportunities for seizing poorly-guarded food stores. Pigs made other appearances in searches for food.

Revolutionary War veteran Jeff Stiles “got away with personally requisitioning a Tory farmer’s pig.”86 Camp chores sometimes yielded unexpected windfalls of supplemental grain. In 1780 and 1781 the British in North Carolina and Virginia used blacks to load wagons and shell corn. They observed that “by the Carlessness and little Pilferings of

Conductors, Waggoners, &c,” “about 600 gallons of Spirits and 7000 Pounds Weight of

85 James Kirby Martin, ed., Ordinary Courage: The Revolutionary Adventures of Joseph Plumb Martin, Second Edition (St. James, NY: Brandywine Press, 1999 [1993]), 34. 86 Buskirk, “Claiming Their Due,” 155.

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Flour were lost at different times.”87 No one seems to have made the connection between the fact that blacks loaded wagons and the fact that foodstuffs loaded on wagons were likely to disappear. In a world where hunger posed a constant threat, it seems reasonable to assume that black soldiers took advantage of lapses in surveillance to help themselves to extra provisions, just as Joseph Plumb Martin had done in the Northern campaigns.

Blacks’ quests for food enabled them to pick up key bits of information in their wanderings. Their mobility as conveyors of food to the troops and to various markets allowed blacks to travel through enemy territory and obtain essential pieces of information. Sometimes they shared this intelligence at their peril. Such was Charles

Grandison’s case. British-allied Mohawks captured him near Montreal in September

1779. Grandison stated that he was free, and had lived with a man named Colonel Warner as his cook. Although “every thing was kept a secret from the Men” in camp, Grandison related that, “he heard the Officers talk over at Table,” and was thus privy to their plans.88

By explaining that he was a cook, Grandison could reasonably claim to possess invaluable knowledge. Perhaps the men he spoke to remembered previous meals, during which they too had allowed their tongues to run too freely while their waiters brought food to the table. The British possessed no way to know whether Grandison was actually free, or whether he was a runaway. All they could do was listen to his story.

On pre-Revolutionary plantations, and doubtless in the homes of the London elite, diners would have become accustomed to ignoring the black men and women who waited

87 Messers. Stedman and Booth, Commissaries, A General Abstract of Provisions, Issued to His Majesty’s Army, late under the Command of the Right Honourable Lieutenant-General Earl Cornwallis, on the March of that Army through the Provinces of North-Carolina and Virginia, in the Years 1780 and 1781, f. 5, CO 5/8, the National Archives, Kew, UK (hereafter TNA). 88 Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 16 September 1779, f. 69, Add. MS 21774, BL.

129 upon them. Slaves might have gossiped among themselves, and even passed information on to visiting slaves from other houses. Yet that pre-Revolutionary information network was much smaller in scope. During the war, by contrast, black table waiters could user their invisibility to hear news that would travel much farther.

Grandison’s information garnered credibility because the British were already well aware of American John Sullivan’s punitive campaign against the Iroquois. Whereas middling white soldiers ate their meals crouched outside of tents and around campfires,

Grandison ventured into officers’ tents and overhear their mealtime conversations.

Grandison reported on “an Expedition intended this Winter against Canada,” as well as evidence regarding Sullivan’s 1779 expedition “against the Indians.”89 Daniel Claus, the

British Indian agent who examined him, concluded that he was “most Intelligent.”90 The word conveyed a double meaning in this instance: obviously, Grandison was smart, but he also used his wits to convey actual intelligence to those who mattered. Captain John, the Mohawk who captured him, wanted to make a present of Grandison to a friend, but luckily for Grandison he “was sent to Chambleu” before the Indian could decide his fate.91

Others were less lucky. The Americans caught fisherman Scipio Handley carrying messages for Sir William Campbell, royal governor of South Carolina, thus putting an end to his fish-selling days.92 Free Virginian Shadrack Furman’s experience as a provisioner for the British led to his transformation as informant and guide regarding

89 Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 16 September 1779, f. 69, Add. MS 21774, BL. 90 Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 16 September 1779, f. 69, Add. MS 21774, BL. 91 Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 9 December 1779, f. 87, Add. MS 21774, BL. 92 Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 21.

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American movements. After providing food to the British when Benedict Arnold invaded

Virginia in 1781, the Americans burned his crops and house. When he refused to give the

Americans counterintelligence, they sentenced him to 500 lashes, bludgeoned him with an ax, and left him totally blind and lame in one leg. He eventually made it to England via Nova Scotia, and eked out his days fiddling for pennies.93

Even as they suffered at the hands of vengeful troops, free blacks and slaves used food to proclaim their allegiance when it suited them. Former British governor of East

Florida James Grant received a letter with a note from his “black man” Alexander, who was in St. Augustine. “He wishes much to come to make your bread, for he says he gives no satisfaction to his present master and mistress; his mistress, he said, was “the diáble.”94 In the eyes of some Britons, St. Augustine posed many dangers; free blacks and slaves could leave employers and masters for the promise of better service with

British troops. Alexander used food to appeal to James Grant, voicing a desire to cook for him as a way to indicate continuing loyalty even in spite of the physical distance between them. St. Augustine also suffered frequently from provisions scarcities, and it is possible that Alexander was trying to move somewhere with a better food supply; others in St.

Augustine could have informed him of the possibilities in other locations.

Slaves’ decisions to stay or leave became thornier than simple questions about easy access to food. Sometimes they stayed when they could readily obtain sustenance and good treatment. This statement is not meant to obscure the brutalities of slavery—the

93 Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 127-28; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 79-80. 94 Frederick-George Mulcaster to James Grant, St. Augustine, 3 October 1775, 15, Provincial Congress, Extracts of intercepted letters, 1775-1776, S165248, SCDAH.

131 case of Shadrack Furman demonstrates that sometimes these choices that former slaves made ended poorly—but rather to emphasize the degree to which choices about food figured into slaves’ searches for agency. Samuel Massey, a literate slave of Henry

Laurens, wrote to Laurens to tell him that his slaves at one plantation “can hardly be purswaided to Stay but those at mepkin are all for Staying at home as Both your field and thear oan are in a flurishing way.” Slaves sought to remain where their gardens and fields yielded produce, but they were motivated by more complicated desires as well. Massey revealed that the slaves at the first plantation also enjoyed plentiful crops, but “the negroes does not want to Stay with mr camel.”95 Slaves who disliked a particular overseer may have wanted to run, even if their foodways seemed secure.

In other instances slaveholders tried to persuade slaves to remain with the mere promise of sustenance. In July 1776, after a British ship appeared on the Potomac River,

Landon Carter’s son, Robert, went to his Cole’s Point plantation and called his slaves together. First, he warned his slaves that Dunmore was untrustworthy. Those who ran to him, Carter implied, would likely find themselves sold “to white people living in the

West Islands.” Then, he asked his slaves whether “any of Ye dislike yr present Condition of life,” and wished “to enter into Ld D’s Service.” He recorded their answer: “We do not wish to enter into Ld D’s Service...but we all fully intend to serve you our master.” After hearing such pleasing declarations of allegiance, Carter told them that if any of

Dunmore’s men landed on Cole’s Point, the men should take their “wives, Children, male

& female Acquaintances, beding & tools, removing all into private places...and send a

95 Samuel Massey to [Henry Laurens (no address, docketed by HL received 30 June, p. 307)], Charles Town, 12 June 1780, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 15, 305-06.

132 person off to Nomony Hall...to advise me at wt Place ye are gotten too.” If they served him well in this regard, he would “give Directions, tending for [their] imediate relief.”96

Carter persuaded his slaves to hide themselves and their valuable farm tools, and in return promised to send them enough to survive. None of them deserted him, for the moment.97

Carter attempted to use supplies (which must have included food) as a bargaining tool. Only if his slaves apprised him of their whereabouts would he send them “relief.”

Carter’s promise, however, belied his weak position. If his slaves did run, they would of course take food with them when they departed. And depart they did; eventually, the younger Carter would lose thirty-two slaves when the British came close enough to his plantation.98 His father was similarly unlucky; eight of his slaves ran from him, a fact that

Landon Carter chronicled in his diary with no small degree of venom.99

Some of the enslaved chose to remain on plantations, not because their masters fed them well, but rather because they hoped that they could steal food from absentee masters. Obviously, we know far more about what happened to those whom authorities caught. One Savannah slave named March was caught stealing rice. The “desperate fellow...Cut off his left hand above the Thumb” before threatening an overseer with a knife. It is possible that March maimed himself to avoid being sold.100 The Virginia

Gazette reported that one slave, who was “tried and found guilty of sheep-stealing,” was

96 Robert Carter Day Book, Volume XIII (1773-1776), Robert Carter Letterbooks 1772-1793, TR 7.2, JDR. 97 Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 26-27. 98 James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730- 1810 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 27. 99 Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3-4. 100 John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, Charles Town, 26 July 1777, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 11, 407; the same letter appears in John Lewis Gervais to Henry Laurens, Charles Town, 26 July 1777, John L. Gervais Letters, 1772-1810, Copies, Call number 43/0096, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC.

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“sentenced to be burnt in the hand.”101 As Douglas Egerton has pointed out, branding a slave in the hand was permissible in lieu of execution if the person accused could recite a

Bible verse, thus claiming benefit of clergy.102 Slaves knew the possible punishments for stealing food, but sometimes, it became impossible to resist. The punishment of these slaves speaks to the fact that even though slaves and free blacks used food to further their situations during the war, food also serves to highlight glaring inequalities between whites and blacks. These inequalities are evident in the ways in which blacks in the army were singled out for punishment, and in the systematic victual warfare that Americans carried out against escaped slaves—during the war, and after its conclusion.

All soldiers stole food, but whereas white soldiers such as Joseph Plumb Martin frequently got away with such thefts, the military stringently punished blacks. Johnson

Green, who served the Americans in the Northern campaign, recalled stealing butter, cheese, and chocolate near West Point in 1781. “I only was detected,” he said, “and punished by receiving one hundred stripes.”103 Despite the fact that soldiers regularly succeeded in stealing food, Green received a whipping for his offense. Green was eventually executed in 1786 after embarking on a post-Revolutionary career of thievery during which he had to steal no less than “near a bushel of meal,” “three or four dozen herrings,” “two cheeses,” “thirty weight of salt pork” (and another twenty or thirty

101 Virginia Gazette, January 6, 1776, no. 1274. 102 Egerton, Death or Liberty, 275. 103 “The Life and Confession of JOHNSON GREEN, Who is to be Executed this Day, August 17TH, 1786, for the Atrocious Crime of Burglary; Together with his LAST and DYING WORDS,” (17 August 1786), in Carretta, Unchained Voices, 135.

134 pounds in two other instances), “a quarter of mutton,” and “one case-bottle of rum.”104

Wartime service encouraged thievery, but during the time of the Early Republic such actions translated to capital crimes. When food supplies ran short, former soldiers, and black soldiers especially, suffered first. In London, scarcities also beleaguered former black soldiers; of the many former slaves who petitioned the British, only four received lifetime pensions as compensation for their sacrifices.105

Other escapees made it through the war, and found a place in the new United

States as members of raiding parties who continued to use victual warfare to attack former masters. In 1787, South Carolinians and Georgians found themselves besieged by raids from a group of escaped slaves—or “the daring banditti,” as one brigadier-general called them. The former slaves ensconced themselves on an island on the Savannah

River, which meant their position enabled them to make incursions into Georgia as well.

The raiders had been known to “carry off whole stacks of rice at a time to compensate, as they term it for their incredible magazine of provisions we destroyed in their Camp.”

Escaped slaves who had used victual warfare for the British during the war continued to do so after the Revolution’s official endpoint. Their “magazine” of provisions implied that people used food as a weapon, in addition to relying on it for survival. Black maroon communities no doubt supplemented their food stores in order to support new runaways.

104 “The Life and Confession of JOHNSON GREEN, Who is to be Executed this Day, August 17TH, 1786, for the Atrocious Crime of Burglary; Together with his LAST and DYING WORDS,” (17 August 1786), in Carretta, Unchained Voices, 135. 105 Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 79.

135

Southerners worried about “The free booty they reap,” as well as the fact that “their numbers are daily increasing.”106

Because the possibility of a black-Indian alliance was too terrifying for any

Southerner to imagine, Georgia and South Carolina felt obliged to act quickly to stamp out the black settlement. An early May expedition against the blacks comprised of whites and Catawba Indians “left six of their head men, dead on the ground.” The expedition against the former slaves wounded several others, and removed all “Their baggage & provisions.”107 Blacks’ assistance with British campaigns of victual warfare during the

Revolution left a palpable legacy: in the post-Revolutionary period, former slaves and punitive masters continued to engage in bloody battles over food. For former slaves—and for Native Americans, as we shall see—the War for Independence continued beyond its formal conclusion in 1783.

***

During the American Revolution black food networks became nearly synonymous with information networks. Although Americans may have kept a watchful eye out for escaped slaves, the nature of slavery also lent an air of invisibility to blacks’ movements in camp kitchens and outside of them. Black soldiers surviving on irregular rations, butchers who needed to obtain herds of cattle, men selling fish, and wagoners who transported provisions shared something: they traveled between and beyond liminal

106 James Jackson to the Governor of South Carolina, 1787, Joseph Vallence Bevan Papers, MS 71, folder 10, GHS. This letter is simply dated 1787, so it is impossible to know whether Jackson was writing to William Moultrie or to Thomas Pinckney. Likewise, the following letter in this folder, also dated 1787, is simply address to “the Governor of Georgia.” 107 James Gunn to James Jackson, 6 May 1787, Joseph Vallence Bevan Papers, MS 71, folder 10, Georgia Historical Society, Savannah, GA; Merrell, “The Racial Education of the Catawba Indians,” 371.

136 spaces. Their journeys put them into contact with key information—some of it, strategic and military in nature. Former slaves remained conscious of their power to obtain food and information, and sought to occupy roles that retained and strengthened that connection. They received provisions in return for their service, but so too did they obtain, produce, and prepare various types of foodstuffs. Their jobs allowed them a better idea of how war worked. It also elevated their status and, at times, kept them well-fed.

Black military participants found themselves distinctively positioned to share the intelligence they procured while in the act of finding food—and they used it as a way to broker power.

At the end of 1775, the British began to deliberately incite Indian-slave violence, and to entice slaves away from plantations in an effort to weaken the Americans physically and psychologically. Colonists interpreted their actions as simultaneous assaults on American foodways. Ultimately, it was this attack on American slavery that prompted the colonists to withhold food from the British, and that really tipped the balance toward war. Americans withheld provisions after Dunmore’s proclamation not simply because they were angry, but also because the proclamation was in part an act of victual warfare.

The story of Revolutionary black foodways is also one of gross inequality. Black soldiers who stole food suffered more than white soldiers who committed similar crimes, they ate poorer food, and they went hungry more frequently. Although American and

British soldiers, local inhabitants, Loyalists, and blacks used food—their ability to obtain it, move it, and resell it—as ways of exercising power, food and the lack thereof also

137 became one of the salient characteristics of the American Revolution. Black soldiers starved in droves as Cornwallis pulled out of Virginia, and slaves who continued to engage in food thefts after the war invited the wrath of the new United States.

On August 18, 1783 a Loyalist named John Monier penned a letter to Frederick

Haldimand. He had “Just arrived from N York” with a group of other Loyalists. He had come to Upper Canada “in order to look for Bread in a Strange Country.”108 His was a story shared by black and white Loyalists alike—though that story will have to wait for the later chapters of this dissertation. For now we must turn our attention to the Iroquois,

Cherokee, Creek, and Western Confederacy Indians who used food to make peace and wage war for the duration (and aftermath) of the War for Independence.

108 John Monier’s memorial to Frederick Haldimand, Quebec, 18 August 1783, f. 40, Add. MS 21875, BL.

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Chapter 3: “No useless Mouth”: Iroquoian Food Diplomacy

“The number of Indians victualled at Niagara is prodigious, and if not by some means reduced, must terminate very disagreably,” General Frederick Haldimand,

Governor of Quebec, wrote to a lieutenant at Fort Niagara on September 29, 1780. “No useless Mouth, which can possibly be sent away” must be allowed to “remain for the

Winter,” he concluded.1 Since the autumn of 1779, Iroquois Indians accommodated at the fort had been overtaxing food supplies. Early on in the American War for Independence, the British held the upper hand with their Indian allies, a situation that allowed them to limit the number of mouths they felt compelled to feed. During the later years of war, this strategy proved untenable. American military raids had forced the Six Nations to starve, resulting in a situation that paradoxically allowed Indians to make firmer demands on

British food diplomacy. By the time the northern portion of the conflict came to a close,

Native food diplomacy became the most frequent form in use.

Historians have convincingly asserted that the American Revolution was a disaster for Natives, and it is not the purpose of this chapter to argue otherwise. It is indisputable that the Iroquois League shattered in 1777 and that the population of the Six

Nations decreased by a third during the war as a result of disease and violence. But the declension narrative that paints the Revolution as one of Native economic dependence after 1779 is incomplete.2 By inquiring into the ways in which food diplomacy and

1 Frederick Haldimand to Lieutenant Colonel Mason Bolton, Quebec, 29 September 1780, ff. 146-47, Add. MS 21764, BL. 2 For the foundational works on Native involvement in the Northern theater of the Revolution, see Barbara Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1972), 142; Colin G. Calloway, Crown and Calumet: British-Indian Relations, 1783-1815 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Robert S. Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies: British Indian Policy in the Defence

139 victual warfare mattered to Six Nations Indians during the American Revolution, historians can see just how effectively Natives fought back against control and domination, and why a declension narrative does not tell the whole history of the Iroquois in the American Revolution.3 Indians used food to assert their power, especially after

1779 when Indian autonomy was supposedly waning. Natives were not passive receivers of food stores; they requested food, demanded it, supplied it, and destroyed it.

Food highlights instances of Indian power, which fluctuated throughout the war.

During times of scarcity Indians displayed unexpected adroitness at implementing and enforcing their own conventions of food diplomacy—which proved notably different from British and American ones. In the early 1770s the British relied on symbolic gifts of food to maintain the loyalties of important Indians, and the Americans used food metaphors to ask the Six Nations to remain neutral. All of that changed after 1779, when

Iroquois Indians used food to dictate the terms of their military service: they served

Britons and Americans in ways that fed their families and villages, and they prized this goal above others. Six Nations allies were the counterpart to white soldiers who rioted over scanty rations, but they did so much more effectively because they were not bound by military conventions such as punishment for desertion.4 By the end of the war Natives

of Canada, 1774-1815 (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992); Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in North American Communities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Edward Countryman, “Indians, the Colonial Order, and the Social Significance of the American Revolution,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 53, no. 2 (April 1996), 354, 358. For this declension narrative, see Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 226, 267; Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (New York: Viking, 2008), 192-93. 3 For a recent review essay that posits the decline of the declension narrative in Iroquois histories, see Edward Countryman, “Toward a Different Iroquois History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 69, no. 2 (April 2012), 347-60, esp. 349. 4 For this phenomenon, see, chapter 1.

140 began to voice preferences for certain types of provisions from the British, and they violently acted out through food when their supporters did not meet their needs. Over the course of the war food diplomacy became a way to strengthen bonds between Britons and

Indians—but so too did it elucidate moments of misunderstanding between allies. Most importantly, Iroquois Indians actively sought to deprive their friends—rather than their enemies—of food when it suited them, because of Indian notions that war was a time for sharing the experience of hunger.

***

In order to comprehend the significance of these wartime changes, historians must understand what victual warfare and food diplomacy looked like during the early years of the war.5 The Iroquois (also known as the Haudenosaunee, or Six Nations) inhabited the region south of Lake Ontario, in and around present-day New York. The Confederacy was divided between the Elder Brothers—the Mohawks, Onondagas, and Senecas—and their Younger Brothers, the Cayugas and Oneidas. The Tuscaroras were the newest members, having joined the Confederacy earlier in the century.6 Iroquois power shifted multiple times in the century preceding the American Revolution, causing historians to question whether or not the Iroquois acted as an empire.7 In the wake of such changing

5 For the history of food diplomacy and victual warfare during the century before the Revolution, see introduction. 6 Colonel Guy Johnson, “A General Review of the Northern Confederacy and the Department for Indian Affairs,” 3 October 1776, vol. 10, no. 204, photostat 280, box 2, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 5-6, 14, 55; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 10; Francis Jennings, “The Indians’ Revolution,” in Alfred F. Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976), 324. 7 Francis Jennings claims that the greatest victories the Iroquois enjoyed spanned the half-decade between 1649 and 1655. Between 1400 and 1600, the Iroquois League was merely a gathering of the five original tribes. Eventually the Iroquois Confederacy came to represent the diplomatic and political aspects of the Six Nations. Up until 1680 or 1690, the Six Nations claimed power over other tribes such as the Delawares,

141 alliances and claims to power, colonists and British officials did not always know which group of Indians they were dealing with; much of the time, colonials used the word

“Indians” without paying mind to the particular tribe they were writing about. Such confusion indicates that the Iroquois Empire was as ambiguous as historians such as

Francis Jennings have claimed.

Despite the unpredictable, changing nature of Indian relations, Native foodways remained stable, and continued to abide by the shift in seasons. Iroquois men started hunting in the fall and continued to do so until the middle of winter; they resumed again in the early spring. Women farmed, but men cleared fields before planting could begin.

When they traveled into the Ohio Valley, Indians ate a diet comprised of the traditional maize-squash-beans triad, supplemented by wild game, but the presence of domesticated animals also indicates the availability of Old World foods such as beef, pork, butter, cheese, and milk. Contact with non-Native traders would also have allowed for the consumption of wheat, as well as more expensive luxury goods such as coffee, sugar, and tea. During times of war, Natives neglected their farming and hunting, and understood that hunger was an unavoidable pitfall they had to endure. Some Indians, such as the

Shawnees, and Susquehannocks. When the colony of New York split from Pennsylvania in 1681, however, Pennsylvanians offered other Indians protection from the Six Nations, thus challenging Iroquois assertions of dominance. By 1720 the Iroquois were once again ascendant, and in 1736 Pennsylvania recognized their right to treat for other tribes. Yet even as Pennsylvania did so, Shawnees and Delawares moved away from geographic areas occupied by the Iroquois. Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from its beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984), 8, 112, 196-99, 290-97. For an excellent treatment of Shawnees’ tendencies to move see Laura Keenan Spero, “‘Stout, Bold, Cunning, and the greatest Travellers in America’: The Colonial Shawnee Diaspora,” (Ph.D. diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 2010).

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Delawares, could even draw upon a history of fasting as a way to deal with disease epidemics.8

On the road to war, the encroachment of American colonials started to hinder

Indians’ foodways, thus paving the way for Revolutionary changes. Violence between

Indians and Anglos interfered with Indians’ hunting and planting.9 Colonists who took

Natives’ land and traders who plied Native Americans with rum impeded Indians’ abilities to farm, fish, and hunt, and made further land cessions even likelier. Native men would not go out to hunt when they feared attacks on their villages. Indian raids against colonists’ towns resulted in similar effects: colonists became wary when planting, and jealously guarded the domesticated animals that belonged to them. Indians knew that by stealing these animals, they could deprive colonists of ready meat and the opportunity to grow food.

The period ushered in by Sir William Johnson’s reign as British superintendent after 1756 introduced a measure of order to Northern Indian affairs. Johnson recognized the need to court the Six Nations with gifts of food and trade goods to maintain their allegiance at the same time that he curtailed the movements of white colonists onto

Indians’ lands.10 Urged by Johnson, the British made continued efforts to maintain peaceful relations, but the exhortations of people on the ground in America did not

8 Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 11, 203; Nancy Shoemaker, “Kateri Tekakwitha’s Tortuous Path to Sainthood,” in Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women (New York: Routledge, 1995), 65; Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 178, 180; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 39. 9 Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 30-32. 10 For more on Johnson, Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 12; Jennings, “The Indians’ Revolution,” 329- 33.

143 always reach the ears of officials in England. In 1764 an anonymous writer observed that something would need to happen to stem the tide of colonial encroachment “before a general Defection of all the Indians in North America take place.”11 Some observers understood that the incursions colonists made were enough to drive Indians’ loyalties in other directions.

Sometimes, these opinions reached the metropole. King George III knew enough to write to colonial governors and warn them that the Indians “have made and do still continue to make great Complaints that Settlements have been made and Possession taken of Lands.”12 The King observed that despite officials’ efforts, colonists still made a habit of finding ways to coax Indians out of their homes. The King’s Proclamation of

October 7, 1763 was designed to definitively stymy white encroachment beyond the

Appalachians, and the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix was supposed to reassert this demarcation line. The fact that the boundary required reinforcement, however, emphasizes British officials’ inabilities to maintain firm boundaries; the Stanwix Treaty was similarly ineffective at controlling colonists’ movements westward.

Under Johnson, British officials tried to maintain peace by fashioning a food diplomacy that they fostered by intermittently giving symbolic gifts of food to Indian women and children, as well as to significant chiefs. Some Indians did receive special treatment in the form of rations; reflecting back on William Johnson’s food diplomacy, one official remembered that his “house was frequently filled with Indians,” and those

11 [Unknown] to [Unknown], 1764, folder 4, box 201, Cadwalader Family Papers, Collection #1454, HSP. 12 Copy Kings Instructions to the Govr. No. 109—Respecting Indians Lands, [c. 1760-1775], Miscellaneous Papers, 517, SHC.

144 familiar with Indian diplomacy knew “that no public officer can avoid feeding them.”13

In 1774 one major reported feeding Native women and children near Detroit: “the

Custom is to give them a Brick of Bread, and [a] Dram.” Important chiefs and their families received “a few Rations of Provisions.” Nearby inhabitants thought it was “an exceeding good sign,” to see the Indians “bring in Meat. & stay about the Fort in

Winter.”14 During the cold seasons it sometimes became customary for Native women and children to gather at British forts while men hunted in neighboring areas.

Food diplomacy flummoxed the British because it was and was not like trade diplomacy. Natives probably viewed gifts of food as a requisite facet of good relations— just as they did trade gifts—whereas Britons believed that by giving such presents they held the Indians in their power. Eminent Indians may have looked to the British for presents of food more than some of their brethren, but these presents indicated status, rather than need. Food was different because although it could function as a practical present, Natives also grew their own food sources, thus decreasing the symbolic bargaining power of British comestibles.

For the most part, Indians did not depend on the British for their food. Indians proved time and again that they did not feel compelled to accept British provisions in order to survive. In times of very extreme weather many Indians chose to remain in their villages, rather than make the journey to British forts for presents of edible goods. Back in 1765, George Croghan informed William Johnson that he had not been saddled with the usual task of feeding Indians at Fort Pitt, in Pennsylvania, because the harsh weather

13 H. Watson Powell to Captain Mathews, Niagara, 29 May 1782, f. 49, Add. MS 21762, BL. 14 Major H[enry] Basset to Frederick Haldimand, Detroit, 10 January 1774, f. 15, Add. MS 21731, BL.

145 had curtailed Indians’ mobility. As a result of “So Sevair a Winter and Spring att this plese Since I have been aquainted with this Country...butt fewe Indians” had arrived.15

When asked whether “the Appeal of Indians for food” was “greater or less than the

Europeans,” Croghan asserted that he had “Never observed thire appetites to be Greater than ours, unless after Liveing a Long Time very Scanty or without food.”16 Before the

Revolution, Indians did not overtax British supplies, and food gifts functioned as an expected, but not central, mode of maintaining Native allegiances.

And then William Johnson died, and the war began.17 As early as September

1774, the British considered asking Indians to aid them; they would only implement that strategy in 1777, after giving the Indians massive gifts of cattle, flour, and rum.18 The

Americans also slowly made plans. Congress proposed a strategy for the management of the Indians in July 1775, which delegated control of the Six Nations and their allies to the

Northern Department, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws to the Southern

Department, and all other tribes to the Middle Department.19 Eventually most Oneida and half of the Tuscarora members of the Six Nations would side with the Americans, and

15 George Croghan to William Johnson, Fort Pitt, 21 March 1765, folder 26, box 201, Cadwalader Family Papers, HSP. 16 Alex White to George Croghan, Winchester, 30 August 1773, folder 38, box 203, Cadwalader Family Papers, HSP. Croghan was responding to a set of queries put forth by a Dr. Robertson, of Edinburgh, who was writing a history of America. White forwarded Robertson’s questions to Croghan, who returned them with his annotations. 17 Johnson’s death on July 11, 1774 threatened to throw the British Indian Department into an uproar when he passed away at an Indian council held at Johnson Hall. Guy Johnson, his nephew and son-in-law, smoothed things over by agreeing to assume his position. In 1781, when the firm of Taylor and Forsyth was exposed for cheating the British government out of supplies and money, Johnson found his honor impugned. His examination in Montreal significantly damaged his reputation. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 137, 146-47. 18 For the 1774 plan to use Indians, see Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 44; for the use of food to win the Iroquois to the British side, see Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 120. 19 James H. O’Donnell III, Southern Indians in the American Revolution (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1973), 22.

146 most Cayugas, Mohawks, Onondagas, and Senecas would throw in with the British. At first the Americans would ask only for neutrality, but it proved difficult for them to obtain even this promise from the Indians because they did not possess the financial backing or organization to uphold Native allegiances.20 On the British side Daniel Claus mediated with the Six Nations in Canada; John Johnson’s Royal Regiment of New York brought Indians together with Loyalists, and Major John Butler and his rangers would work frequently with Mohawk Joseph Brant and his Indians in campaigns around

Niagara.21

Because the trade goods that the British had used to strengthen past alliances became nearly impossible to obtain as a result of shipping problems and colonial hostilities, during the Revolution British-Indian diplomacy heavily depended on food.22

In light of burgeoning conflicts, decreased funds, and limited goods, colonial officials struggled to administer food diplomacy following Johnson’s death in 1774. In order to maintain such diplomacy the British needed to organize a method of supplying the

20 Calloway, Crown and Calumet, 6; Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 46. 21 Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies, 53. Butler’s Rangers had the phrase “To Serve with the Indians” written out in the terms of their commissions. Although they considered “themselves bound to serve with them,” the Rangers would request that this phrase be removed, because if they were captured it implicated them in the exaggerated stories that the Americans told of Indian hostilities. That part of their commission would be removed in 1781. Other Indian commissioners were even more explicit about separating Indians’ activities from those of British soldiers. Daniel Claus implored Frederick Haldimand to make sure that only Indians participated “in the glory of such petite guerrers as burning and destroying, &c,” and claimed it “would look much better in the eye of the public such feats to come rather from Savages than whites...” For “bound to serve” and the request for the phrase’s removal, see John Butler, memorial to Brigadier General Powell, Niagara, 1 October 1781, f. 224, Add. MS 21874, BL; for the removal of the phrase, see Robert Mathews to Brigadier General Powell, Quebec, 1 November 1781, f. 250, Add. MS 21764, BL; for Daniel Claus’s opinion, see Lieutenant Daniel Claus to General Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 13 October 1778, volume IV, William A. Smy Collection, the Butler Papers, R3779-0-7-E, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, CA (hereafter LAC). John Butler gained the rank of Major in the provincial service in 1777, but is sometimes referred to in the records as a colonel. The American documents also confuse Butler and his son, Walter. For more background on Butler, see vol. I, “Editorial Notes, Notes on the Indians of John Butler’s World, and Gazetteer and Glossary,” William A. Smy Collection, the Butler Papers, LAC. 22 See introduction.

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Indians. At first they were shockingly disorganized as a result of their problems providing food for their own army.23 By the 1780s, however, the British put a system in place for determining how much food Indians needed in their villages: “In order to ascertain the number of Indians, to whom it is necessary to issue provisions, the Superintendant frequently sends some of his Officers among the different Tribes to take an account of them.” After obtaining a headcount, the Indians received tickets from the commissary, which they could then redeem. The commissary gave his account to the commanding officer of a garrison, who signed three receipts for the commissary general.24 This system was not without its flaws, as the food Indians received at the various British posts sometimes spoiled by the time it arrived. In the initial years of war, the British did not concern themselves overmuch with the quality of Indians’ foodstuffs.

A different method existed for feeding Indian warriors fighting in tandem with

British soldiers. Some of that fare proved decidedly poorer than rations that British troops consumed. Although Indian men, like British troops, received food rations, Natives, like escaped slaves, were also some of the first men that commanders sent off to find their own meals when supplies ran low.25 John Butler also observed that the Indians tasted

“very little of the fresh meat...except such as was too poor to be issued to the Garrison.”

Their taking included little “besides the heads, Offals, & feet” of cattle.26 Despite the fact

23 See chapter 1. 24 See, for example, H. Watson Powell to Frederick Haldimand, Quebec, 5 December 1782, f. 589, Add. MS 21734, BL. 25 For examples of combined rations given to Indians and British soldiers, see Mason Bolton, “Return of Provisions issued out of the King’s Store at Niagara between the 25 Decemr. 1778 & the 24th Jany. 1779 inclve.,” f. 87, Add. MS 21760, BL. 26 John Butler to [Francis Le Maistre], Niagara, 1 May 1778, f. 27, Add. MS 21765, BL.

148 that Natives did not obtain access to better rations, this difference did not cause problems, as Natives possessed enough food in their villages to sustain them.

Yet as the war continued, the British became cognizant of the fact that they would require Indians’ allegiance for some time to come, and by 1778 the Six Nations began to expect that British-supplied provisions would do more than supplement their diet. In the spring of 1778 John Butler noted “almost all the Indian Villages in a distressed condition for want of Victuals.” The younger men had “neglected” their spring hunting season, which meant that people in the village had been eating stored corn, instead.27 British gifts of food increased to salve Indians’ hunger: 2,700 Native women and children came to

Detroit, where they ate “all the Beef...in six or seven days.”28 After he fed them, one lieutenant colonel reflected that he felt obligated to do so. If he had refused, “this

Garrison must have been distressed or the Savages offended, and of course I suppose cou’d have joined the Rebels.”29 It became more logical for British officials to fear that if they declined to feed their Indian allies, the security of their forts would suffer—or worse, the Indians would no longer agree to fight for them. Whereas before the war officials gave gifts of food intermittently, now Natives required more frequent supplies because they possessed the alternative option of getting them from the Americans.

British commissaries also needed to find a way to supply troops without encroaching on Natives’ lands (and consequently, their foodways). In addition to problems related to provisioning an army from across the Atlantic, the British needed to

27 John Butler to [Frederick Haldimand], Niagara, 17 September 1778, f. 34, Add. MS 21765, BL. 28 Mason Bolton to [unknown], Niagara, 31 January 1778, f. 5, Add. MS 21760, BL. 29 Mason Bolton to Sir Guy Carleton, Niagara, 12 May 1778, f. 18, Add. MS 21760, BL.

149 deal with the fact that it was difficult to procure food in the colonies. Raiding parties could only steal so many animals before none remained, and soldiers could only purloin as much grain as they could carry before they had to burn the rest to prevent the

Americans from eating it. By 1778 the British had to acknowledge the fact that they needed other food sources, but they also realized that planting crops in and around

Indians’ villages would threaten Native-British alliances. The Six Nations would never allow troops to grow supplemental crops because that would indicate a British intention to seize their territory; such behavior would seem too reminiscent of American colonists’ encroachment. The Indians leaned upon the Treaty of Stanwix, which, as one lieutenant- colonel put it, allowed “only such improvements as may be necessary...for carrying on the business” of portage. A plan for agriculture “might be displeasing to our allies the Six

Nations,” he concluded.30

As the British struggled to find a middle ground between scarcity and sustenance, the Americans also tried to use food diplomacy with the Six Nations, though at first they merely used it to try to extract promises of neutrality. The Americans employed old

Indian food metaphors to describe their hopes for a peaceful settlement with Britain, and they encouraged the Indians to continue to pay mind to their own foodways. When representatives of twelve of the colonies met the Six Nations in 1775, they used figurative language to describe the conflict.31 American officials explained, “If our people labour in the fields, they will not know who shall enjoy the crop. If they hunt in the Woods, it will be uncertain who shall taste the meat.” The Americans implied that

30 Mason Bolton to Frederick Haldimand, Niagara, 4 March 1779, f. 96, Add. MS 21760, BL. 31 Georgia was missing from the group.

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Britons had made it hard for colonists to feed themselves, and they used the possible absence of meat and grain to explain their complaints with the metropole. They suggested that the British had curtailed their access to the edible products of their labor, thus necessitating rebellion. They drove home this point by arguing that Americans “cannot be sure whether they shall be permitted to eat drink and wear the fruits of their own labour and industry.”32 The colonists expressed their hope that in the future their relationship with Britain would mend so that they would be able to “eat and drink in peace” with them. By utilizing the Indian metaphor of a shared meal, the Americans signaled their desires to avoid prolonged conflict with the British. For the moment, however, they felt

“necessitated to rise, and forced to fight.” Although they justified their reasons for rebellion, they did not request assistance from the Six Nations. Instead, they asked the

Indians “to remain at home and not join on either side.”33 They demonstrated their knowledge of Indians’ needs to remain in their villages in order to obtain food, and did not ask them to risk their crop and game yields by supporting the Americans’ war effort.

Whereas British food diplomacy meant giving Indians food gifts—despite their problems with supply—the Americans found themselves forced to rely on metaphorical language as the scaffold of their food diplomacy. When Abraham, a sachem of the Lower

Mohawk castle, complained of a decrease in Indians’ trading opportunities, the

32 For a description of this conference see Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 69; A Speech To the Six Confederate nations Mohawks, Oneidas, Tuscarora’s, Onondage’s, Cayugae’s, Seneka’s. From the twelve United Colonies convened in Council at Philadelphia, 18 July 1775, 3-4, 7, box 22, folder 26, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL. Thanks to a research fellowship from the New York Public Library, I was allowed to examine the Schuyler manuscripts, rather than the microfilm. The collection is a bit disorganized; folders are not numbered chronologically, some have no numbers at all, and some folder numbers repeat themselves. I have tried to be as specific as possible when citing a source. 33 A Speech To the Six Confederate nations Mohawks, Oneidas, Tuscarora’s, Onondage’s, Cayugae’s, Seneka’s. From the twelve United Colonies convened in Council at Philadelphia, 18 July 1775, 3-4, 7, box 22, folder 26, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL.

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Americans reminded him that wartime was different. They explained this situation by comparing their supply issues to Indians’ foodways, saying, “You Brothers in Time of war do not hunt so much as in Time of peace.”34 The Americans, by implication, were too busy to “hunt.” At the same time that they continued to encourage Indians’ neutrality, colonial officials invoked the hunger and scarcity associated with wartime raids, and beseeched the Indians to bear with them through their times of difficulty.

Eventually, the Americans had to oblige with gifts of food in order to remain in competition with British diplomacy. By January 1776 one America Indian commissioner recorded giving “Cannojoharry Indians”—Mohawks—victuals enough for 30 people. He also provisioned “11 Cayugoes and 1 Onnondaga...each having 3 Meals,” as well as 120 unnamed Indians with 36 pounds of bacon, “2 Fat Swine,” and “70 Loaves of Bread.”

The fact that they distributed food to Mohawk Indians may also have indicated

Americans’ hopes that some of those Natives would eschew British alliance in exchange for American diplomacy. Although American Indian commissioners gave Indians food too, the American system for doing so remained disorganized; they distributed meals, not rations, consisting of random amounts of pork and bread. The Americans would become more efficient by March 1778, when “3 or 400 of the Warriors of the six Nations” joined the continental service, and Indian commissioners in Albany resolved “to furnish

34 [Speech by Volkert Douw and Timothy Edwards], [n.d., but c. May 1776], in unlabeled bound journal, box 22, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL.

152 provisions from Time to Time for the use of the Indians on the general order of the

Commissioners.”35

The fact that British and American officials took a relatively long time to figure out how best to practice food diplomacy with the Iroquois gave those Indians the opportunity to retain power in the fact of uncertainty. Even as Indians received food from

Britons and Americans, they too developed a language of food diplomacy that allowed them to communicate their wants and demands to both sides. They used food metaphors and language to communicate with Britons, Americans, and other Indians; they requested food; they asked the British to refrain from planting on their lands; and they supplied

British and American troops with provisions, which at times allowed them to exercise their own power over the soldiers who depended on them.

Iroquois food diplomacy deviated from British and American ideas and practices.

Natives, for example, used food to communicate with enemies just as frequently as they used it to speak with allies. In 1778, when a number of Oneidas met with American

Indian commissioners, they described their readiness to aid their foes with food. The

Oneidas reflected that although “It is probable that there are some...who are inimical to us and who would wish to give Information of what may pass at this Conference to [British

Major John] Butler,” they would willingly “cause them to be supplied with provisions” and furnish them with rum “to perform the Journey to Niagara.”36 During the war the Six

35 [Volkert Douw] to Jellis Fonda, Caughnawaga, 6 January 1776, folder 63, box 22, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL; At a Board of Commissioners of Indian Affairs of the Northern Department held at Albany, 13 April 1778, folder 57, box 23, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL. 36 At a Meeting of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department with a Number of Sachems and Warriors of the Six Nations for the purpose of holding a conference pursuant to the orders of Congress, held at John’s-Town, 7 March 1778, folder 57, box 23, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL.

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Nations continued to practice their own etiquette habits, even if that meant giving food to hostile Indians. These Oneidas were not like American and British soldiers who offered food to enemies to encourage shifts in allegiance. This moment demonstrated distinctions between Indian and Anglo diplomacy: the Oneidas offered food because they saw it as a necessary component of communication—even with their enemies—rather than payment for military services. Although the Oneidas worried that other Six Nations Indians, whom they now considered “inimical,” might report details of their meeting, they still evinced their plan to supply them with food and drink for the journey there.37 Native notions of inter-Indian food customs could interfere with American and British plans to block the enemy’s food supply, just as Natives’ ideas about British planting habits could flummox

British strategies for supplementing their food sources.

Yet Six Nations Indians also took advantage of British and American notions that food could function as a form of payment for services rendered. By requesting consumable gifts, and sometimes demanding them, Natives reminded military officials that they also needed to purchase Indians’ allegiance. Such was the case in August 1778, when Onondagas who were meeting the American Indian commissioners informed them,

“we mean to remain in the strictest friendship with the United States,” and then expressed their “hope they will furnish us with a Keg” of rum.38 In September 1778, a different group of British-allied Onondagas informed one official that the Six Nations desired

37 On the Oneidas’ unwillingness to fight directly against other members of the Iroquois Confederacy, see Karim M. Tiro, “The Dilemmas of Alliance: The Oneida Indian Nation in the American Revolution,” in John Resch and Walter Sargent, eds. War & Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization and Home Fronts (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), 229. 38 At a meeting of the Commissioners for Indian Affairs in the Northern Department, Albany, 15 August 1778, folder 57, box 23, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL.

154 ammunition, “and provision to carry on the Service.” The Onondagas wanted the food and powder sent to Lake Ontario because it was “nearest to the Seneca & 6 Nations

Country.”39 In both of these cases, Natives stated their willingness to fight for one side, and then asked for the sustenance to do so. The second set of Indians even dictated how the British should distribute their food. That these events occurred within a month of each other suggests both the factious nature of relations within Indian tribes, as well as

Indians’ inclinations to say what they needed to obtain supplies. Clearly, British and

American officials rightly feared that improper food diplomacy might result in a shift in loyalty. Even beyond the year 1777—when the Six Nations Confederacy supposedly shattered—Indians voiced uncertainty over which side to support.

Because Indians possessed experience battling the uncertainties of wartime, they seized the opportunity to control food supply when they got the chance. In January 1778, the British found themselves short of supplies at Niagara. One lieutenant reported that he had felt “obliged to buy up all the cattle the Indians had to spare.” He had also done

“everything in [his] power to keep the Savages in good Temper.”40 The man’s use of the word “obliged” indicated that although he purchased cattle from Indians in order to subsist the troops, he may also have done so to broker good relations with the Indians by making them his primary suppliers. He would have known that when Natives requested food from him, he might need to feed them the very cattle that they had sold him previously. Indeed, sometimes the British bought corn and fish from Indians, only to

39 Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 15 September 1778, f. 1, Add. MS 21774, BL. 40 Mason Bolton to [Sir Guy Carleton], Niagara, 31 January 1778, f. 5, Add. MS 21760, BL.

155 reissue them as presents or rations.41 Good food diplomacy, consequently, could mean allowing Indians to sell food to Britons, in addition to making plans for British officials to supply food to Natives.

Occasionally, Britons encountered difficulties obtaining food from British-allied

Indians, even when those Indians accompanied them on their expeditions. A 1778 journal written by a man named Richard McGinnis lamented that while on the march with “about

300 Indians of different tribes, chiefly Senecas and Delawares...we many a time had very hungry times.” Historians can read these periods of scarcity as indicative of British military difficulties, as well as examples of how war affected Indian foodways. In the face of such shortages McGinnis found himself “under the necessity of giving a hard dollar for 4 small Indian cakes, and sometimes could not get it at all.” Many times, he complained, “I have gone into a wigwam and waited for a Hommany Kettle with great impatience to get a trifle and was often disappointed.”42 Sometimes Natives charged what the British considered to be exorbitant prices, and sometimes, the Indians did not feed them at all. Where food was concerned, everyone at some point suffered from dependency.

***

Victual warfare was the counter to food diplomacy. Like food diplomacy, victual warfare possessed its roots earlier in the colonial period. For decades, colonists and

41 Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650- 1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1991]), 404. 42 2 May [1778], Extract from the Journal of Richard McGinnis, vol. IV, William A. Smy Collection, the Butler Papers, LAC.

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Indians had used violence as a way to obtain and protect trade.43 As edible goods became as indispensable as trade goods, people also began using violence to obtain and guard food stores. At times the line between food diplomacy and victual warfare could blur, such as when Anglos withheld food until receiving military service from Natives, or when Indians charged hungry soldiers exorbitant prices for cattle: then, people brokered diplomacy only at a very high cost. At other times, the nature of victual warfare became clearer. When people used starvation as a deliberate military tactic, stole grain, cattle, and horses, and destroyed food stores, they made their intentions obvious.

On the brink of Revolution Americans used victual warfare against Indians’ towns and villages by stealing their domesticated animals and burning their corn.44 In

1774, for example, go-between and future British ally Simon Girty described an expedition against several Indians’ Towns. His men set about destroying “whatever Corn they found standing,” in addition to “three & four hundred Bushells of Old Corn.”45 Girty and his party sent a clear message of hostility by razing Indians’ growing corn as well as their stores of food: they wanted the Indians to leave and to never return. By 1779 the

Americans relied upon a specific method for the systematic destruction of corn. They would “make large fires with parts of houses and other woods,” and by “piling the corn on the fire,” they ensured that they “effectually destroyed the whole of it.”46 Burning corn

43 White, The Middle Ground, 75. 44 Barbara Graymont has called these actions “a warfare against vegetables.” Military historians might dub this sort of warfare a “scorched earth” campaign undertaken as part of a total war mentality. Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 213; Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 47-53. 45 15 May [1774], [Captain John Connolly, journal], ff. 54-5, George Chalmers Papers, MssCol 507, NYPL. 46 [Lieutenant John Jenkins,] A Journal of the West Expedition Commanded by the Honble Major General Sullivan began at Eaton, June 18 1779, 15 September 1779, f. 187, folder entitled “John Sullivan Letters in

157 was more than a simple violent act: military forces used it as a message of total war that they wrought against entire villages. Scorched cornfields symbolized an effective and devastating use of power.

Indians and military forces frequently used the tactic of stealing food as the events of the Revolution unfolded. To contend with their food supply issues, the British encouraged Native allies to pilfer cattle, horses, and grain from American farms and supply wagons. Sometimes people stole to feed themselves, whereas at other times they stole to deliberately deprive the enemy of food. Sometimes the two strategies overlapped.

In July 1778, Briton John Butler reported an expedition near Wyoming, Pennsylvania, where his rangers and a party of Indians “killed and drove off about 1000 head of horned

Cattle, and sheep and swine in great numbers.” The phrase “killed and drove off” indicates that they killed the animals they could not direct back to Niagara with them.

Butler also possessed a secondary agenda: he acknowledged that by engaging in these activities he could also “harrass the adjacent country, and prevent them from getting in their harvest.” Stealing animals was a practical strategy, as well as a distracting ploy;

Americans who worried about random attacks would remain in their houses rather than in their fields, and the absence of their cattle would make it harder for them to use farming tools such as plows.47 Butler even speculated, “It we can prevent the Enemy from getting in their grain, their Grand Army (who are already much distress’d) must disperse and

the Rolls Office, Washington, 1775-1791. John L. Sullivan/T.C. Amory, 1856-. Extracts from N.H. Materials re John Sullivan, 1772-. Journal of West Expedition 18 June 1779-. General Orders, Campaign on RI, 1778,” box 4, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS. 47 Copy of a letter from Major John Butler to Lieutenant Colonel Bolton, Laeuwanack, 8 July 1778, f. 32, Add. MS 21760, BL. For other examples, see William Caldwell to Colonel John Butler, Onondella, 21 September 1778, f. 42, Add. MS 21765, BL.

158 their Country of course become an easy prey to the King.”48 The British hoped that by causing starvation in the American countryside, they would limit supplies to the

American army.

People also stole food as retaliation against enemies for previous hostile actions.

In 1777 Mohawk Molly Brant,49 Joseph Brant’s sister and William Johnson’s widow, was

“insulted & robbed of every thing she had in the world by the Rebels & their Indians” for the role she played at the Battle of Oriskany in August of that year.50 Legal depositions from 1778 reveal the extensiveness of New Yorkers’ punitive thefts of crops and animals from the Mohawk upper castle at Canajoharie during the fall of 1777. Peter Deygart, chairman of the Tryon County Committee of Safety, spent three days “Riding Indian

Corn & Potatoes from the Canajohary Indian fields.” Someone else saw “Old Christian young, pulling up and Distroying Potatoes, Turnips, Cabbage, and other Gardan Stuff.”

They dug barrels of flour up from the ground, and took those, too. The New Yorkers also stole sheep and hogs.51 The extensiveness of their actions testifies to the extent which food had become a way to act out violence.

Because Oneida Indians also took part in the attack, this moment also marked one of the first instances of inter-Indian victual warfare. Led by Oneida chief Hanyery, or

48 John Butler to Captain William Caldwell, Tioga, 12 July 1778, f. 9, Add. MS 21771, BL. 49 Brant appears variously in the records as Mary Brant and Molly Brant. 50 Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 30 August 1779, f. 57, Add. MS 21774, BL. 51 20 April 1778, depositions against persons stealing from the Canajohary Indian Castle, taken at Palatine, New York, Tryon County, before Jelles Fonda, Justice of the Peace [enclosed in Jelles Fonda to the Honorable Board of Commissioners of Indian Affairs, Palatine, 21 April 1778], box 23, folder 57, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL. For the background to these actions and on Deygart, see Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 146-47; Helen Caister Robinson, “Molly Brant: Mohawk Heroine,” in Phyllis R. Blakeley and John N. Grant, eds., Eleven Exiles: Accounts of Loyalists of the American Revolution (Toronto: Dundurn Press Limited, 1982), 117.

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Tehawenkaragwen, Oriska Oneidas joined the rebels in plundering the Mohawk castle.52

The Oneida “Indians orders” stated that if in the past they had “lost, one Cow, Ox, horse

Hogg Sheep...that we should take two in liu thereof.”53 Oneidas reacted against the actions of Mohawks by participating in animal theft, but also by stealing twice as many animals as the Mohawks had taken from them. Escalations of this kind threatened to do more than send a symbolic message; they may actually have hurt Mohawk meat supplies.

Whereas in some contemporary instances of inter-Indian food diplomacy the Oneidas expressed their willingness to feed enemy Indians, here they made sure to steal as many animals from the Mohawks as they could. Natives’ victual warfare thus escalated the scale of violence in order to send messages of dominance.

One of the most notable consequences of this type of violence was the degree to which Indians began to recognize the effects of victual warfare. In October 1778, after the British had destroyed “the Grain &ca. at the German Flatts,” and stolen “all the

Winter Beef intended for Fort Stanwix & brought from New England,” British-allied

Mohawks voiced the “Opinion that the Rebels will be obliged to abandon that post.”54 Of course, the Mohawks may also have said that the Americans’ position was lamentable in order to placate their British allies, but the fact that they did so after noting the

Americans’ decreased food stores still demonstrates their abilities to articulate the effects of food destruction. Indians also began to anticipate and report on victual warfare that

52 It also marked the point at which the Confederacy began to fracture. Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 142-47. 53 20 April 1778, depositions against persons stealing from the Canajohary Indian Castle, taken at Palatine, New York, Tryon County, before Jelles Fonda, Justice of the Peace [enclosed in Jelles Fonda to the Honorable Board of Commissioners of Indian Affairs, Palatine, 21 April 1778], box 23, folder 57, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL. 54 Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 26 October 1778, f. 7, Add. MS 21774, BL.

160 other Natives planned to use. In April 1779, Joseph Brant relayed the fact that some “of the ill disposed Trib[es] of the Six Nations” planned “to cut off or interrupt” a British

“convoy of Provisions and Store.”55 Brant’s Mohawks used their knowledge of these foodways to prevent the other Iroquois from carrying out the action, as well as to demonstrate the Mohawks’ value to the British. Whereas Indians sometimes used food diplomacy to aid their enemies, they employed victual warfare more indiscriminately, and to hurt their former friends.

The use of food to wage war and form alliances set a significant precedent for the year 1779, which was a turning point for the Americans, the British, and the loyalties of their Six Nations allies. It is important to observe that on the cusp of that year, a few conventions of food diplomacy and victual warfare had solidified. Up to that point British food diplomacy had involved giving Indians symbolic gifts of food that did not comprise the majority of their food—even if British officials felt obliged to offer such gifts frequently as a way of reaffirming Six Nations’ fidelity. The British did not see the

Indians as hungrier allies than other people; in Britons’ minds, Natives ate similar amounts of food as they did. Indians had learned to use food to talk to each other, whether that meant diplomatically promising food supplies to traveling enemies, or stealing animals as signs of victual warfare when other Indians’ actions took them too far beyond the realm of acceptable behavior. They had proved capable of controlling supply, demanding food when they felt justified, and stealing it, when necessary. Most importantly, was that by 1779, all parties had become well-acquainted with the idea that

55 Captain Brehm to [Frederick Haldimand], Montreal, 16 April 1779, f. 23, Add. MS 21759, BL.

161 the destruction of crops and thefts of domesticated animals made for a very effective method of inducing hunger.

***

When British and American officials encouraged the growing use of food diplomacy and victual warfare with their Indian allies, they did not anticipate the consequences of these policies. In 1779 Iroquois villages bore the brunt of retaliatory

American campaigns, which ushered in a period of crop and animal scarcities. This dearth was exacerbated by a particularly harsh winter. Indian allies suffered because of the absence of food in their villages and at British strongholds in Niagara and Detroit.

These circumstances seemed familiar, but the extent to which the Americans destroyed

Indians’ villages changed the face of food diplomacy for British-Native relationships.

As a result of this scarcity Indians became increasingly capable of turning food diplomacy and victual warfare to their advantage. When American John Sullivan’s 1779 campaign against the Six Nations engendered starving conditions in Iroquois towns,

Indians began to use food to dictate the terms of their military engagements with the

British. Indians also used victual warfare against the Americans, but in the main the

Iroquois sought to alter the ways in which British troops and officers fought alongside them by curtailing Britons’ access to food. Natives wanted to ensure that their British allies also suffered from scarcity, because Indian notions of allegiance rested upon the shared experience of hunger. Rather than voicing their need for and dependence on

British food supplies, Indians actively changed British notions of Indian service to suit

162 their needs. In a paradoxical twist, the scarcity of 1779 made British-allied Six Nations more capable of enforcing their version of food diplomacy.

1779 began as a hungry year for the British and their Six Nations allies. The absence of cattle and low crop yields combined to threaten food security. Whereas the previous fall “a considerable quantity of cattle” roamed through “the Indian Country,”

John Butler observed, “these have been chiefly consumed by the Indians themselves.”

The British could not enjoy “the same Opportunities of driving off Cattle from the

Enemy’s Frontiers,” as they had done during the previous years, because there simply were no more cattle. Butler explained that the preceding summer, Americans did not take adequate care to protect their farms and food stores. By 1779, however, movable food supplies were “secured by a Chain of Forts,” which made raiding for animals difficult— not to mention dangerous. To add to the issue of British failures to steal food from the countryside, the Indians had not planted “the usual quantity” of “corn, pulse, and things of that kind” because “they were so employed on various excursions,” for the British, and

“the number of people who passed through their country” destroyed what they had planted.56 An American attack could prove problematic.

And attack they did. John Sullivan’s 1779 campaign was an expedition of devastating victual warfare against British-allied Six Nations’ towns and villages. George

Washington instructed Sullivan that the campaign’s “immediate objects are the total destruction & devastation of” Indians’ villages. Washington wished to see the country not

56 John Butler to Frederick Haldimand, Canadasango, 21 July 1779, ff. 115-16, Add. MS 21765, BL.

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“merely over-run, but destroyed.”57 Later he would charge Sullivan with the task of

“throwing [the Indians] wholly on the British Enemy,” in addition to destroying the Six

Nations’ villages.58 In July the British received news that the Americans planned to mount an attack from the Wyoming Valley in Pennsylvania, and that their numbers were

“said to consist of 8,000 Men.”59 By September, John Sullivan’s raids had consumed

Iroquois villages and made it virtually impossible for Natives to continue to live among their towns in upstate New York. Sullivan’s men destroyed at least 160,000 bushels of corn, other vegetables, and animals.60 Although it is difficult to estimate population numbers of Native towns because officials frequently omitted women and children in their population counts, historians know that each Indian ate approximately six bushels of corn per year.61 Such destruction, then, hypothetically threatened the livelihood of 26,000 people.

The Sullivan expedition was a systematic campaign of food destruction.

Americans related how they torched “very fine and extensive” cornfields. One lieutenant recorded lighting “a glorious bonfire of upwards of 30 buildings at once,” which the

Americans probably used to burn “about 40 acres” of the Natives’ “fields of Indian corn.”

57 [George Washington] to John Sullivan, Head Quarters, Middle Brook, 31 May 1779, HM 1590, HL. 58 George Washington to John Sullivan, Head Quarters, West Point, 15 September 1779, f. 23, vol. 5, box 2, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS. 59 John McDonell to Colonel Butler, Camp 20 Miles from Fort Wallace, 24 July 1779, f. 171, Add. MS 21760, BL. 60 For background on Sullivan’s campaign, see Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 192- 223; for British news of Sullivan’s campaign, see Extracts of Intelligence received by Sir Henry Clinton concerning an Intended Expedition of the Rebels to the Westward, sent to General Haldimand, 13 April 1779 [dates 1 February and 2 April 1779], vol. 11, no. 33, photostat 1886, box 8, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 61 Alan Taylor, “‘The Hungry Year’: 1789 on the Northern Border of Revolutionary America,” in Alessa Johns, ed., Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 1999), 167.

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In another town “called Kanegsae or Yucksea” they took four hours to destroy the corn; at the Genesee Flats they burned 20,000 bushels in eight hours. At “Chemango and

Oswega” they “destroyed all their crops,” and near Canadasago they “girdled the fruit trees and destroyed the corn.” In keeping with Washington’s orders for total war, the

Americans mutilated trees so that they would not produce fruit in the ensuing months.

Finally, after burning “the Genesee Village and destroy[ing] the Corn,” the Americans retreated.62 To add to the trauma of these physical attacks, Natives also suffered the mental anguish of knowing they would be unable to return home: by October, American frontier inhabitants had moved into the abandoned dwellings in the Lower Mohawk castle, and were enjoying the “great plenty of Grain; several Horses, cows and waggons” that the American army had left in place for the colonial invaders.63

Americans seized the opportunity of their success in New York to remind rebel- allied Six Nations Indians that misplaced allegiances resulted in hunger. “For their

Breach of the Covenant Chain,” commissioners told the Oneidas and some of the

Tuscaroras, British-allied members of the Six Nations found themselves “without Food or

Shelter,” “driven from their Country,” and forced to “wander in the wilderness. This,”

62 F. Barber to Governor Clinton, Praoga, 15 August 1779, f. 79, folder entitled “John Sullivan Letters in the Rolls Office, Washington, 1775-1791. John L. Sullivan/T.C. Amory, 1856-. Extracts from N.H. Materials re John Sullivan, 1772-. Journal of West Expedition 18 June 1779-. General Orders, Campaign on RI, 1778,” box 4, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS; [Lieutenant John Jenkins,] A Journal of the West Expedition Commanded by the Honble Major General Sullivan began at Eaton, June 18 1779, 13 August, 13 and 15 September 1779, ff. 169, 184, 187, folder entitled “John Sullivan Letters in the Rolls Office, Washington, 1775-1791. John L. Sullivan/T.C. Amory, 1856-. Extracts from N.H. Materials re John Sullivan, 1772-. Journal of West Expedition 18 June 1779-. General Orders, Campaign on RI, 1778,” box 4, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS; 20 August and 8 September 1779, Andrew Hunter Revolutionary War Diary, M-2097, JDR; John Butler to Frederick Haldimand, Niagara, 20 September 1779, f. 140, Add. MS 21765, BL. 63 Peter Gansevoort to John Sullivan, Albany, 8 October 1779, f. 31, vol. 5, box 1, John Sullivan Transcripts, MHS.

165 they concluded, “is the constant Reward of Treachery!”64 The Americans hoped to draw the rebel-allied Indians’ attention to the power of the American army, and to imply that those who switched sides would inevitably suffer from the effects of victual warfare.

Knowing as they did that opposing factions of the Iroquois continued to communicate, they probably hoped that the Oneidas and Tuscaroras would pass along the message, and possibly convince some of the recalcitrant Six Nations to switch back to their side. As long as the Americans were doing well in the war, they could afford to hold the threat of victual warfare over the heads of their allies, as well as their enemies.

Although the Sullivan campaign resulted in abrupt losses of food and life, its reverberations resounded much longer because it also altered future diplomatic relations.

The Americans’ campaign against the Iroquois stretched beyond the reach of Six

Nations’ territory, and set the stage for pan-Indian unity and retaliation in the postwar period. In the immediate wake of the attacks, however, Indian communities fought, fractured, and reexamined their various loyalties. Americans had asserted their dominance, but also possibly frightened the colonial-allied Oneidas and Tuscaroras— who perhaps never imagined how completely the colonists would destroy the towns of their brethren. Maybe those Indians worried about where their friends would live that winter, but maybe they also worried about the potential backlash from former fellows.

British-allied Indians, of course, possessed better reasons to reassess their allegiances, given the severe consequences of supporting His Majesty’s troops.

64 The Answer of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs for the Northern Department to the Speech of the Oneidas & Tuscaroras [undated, c. 1779], folder 53, box 23, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL.

166

As a result of the extensiveness of their victual warfare, the Americans achieved their immediate goal of evicting the Six Nations from their villages, and pushing them toward the British.65 On his return to Niagara Briton John Butler sent word that “all the

Indians with their Families are moving in, as their Villages & Corn are Destroyed.”66

General Haldimand noted that this phenomenon was not confined to the Mohawk,

Onondaga, and Cayuga Indians at Niagara; “old men, women and children...of the

Shawanese & Delawar Nations” faced “the Same Predicament at Detroit,” further to the southwest.67 In spite of the distress caused by Natives’ impromptu relocation, however,

Butler was “happy to acquaint” Haldimand that the Indians appeared “Still unshaken in their Attachment to His Majestys Cause.” “As Soon as they have placed their Women &

Children in Security,” Butler reported, British-allied Iroquois planned to “go and take

Revenge of the Enemy.”68 Soon, however, the Indians would waver.

The Sullivan expedition prompted the British to question their food diplomacy with the Iroquois. Such inquiries into established policy came at an inopportune moment, when the British really needed to do everything they could to placate homeless and

65 For a description of exactly how the Six Nations refugees settled into their new home at Niagara, see Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, ch. 5, esp. 136-37. 66 Extract of a Letter from Major Butler to Colonel Bolton, Camp, Buffaloe Creek, 14 September 1779, in Lieut. Col. Mason Bolton and Major John Butler, 14, 16, and 20 September 1779, vol. 11, nos. 93 and 94, photostat 2308, British Headquarters Papers, box 10, NYPL; for similar British sentiments see Lieutenant Colonel Mason Bolton to General Haldimand, Niagara, 7, 8, and 10 September 1779, vol. 11, no. 83, photostat 2260, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; General Haldimand to General Sir Henry Clinton, Quebec, 2 November 1779, vol. 11, no. 97, photostat 2400, box 11, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; for American accounts of the campaign see Cornelius Harnett to Thomas Burke, Philadelphia, 9 October 1779, folder 4, box 1, Thomas Burke Papers, Collection 104, SHC. 67 General Haldimand to General Sir Henry Clinton, Quebec, 29 August 1779, vol. 11, nos. 45 and 60, photostat 2234, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 68 Major Butler to General Haldimand, 20 September 1779, in Lieut. Col Mason Bolton and Major John Butler, 14, 16, and 20 September 1779, vol. 11, nos. 93 and 94, photostat 2308, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

167 hungry Native allies. Around July of 1779 Haldimand began to voice his desire to provision the Indians less frequently. He wanted Butler told that it was impossible to procure more provisions for him and his rangers. He also wanted Butler to remind the

Indians “that all our distress on that account proceeds from the amazing quantity of provisions they consume.”69 In another letter he noted that the “quantity consumed by the

Savages is enormous.”70 By September he was asking that the Indians “make demands for Provisions as seldom, and as moderate as their wants will admit of.”71 Over the course of 1779 ideas that Indians ate no more than other allies changed: now, British military leaders viewed Indians as enormous eaters who threatened their whole enterprise.

Animal scarcities, crop failures near Detroit and Niagara, imminent weather problems, and qualms about the costs of feeding Indians to the detriment of other military operations contributed to the change in Haldimand’s food policies.72 Haldimand objected so vehemently to Indians’ eating habits because feeding them interfered with other military operations. He argued that the cost of supplying the Indians “far Exceeds all ordinary and Extraordinary Expences in this Province, including [the] army, navy,

Enginieer & all Departments.”73 Haldimand feared that the act of feeding Indians sometimes took food out of the mouths of other British soldiers. To have the troops be

“obliged to abandon the Purpose of their Enterprize for want of Provisions,” he wrote,

69 General Frederick Haldimand to Lieutenant Colonel Mason Bolton, Quebec, 23 July 1779, vol. 5, William A. Smy Collection, the Butler Papers, LAC. 70 General Haldimand to General Sir Henry Clinton, Quebec, 19 July 1779, vol. 11, no. 43, photostat 2129, box 9, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 71 General Frederick Haldimand to Major Butler, Quebec, 3 September 1779, f. 136, Add. MS 21765, BL. 72 General Haldimand to General Sir Henry Clinton, Quebec, 28 September 1779, vol. 11, no. 78, photostat 2334, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 73 Frederick Haldimand to Major Butler, Quebec, [August, no day] 1779, f. 134, Add. MS 21765, BL.

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“would be followed by much more fatal Consequences than if they had never undertaken it.”74 Nevertheless, the presence of Indians collected at Niagara and Detroit still placed him, however grudgingly, under “the Necessity of Feeding” them to keep them from changing their allegiance.75 In the fall of 1780 Haldimand penned the lines that open this chapter, in which he demanded “that no useless Mouth” would remain at Niagara for the winter.76 Seeking to avoid a repeat of the previous year, Haldimand sought to decrease the number of Indian mouths he would need to feed.

Around this time, Indians’ notions of food and service also began to change. The first real signs of this change came during the summer of the Sullivan campaign, when

Iroquois Indians overcharged the British for domesticated animals. In June the Indians began to withhold cattle from the British unless they agreed to pay dearly for them. One lieutenant reported that someone at Niagara had “endeavoured to persuade the

Indians...that they were paid too small a price for their Cattle, that for the future they ought to demand twelve pounds a Head.”77 Whether someone really had convinced the

Six Nations that they were not earning enough, or whether the Six Nations started charging more because of the attacks on their towns, the fact remains that once they received news of Sullivan’s campaign the Indians began to fix higher prices for food.

Cattle prices created conflicts all the way into August of that year.78 Natives continued to use food diplomatically (they were giving the British the cattle in the end, after all, so that

74 General Frederick Haldimand to Major Butler, Quebec, 3 September 1779, f. 136, Add. MS 21765, BL. 75 General Haldimand to General Sir Henry Clinton, Quebec, 29 August 1779, vol. 11, nos. 45 and 60, photostat 2234, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 76 Frederick Haldimand to Lieutenant Colonel Mason Bolton, Quebec, 29 September 1780, ff. 146-47, Add. MS 21764, BL. 77 Mason Bolton to Frederick Haldimand, Canadasagoe, 24 June 1779, f. 145, Add. MS 21760, BL. 78 Frederick Haldimand to Mason Bolton, Quebec, 9 August 1779, f. 29, Add. MS 21764, BL.

169 they could keep feeding troops and thus continue to fight), but they, too began using a less accommodating form of food diplomacy to signal to the British that they knew the value of their food stores.

Other signs indicated Indians’ growing discontent with Haldimand’s new version of British food diplomacy; Natives began to interpret British unwillingness to supply them as a demonstration of bad faith. Once unwillingness became actual inability, the situation worsened. By September one official related that John Butler had met with little success trying to convince many of the Indians to remain with him in the field. Butler encountered “difficulties” obtaining food, and with “assembling the Indians.” The

Indians, this man reported, worried “that what the Rebels often told them will prove true...that we only meant to deceive them, and leave them in the Lurch.”79 Perhaps the

Americans’ machinations with the Oneidas and Tuscaroras had succeeded, and those

Indians had reached out to other members of the Six Nations. British-allied Indian allies started to resent all the worry over food. The Iroquois began to say, “they could no longer fight the King’s Battles,” that the British “talked of nothing but Provisions,” and that they

“could have no excuse for not assisting them,” because they knew about a quantity of extra food at Quebec.80

At this point in the war the Six Nations began to charge the British more for the food they supplied to them, and to manipulate the British for more provisions when they could. But most importantly, they began to rely on Native ideas about war and scarcity in

79 Lieutenant Colonel Mason Bolton to General Haldimand, Niagara, 7, 8, and 10 September 1779, vol. 11, no. 83, photostat 2260, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 80 Lieutenant Colonel Mason Bolton to General Haldimand, Niagara, 16 August 1779, vol. 11, no. 72, photostat 2202, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

170 order to imply that allies should share the experience of hunger when food was not available for everyone. At the same time that they took more food from the British,

Natives also proclaimed themselves less hungry, more willing to undergo scarcity, and more insistent that the British should suffer with them. It is difficult to ascertain what, precisely, prompted this change. Certainly the shift followed closely on the heels of the

Sullivan expedition, but getting inside the heads of British-allied Natives is close to impossible. Perhaps the Mohawks, Cayugas, Senecas, and Onondagas knew their allegiances were so valuable that they could dictate the terms of their joint military service. Or perhaps they feared that the war would only further curtail their food security, and they simply sought to prepare themselves for starvation. What matters is that their actions somehow managed to alter British food policies.

Whereas in previous years Iroquois men assumed that the British would feed their women and children symbolic gifts while women grew crops and younger men provided game meat, in the winter of 1779-80 all Indians expected to be fed because torched cornfields and absent game resulted in scanty fare. In pre-war years Indians stayed at home rather than trekking through snow to get food from the British; in this year, they made their homes with the British. This change does not translate to dependence because the Indians did possess a few other choices, as the British explained to them—but in the end, the Iroquois chose the road that gave them the power to alter British diplomacy.

British officials tried to get the Indians to go elsewhere, an action which in turn prompted Indians’ declarations that they would simply deal with their hunger. Britons continued to regard gifts of food as something that Natives required as a form of

171 payment. By making it impossible for the British to feed them, the Iroquois shifted the balance of power in their favor. One official suggested that “it would be less expensive” to victual the families of the Iroquois at Montreal, “to save Transportation of

Provisions.”81 At an October meeting Guy Johnson (the late Sir William Johnson’s nephew), John Butler, and others tried to convince the Six Nations to go to Carleton

Island and other parts of present-day Canada, because the lateness of the season meant that “Vessels could not bring a sufficient Quantity of Provisions across the Lake.”82 After citing transportation issues, officials tried to appeal to Indians’ previous histories of asking the British for food in order to convince them that leaving Niagara was their best chance for receiving comestibles. In November Guy Johnson finally “prevailed on” some

50 Indians to depart for Carleton Island, and several hundred others to go out hunting.83

Overwhelmingly, however, the Indians chose to remain at Niagara.

For the most part, the British did not succeed in getting the Indians to leave because the Six Nations privileged their proximity to the British over their access to food.

A Cayuga named Twethorechte told British officials that he appreciated “what has been said on the Score of Provisions,” but that the Indians “cannot think of separating, nor deem it proper that any considerable Number of our Body should go down the Country.”

If the Indians had “to suffer for Provisions we cannot help it,” he explained. They remained “determined to persevere in the Cause we have engaged in,” and would

“endeavour in some Measure to help ourselves by Hunting, and hope to be able to live

81 Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 30 September 1779, f. 72, Add. MS 21774, BL. 82 Proceedings with the Indians at Niagara, 31 October 1779, f. 60, Add. MS 21779, BL. 83 Guy Johnson to Frederick Haldimand, Niagara, 12 November 1779, f. 51, Add. MS 21767, BL.

172 through the Winter.” Although Johnson worried that “Some of you seem already to complain that your Allowance of Provisions is small,” most of the Indians evinced their unwillingness to depart.84 By ignoring British claims that provisions would prove difficult to transport to the fort, Indians set an example of hardened soldiers willing to experience hardship. Suddenly, officials possessed no way to guarantee that the Six

Nations would do what the British wished.

To be sure, some aspects of the British-Iroquois relationship remained consistent with pre-1779 patterns. In May of 1780 the Six Nations left Niagara to plant crops in new locations, and Indians continued to serve the British army in their campaigns of victual warfare.85 Between February 1780 and January 1781 the British recorded that Indians serving in Colonel Guy Johnson’s department captured 430 cattle and 250 horses, and destroyed 10 mills and over 150 granaries.86 The cost of supplying Indians also continued to figure heavily in British accounting. In one month, for example, Guy Johnson ordered the distribution of 80 gallons of wine and liquor, 130 pounds of loaf sugar, 217 pounds of coffee, 154 pounds of chocolate, 155 pounds of butter, 46 quarts of barley, 272 pounds of fresh beef, 31 gallons of vinegar, 186 pounds of raisins, 274 pounds of prunes, and 62 pounds of almonds for the consumption of the Indians.87 Nevertheless, when Indians did

84 Proceedings with the Indians at Niagara, 3 November 1779, f. 61, Add. MS 21779, BL. 85 For an account of Indians who went out to plant, see Return of Indians of Colonel Johnsons Department Gone out to plant at Different Places, their Villages having been destroyed, Niagara, 26 May 1780, f. 62, Add. MS 21769, BL. 86 Return of the Several Indian War parties of Col: Guy Johnson’s Department that Marched from Niagara against the Rebels from Febry 1780 to January 1781 with their success & the damages done by the Enemy, Niagara, 1 January 1781, f. 94, Add. MS 21769, BL; For monthly accounts of these numbers, see ff. 76, 80, 83, Add. MS 21769, BL. 87 John Servor, Accot. Of Sundreys. Issued by me to Indians and Prisoners by Order of Colo. Johnson out of his own Stores from the 24th Septr. to the 26th Octr. 1781 when he came from Niagara, Montreal, 30 May 1782, f. 170, Add. MS 21769, BL.

173 go out on service for the British, they were doing it in ways that differed from previous alliances of the 1770s.

Iroquois Indians’ concepts of military service began to change, as evidenced by their behavior concerning food. Natives expected to arrive at military forts in time to weather the wintertime, and to receive rations for the season. In February 1781, Indians around Niagara would arrive “upon us sooner than could be wished” because of their lack of success “on their hunting grounds” and “the severity of the last winter.”88 In spite of

Haldimand’s complaints, commands, and entreaties to officers working in Indian affairs, the British kept making plans to feed Indians. The ways that British officials related these occurrences—“wishing” the Indians would come later—connotes their desires that the situation would change, but also their resignation about the fact that they could not alter it. Sometimes, the Indians even got away with outright manipulation. Haldimand was shocked to find that Iroquois Indians who were “Intermarried, with those of Canada,” had received provisions twice—once, as Indians belonging to the Seven Nations of Canada, and again, as Indians belonging to the Six Nations.89

By the end of 1779 Iroquois Indians were going beyond voicing doubts about

British food diplomacy and trying to obtain more provisions from British officials; they were seeking to impose their notions of hunger on their British allies. In August 1779,

John Butler reported on an action with Mohawk Joseph Brant and a number of Delawares and Senecas. After failing to persuade the Indians to retreat, Butler lamented having

“Scarcely time to dress a few Ears of Corn” before they attacked. Once the action failed,

88 H. Watson Powell to Frederick Haldimand, Niagara, 18 February 1781, f. 7, Add. MS 21761, BL. 89 Frederick Haldimand to Daniel Claus, Quebec, 6 September 1779, f. 61, Add. MS 21774, BL.

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“many of the Indians made no halt, but proceeded immediately to their respective villages.”90 In this instance, the Delawares and Senecas dictated where and how they would stand against the enemy; they ignored the lack of food before they fought; and upon retreat, they privileged their return to their villages over an orderly retreat with the

British, no doubt to see whether the rebels had succeeded in destroying their villages’ food stores, as they had in so many other Indian towns.

Indian allies changed their behavior so that they were not merely ignoring British preferences, but forcing their British allies to starve alongside of them. Over time this mentality extended to Indians other than the Six Nations. In June 1780, a group of

Shawnees and Great Lakes Indians arrived at the American-held Fort Liberty with

Britons Henry Bird and Alexander McKee.91 Before the Indians entered the rebel fort,

Bird granted the Americans “That their Lives should be saved, and themselves taken to

Detroit.” In a separate council, the Indians agreed to let the British take “the Cattle for

Food for our People, and the Prisoners.” Natives also promised that they would not go into the fort until the following day. While McKee and Bird were inside the fort “settling these matters,” however, the Indians “rushed in, tore the poor Children from their

Mother’s breasts, killed a wounded Man, and every one of the Cattle, leaving the whole to stink.”92 The Natives deliberately obliterated all of the food stores, an act that ensured

90 Major John Butler to Lieutenant Colonel Mason Bolton, Shechquago, 31 August 1779, vol. 11, no. 85, photostat 2238, box 10, British Headquarters papers, NYPL. 91 John Sugden calls the fort “Capt. Isaac Ruddell’s fort,” or “Ruddell’s Station,” not Fort Liberty, but his citations suggest they are one and the same. Richard White identifies the Indians as Shawnees and Great Lakes Indians. John Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 60-62; White, The Middle Ground, 407. 92 Henry Bird to Major Arent Schuyler De Peyster, Ohio, opposite Licking Creek, 1 July 1780, f. 316, Add. MS 21760, BL.

175 that the British could not appropriate any of them. They repeated these actions at the next fort, where “The same promises were made, and broke in the same manner...not one pound of Meat” survived. Bird recorded that they “had brought no Pork,” and were

“reduced to great distress.” The prisoners stood “in danger of being starved.”93

By rushing into the fort, shooting a prisoner, and killing the animals, the Indians accomplished two things. First, they took their revenge on the Americans, some of whom may have deprived them of food the previous summer. Second, they also succeeded in keeping the British from obtaining sustenance. Initially this second achievement might seem odd: why would Indians try to prevent their allies from eating? When one considers that the Indians had evinced their willingness to eat less beginning in the fall of 1779, however, it seems likely that the Indians were attempting to bring the British up to their level of stoicism. They associated hunger with times of combat. Killing the cattle sent a message to the British that said, “it is time for war, tighten your breeches and help us to fight.”94 When Indians went hungry, they also demanded that the British would eat less during periods of dearth. Even if establishing British hunger was not their intention, the

Indians still managed to end their campaign early. Rather than marching through

Kentucky, as planned, their actions enabled them to return home to their villages.95

The British did not recognize Indians’ actions as a reformulation of food diplomacy. Frederick Haldimand was infuriated by the Indians’ behavior at Fort Liberty.

93 Henry Bird to Major Arent Schuyler De Peyster, Ohio, opposite Licking Creek, 1 July 1780, f. 316, Add. MS 21760, BL. 94 This sentence originally read “...tighten your belts...” I am grateful to William P. Tatum, III for clarifying that eighteenth-century British soldiers would have been likelier to wear breeches, rather than pants that required belts to hold them up. 95 White, The Middle Ground, 407.

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He had conceived of the operation as a way “to cheque the Encroachments of the Enemy, so loudly complained of by the Indians.” Instead, he concluded, that by “killing and destroying the Cattle,” the Indians “not only prevented Captain Bird from pursuing his

Success, but reduced him to the last Extremity for want of Provision.”96 Haldimand did not consider the fact that his military purposes might have differed from the Indians’ goals. He painted the expedition as a way to curtail Americans’ encroachment onto

Indians’ lands. He did not realize that by killing the Americans’ cattle, Indians were, in fact, revenging themselves for this encroachment, much the same way as Natives in the earlier colonial period acted out their anger against similar “creatures of empire.”97 These cattle would also have been food, as Indians partaking of British provisions (and selling them, at that) would have known. Haldimand missed the point that the Indians had worked to deprive his men of ready, mobile food supplies.

Over time, making sure that their British allies went hungry became one of the key tenets of Natives’ actions. In 1781, a combined party of Indians and rangers met at

Oswego, and the Seneca Indian headmen “held a council...without advising” the British of their plans. They informed two British officers they would go to Monbackers and “to no other place” because they were “in a starving condition,” and because it was “a verry rich country.” One officer reflected that he felt obliged to go with them, “altho contrary to my Instructions.” Once the action commenced, the Indians seemed bent on ruining food supplies rather than enjoying the country’s riches. The party destroyed “thirty large

96 Frederick Haldimand to Mason Bolton, Quebec, 10 August 1780, f. 130, Add. MS 21764, BL. 97 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

177 storehouses,” grain, and animals. In encountering a fort defended by the Americans, the

Indians chose to burn the party of rebels, with the “large quantities of grain” inside of it, rather than giving quarter to the troops. The officers, who were also hungry, were horrified “to see the Indians kill and take the greatest part of the cattle that were captured by the Rangers,” leaving the rank and file in “a starving situation.”98 Once again, the officers in charge could do nothing to stop them.

The fact that the Americans continued to use food metaphors that drew on the shared experience of scarcity may eventually have worked to their advantage. At a meeting of American commissioners with American-allied Oneidas, Tuscaroras, and

Caghnawagas in 1781, the Americans described how the “long War has impoverished us.” They could offer attendees little in the way of sustenance because their stomachs also ached with hunger. But what differentiated American from British food diplomacy was Americans’ willingness to undergo deprivation alongside of their Native allies. Of course, the Americans possessed little choice in the matter of starvation because the war was fought in their towns, and throughout their farmlands. But this position ironically gave them a better chance with food diplomacy than their British counterparts because

Indian allies could empathize. Although the Americans promised, “that your way hereafter [would] be better supplied with provision and necessaries,” they also guaranteed that when “hardships are inevitable,” the Indians should “be of good comfort: We suffer with you.”99 By appealing to the idea of mutual suffering caused by the absence of food,

98 [Captain William Caldwell] to [Brigadier General Henry Watson Powell], Ochquago, 19 August 1781, ff. 148-149, 152, Add. MS 21762, BL. 99 [Unknown men] of the great Council of the United States and the Board of War, talk to the Oneidas, Tuscaroras, and Cochnawagas, 13 September 1781, folder 27, box 23, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL.

178 the Americans evinced their willingness to eat when there was food, and to go hungry when there was none. Yet this meeting also demonstrated Indians’ abilities to alter

American food diplomacy. No longer could American officials rely on metaphors to maintain Natives’ allegiance; they too felt obligated to accede to Indian demands, and to promise a future delivery of provisions.

Indian-driven food diplomacy became still more evident in the ways in which

Britons actively sought to discover and accommodate Natives’ emerging food preferences. In addition to receiving food from the British, the Indians would refuse to grow it for themselves. In May 1781, the British distributed hoes for the use of the Six

Nations, the Delawares, and the Shawnees. They accompanied this gift of farm implements with a present of corn, a sort of carrot-and-stick approach to encouraging the

Indians to grow food at home.100 In December of that year, however, the Indians again appeared at Fort Niagara, claiming, “The Trifling quantity of Indian Corn Issued to the different Families of Indians for planting” was their “reason for coming in to be Supply’d with provisions.”101 In effect, the Indians suggested that the amount of seed the British gave them in the spring was too paltry to produce an abundant crop—which once again necessitated British support over the winter. Two years later they claimed that “the rememberance of their late losses...were too recent for their entering with alacrity on planting.”102 In sum, Indians refused to plant corn when they could receive provisions readily from the British. They were not lazy; they merely sought to claim what they saw

100 Distribution of Corn, and Hoes for the Indians of Colonel Johnson’s Department, planting at Buffaloe Creek, 13 May 1781, f. 120, Add. MS 21769, BL. 101 John Butler to Robert Mathews, Niagara, 7 December 1781, ff. 263-64, Add. MS 21765, BL. 102 Extract of a letter from Colonel Guy Johnson to Frederick Haldimand, 11 January 1783, f. 134, Add. MS 21770, BL.

179 as the rightful terms of their allegiance, and to play into British notions of food as payment for military service.

In these various moments, Native tastes held sway over British wants, and occasionally, needs. In 1782 Frederick Haldimand received an inquiry that asked whether there was any corn available, “as the Indians would rather have it than flour.”103 The

British remained cognizant, however, that “the Indians prefer Bread to flour.”104

Although Britons encouraged Indians to plant crops, they also demonstrated their intention to continue to provide provisions that conformed to Indians’ tastes. Natives voiced their desire for salt provisions when it suited them, and for fresh provisions, likewise. Indians did not like “the Effect of living entirely upon Salt Meat,” because they found themselves “getting sickly.”105 As early as 1778 the Mohawks had convinced one official to give them half fresh and half salt provisions after living solely upon salt provisions for half of the year. By 1780, however, Indians around Montreal were requesting five days of fresh provisions out of each week—more than twice what they received in previous years. These Natives complained that salty food threatened their health, and by inference, their ability to fight well. Their case must have proved convincing, because Haldimand granted their request less than a week later.106

These changes underscore the degree to which Indians retained their power in a disastrous situation, even at a time when historians have argued that they were dependent,

103 H. Watson Powell to Frederick Haldimand, Niagara, 17 May 1782, f. 46, Add. MS 21762, BL. 104 Extract of a letter from Captain Fraser dated Carleton Island, 21 February 1780, enclosed in Frederick Haldimand to Mason Bolton, Quebec, 16 April 1780, f. 96, Add. MS 21764, BL. 105 Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 26 October 1778, f. 7, Add. MS 21774, BL. 106 Daniel Claus to Frederick Haldimand, Montreal, 26 October 1778, f. 7, Add. MS 21774, BL; Daniel Claus to Robert Mathews, Montreal, 23 March 1780, f. 98, Add. MS 21774, BL; Robert Mathews to Daniel Claus, Quebec, 27 March 1780, f. 99, Add. MS 21774, BL.

180 declining, and powerless. Over time the British came to see the Six Nations as hungry allies that they had to feed at the expense of other forms of military service; British expenditures on supplies to Niagara increased from £500 New York currency at the start of the war to £100,000 in 1781.107 Sometimes when the British went hungry, they did so because their Native allies had deliberately destroyed their food stores, but they possessed little choice but to continue to bow to Indian terms of service. By 1781 people increasingly practiced food diplomacy according to Indian notions, rather than British or

American ones.

***

Even though the Sullivan campaign embroiled the Six Nations in what some historians have called an Indian civil war, the degree of inter-Indian food diplomacy that continued to factor in Indian relations is notable—despite the degrees of victual warfare that also took place. These interactions would set the stage for inter-Indian contact in the postwar period. When food diplomacy broke down, Indians used foodways to communicate displeasure with other tribes.

In February 1780 several American-allied Iroquois held a meeting with the

British-allied sachems at Niagara. The four rebel Iroquois Indians asked the Six Nations to return to a position of neutrality, and said that in exchange for this behavior the

Americans would allow them to go back to the towns that they had destroyed during

Sullivan’s campaign. Before the Six Nations chiefs could respond, Colonel Guy Johnson told them, “that agreeable to their [wampum] Belt” he had permitted them to speak, and

107 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 133.

181 that he would give the Six Nations Indians “a free Opportunity to answer.” First, however, he said, “he could not take a Belt from People of their Character...and threw it towards them with Contempt.” After Johnson’s refusal of the wampum belt, someone presented some liquor, and Sayengeraghta, a British-allied Seneca chief, told the rebel

Indians that they “would give them an Answer when they had properly considered of it.”

But then, “he drank to the Health of the other Indians, omitting the four Rebels” as an indication “of his Contempt.” Although this moment has been filtered through the eyes of

British observers, and doubtless a number of translators, the actions of the British-allied

Indians speak for themselves. After hearing the rebel Indians ask them to renege on their loyalty to the British, the Six Nations declined to drink with them. This action anticipated the unceremonious return of their wampum belt shortly thereafter.108 It is notable, however, that this meeting concluded with messages sent through the symbolic use of food, rather than a physical display of violence.109

In spite of instances of hostility, the latter half of the Revolution witnessed

Indians increasingly using the language of food diplomacy to communicate between themselves and other Indian tribes. Even enemy Indians rarely used physical victual warfare against each other; rather, they used food to voice threats when diplomacy failed.

Only sporadically did they engage in the destruction of each other’s crops, cattle, and food stores—the Oneidas’ actions against the Mohawks in 1777 is perhaps the most striking example of this exception.

108 Copy of Proceedings with four Rebel Indians who came to hold a meeting with the Chiefs of the Six Nations, Niagara, 12 February 1780, 17 February 1780, ff. 75-8, Add. MS 21779, BL. 109 It should be noted that the British threw the four emisaries in jail. Little Abraham—the same Mohawk man who in 1776 berated the Americans for their poor food diplomacy—died there. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 141.

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Communication through food remained an essential tie that bound Indians together throughout the course of the war. Such was the case in 1780, when Samuel

Kirkland described a meeting between American-allied Oneidas, and some Senecas and

Mohawks whose loyalties rested with the British. The Mohawks and Senecas tried to persuade the Oneidas to leave their American alliance behind them. They hoped for a renewal of good relations, but they also issued a warning, “that the Oneidas should not taste of their Cornfields this year unless they complied with their proposals.”110

What followed, however, was a further negotiation of Indian diplomacy. The

Senecas accused the Oneidas “of being too officious in reconnoitering the woods in their

Vicinity and making report to the Americans of every track they discovered.” The

Senecas essentially informed the Oneidas that they were working too hard in their scouting work for the Americans. To earn their sympathy the Oneidas replied, “that it was very hard” if “their Young Warriors” had to balance “pursuing a Deer, or catching a fish” with the task of “seeking after the tracks of men.”111 There was some code at work here that neither the Americans nor the British were privy to. By stating that it was difficult to multitask by having to hunt and track for their allies, the Oneidas complained of struggling to obtain meat and fish. From these words alone it is not possible to say whether or not they were agreeing to avoid hostilities with other, but it is clear that by appealing to universal ideas about the difficulties of obtaining food during wartime, the

Indians were communicating on a level that Samuel Kirkland only partially conveyed.

110 Samuel Kirkland to Volkert P. Dowe, Fort Schuyler, 3 [unknown] 1780, folder 27, box 23, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL. 111 Samuel Kirkland to Volkert P. Dowe, Fort Schuyler, 3 [unknown] 1780, folder 27, box 23, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL.

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In April, 1783, Frederick Haldimand wrote that America and Great Britain had agreed to the terms of peace. He was immediately worried by the rumor that the Indians

“are not considered in the treaty.”112 One brigadier general understood the implications almost instantly. He wrote to Haldimand and worried that, “If the terms of the Peace between Great Britain and America are such as we have seen in the Philadelphia papers, the Indians will be outrageous.”113 Officials in the new United States assumed that they had won a transfer of all lands stretching to the Mississippi River—lands occupied by

British-allied Natives.114

Ceding land seemed like a simple matter, even if it was not. By contrast the transfer of food diplomacy from the British to the Americans occurred only haphazardly, when it happened at all. The British continued to act as the main suppliers of food to

Indians, and in fact they did everything in their power to prevent the Americans from practicing effective food diplomacy. In July 1783 the British still victualed some 3,000

Indians a day at Niagara. When a U.S. commissioner attempted to contact the Six

Nations, the same British brigadier general refused on the grounds that doing so would

“bring on disputes that might be disagreeable to the Service and the Troops under my

Command.”115 In reality the British official distrusted the Americans. He reflected, “they are become such Arch-Politicians by eight years practice, that were old Matchiavell alive, he might go to School [with] the Americans to learn Politics more cooked than his

112 General Frederick Haldimand to [unknown], Quebec, 21 April 1783, vol. VIII, William A. Smy Collection, the Butler Papers, LAC. 113 Brigadier General Allan MacLean to General Frederick Haldimand, Niagara, 2 May 1783, vol. VIII, William A. Smy Collection, the Butler Papers, LAC. 114 Graymont, The Iroquois in the American Revolution, 259. 115 Allan Maclean to Ephraim Douglass, Niagara, 16 July 1783, folder 27, box 23, Philip Schuyler Papers, NYPL.

184 own.”116 These worries about the corruption of American officials and their abilities to sway British-allied Natives trickled down into British food diplomacy.

British officials expected that the British would continue to supply the Indians. In

July Haldimand received a letter that discussed the state of flour, pork, and butter supplies needed at Niagara, Carleton Island, and Detroit in order to “Continue to Victuall the Same Number of Troops and Indians [that] we have done, and are doing.” The

American commissioners tried to reach the Iroquois again in August, bringing “three

Batteaux’s...Loaded with Rum to trade at the Upper Posts,” passes from General Philip

Schuyler, Governor Clinton of New York, and a pass from the mayor of Albany. Once again, the British official refused to let them through, and was pleased to report that one of “Our Indian friends,” mistaking an Englishmen for one of the American commissioners, drunkenly asked him, “You damn Yankee what brought you here.”117 By preventing the Americans from treating with the Indians, the British attempted to maintain their influence with the Six Nations. British officers happily related any instances in which the Indians manifested continuing goodwill toward the British at the

Americans’ expense. This trend would continue to factor heavily as the British lingered on at their posts in present-day Canada, and as the Indians continued to fight on.

Historians have suggested that the American Revolution was not merely a war fought between Americans and Britons, but also one that embroiled the numerous Indians living in North America. The Indians’ “War of Independence” began long before the

116Allan Maclean to Arent Schuyler De Peyster, Niagara, 8 July 1783, f. 179, Add. MS 21763, BL. 117 Allan Maclean to Frederick Haldimand, Niagara, 1 August 1783, ff. 214-15, Add. MS 21763, BL.

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Revolution, and continued beyond its formal conclusion.118 Food diplomacy and victual warfare matter because they demonstrate the extent to which the war between Britons and

Americans was fought on Indian terms, on a visceral, daily basis. When understood in this context, the continuing violence of the 1790s makes much more sense because it was merely a continuation of foodways that Indians strengthened by participating in the

Revolution.

Before the key year of 1779, the British set the terms of food diplomacy with their Six Nations allies. They gave symbolic gifts of food to maintain allegiance, but they could tell the Indians when and how to fight for them. After John Sullivan’s devastating expedition of victual warfare, the Iroquois continued to use retaliatory victual warfare to deprive the Americans of food, but they also altered their food diplomacy to dictate the terms of their military service, to make demands about food supply, and to make the

British starve when it suited them. An Iroquois declension narrative may exist, but its implications resound more loudly in the post-Revolutionary period than they do in the

1770s. In the 1780s and 1790s, Americans would have to speak food diplomacy with

Indians. They had their work cut out for them as they set about trying to prevent “useless mouths” from becoming vengeful enemies.

118 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, xiii.

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Chapter 4: “We shall make their Towns Smoak with fire, and their Streets run with blood”: Victual Warfare and the Not-So-New Order of Things

Americans in the South did not wonder whether Natives would turn into vengeful enemies; they knew that Creeks and Cherokees would use violence, because throughout the Revolution, hostility permeated Southern Indian affairs. Historians agree that the official endpoint of the American Revolution changes depending on who one asks: some say that the war closed when fighting ceased after the British defeat at Yorktown in

October 1781; others argue that the war concluded only when Americans and Britons signed the articles of peace on September 2, 1783; and still others point to November 25,

1783, the day the British departed from New York City. None of these details mattered to

Southern Indians, because for them warfare began before the Revolution and continued uninterrupted after these historic dates.1 In the Southern theater of war Americans and

Britons competed to gain the allegiance of Cherokee and Creek Indians through food diplomacy. These efforts overwhelmingly failed.

Whereas Native food diplomacy in the North worked quite well by the end of the

Revolution, in the South, the presence of multiple strong imperial powers meant that victual warfare prevailed. Indians possessed more room to negotiate with Americans and

Britons, yet food shortages occurred regularly, a fact that made it difficult for European powers to utilize food diplomacy. When Americans and Britons realized the multiple obstacles to practicing effective food diplomacy, both sides tried to block the enemy’s

1 Consequently, this chapter stretches to 1789. First, because fighting ceased briefly in 1785 with the appointment of United States Indian commissioners; second, because violence picked up again until 1790, the year of the Treaty of New York with the Creeks.

187 attempts, rather than using it themselves. When this tactic did not succeed, they turned to victual warfare—against each other, and against disloyal Indians. They hoped that by destroying the crops of recalcitrant Indians, they could force other Southern Natives into compliance.

Historians puzzle over the problem of tracking Southern Natives’ loyalties throughout the Revolution. Foodways expose divisions among Indians who accepted food diplomacy, and then, confusingly, engaged in victual warfare. What Americans and

Britons saw as prevarication did not necessarily indicate Indians’ inabilities to choose sides. Rather, such hemming and hawing was actually the different opinions of various

Creek and Cherokee factions; Anglo-American officials simply could not differentiate between them. When Natives committed victual warfare, Indian chiefs asked Americans and Britons to excuse the actions of their “young men.” In reality violent Cherokees and

Creeks acted, not against the orders of older chiefs, but without their knowledge—they had moved away from their villages. The actions of Native factions made wartime violence indistinguishable from postwar victual warfare; food, in other words, provides the continuity necessary to comprehend the Southern Indians’ War of Independence.2

Victual warfare reveals Revolutionary and postwar divisions among Americans as well as Indians. The practice of preventing food diplomacy, coupled with the extent of victual warfare set an important precedent in the years after the official end of the war, when Southern states competed with the federal government for Natives’ allegiances.

After 1783, American factions mirrored Revolutionary-era Indian ones. Whereas during

2 Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in North American Communities (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), xiii.

188 the period from 1774 to 1783 Americans and Britons tried to present their separate united fronts to Indian groups, in the postwar years a divided, competitive groups of Southern states sought to treat with equally factious clusters of Natives.

In the 1780s the spirit of competition would dominate Southern Indian affairs.

The extent of food scarcities in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia meant that these states embraced the wartime model of blocking an enemy’s ability to engage in food diplomacy: they refused to help neighboring states exercise food diplomacy because their poor food security made them self-interested. The inabilities of the Southern states to cooperate translated into a nearly constant state of victual warfare in the postwar South. Only when the United States appointed its own Indian commissioners in 1785 would affairs briefly resume a peaceful tone, but even then, violence continued as Southern commissioners and U.S. commissioners began to compete with each other for Native loyalties. To add to these difficulties, frontier violence continued to break out between American inhabitants and Native Americans.

***

The years leading up to the American Revolution were tense with conflict between Indians and American colonists; food diplomacy flourished only sporadically.3

3 Before the war, the British categorized the Cherokees into four groups—Lower, Valley, Middle, and Overhill. Lower Cherokees lived in South Carolina; Valley and Middle Cherokees lived in the Blue Ridge region; and the Overhills lived north on the Little Tennessee and Tellico rivers. Traveling from Charlestown to Keowee, the first of the Lower towns, took about twelve to fifteen days of travel across 250 miles. The Creeks lived to the South of the Cherokees in present-day Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, divided into the three groups of Upper, Lower, and Seminole Creeks. Whites bestowed the name “Creeks” on the peoples who called themselves “Muskogee” or “Muskogugle,” from the Algonkian. Indians began to use the term “Creeks” to refer to themselves in the late eighteenth century. Since 1715 they had intermittently acted as a confederacy, but their allegiances rested more with their towns and families, rather than to the tribe as a political entity. In the eighteenth century there were approximately forty Upper Creek towns. Little Tallassee, Okchai, and Tuckabatchee were their main diplomatic towns. The towns of Coweta,

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Since 1761 John Stuart, a Scots immigrant to South Carolina, had superintended the

Southern tribes on behalf of Great Britain.4 Conflicts arose over land claims and the thefts of domesticated animals, just as they had in the North. At treaties in 1763 and

1765, Creeks complained that the deliberate efforts of colonists, combined with the intrusive behavior of Americans’ cattle, conspired to drive off their bear, buffalo, and deer, and consequently interfered with their foodways.5

Colonial officials proved ineffective at circumscribing Southern colonists’ movements onto and throughout Indians’ lands because, as John Stuart observed, any person who could “give Security for the observance of Regulations, has a right to a

Cusseta, and Apalachicola were particularly important to the Lower Creeks. Upper Creeks lived on the Alabama, Coosa, and Tallapoosa rivers; Lower Creeks made their homes along the Chattahoochee, Flint, and Ocmulgee rivers. A third group of Creeks, who would become known as Seminoles, began to settle in Florida during the 1760s. In 1775, between fifty and sixty thousand Natives comprised the Southern Indian tribes. Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 3-4. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 61; Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians Through the Era of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xiii, xiv, 14, 81; Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3, 13-14, 19, 22, 34; Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775-1782 (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 26, 28. 4 Saunt, A New Order of Things, 48. 5 Southern Indians’ foodways relied mostly on farming, but they also raised horses, pigs, and cows. Cherokees tended to embrace pigs, while the Creeks eventually evinced a preference for cattle. The Cherokees reserved their winters for war, and ignored their hunting during this time. Cherokees and Creeks both celebrated a form of the Green Corn Ceremony, busk, or Poskita in late July or August; each town’s celebration occurred when the corn ripened. In most places women farmed and men hunted. Yet this distinction is not as clear-cut as it may seem; especially among the Creeks, men could clear fields, and women sometimes accompanied men on hunting trips. Sometimes, this gendered ambiguity existed among the Cherokees, too. The Creeks conceived of the food they grew as property, though they did not think of the land itself as something that could be owned. O’Donnell, III, Southern Indians in the American Revolution, vii-ix, 5, 8; James H. Merrell, The Indians’ New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact Through the Era of Removal (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1991 [the University of North Carolina Press, 1989]), 216-17; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 7; Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 62, 185; Hatley, The Dividing Paths, 8, 48, 162; Neal Salisbury, “The Indians’ Old World: Native Americans and the Coming of Europeans,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 53, no. 3 (July 1996), 457; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 63; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 40-41.

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License to Trade in any Nation of Indians.” Anyone—rebel-minded colonist or British

Loyalist—who possessed a license could come and go among the Indians.6 Such laxities in distributing trade licenses enabled unscrupulous men to masquerade as traders who could claim affiliation with Americans, Britons, or Spaniards, depending on the Indian group with whom they sought to speak.

The Creeks complained about traders because their actions resulted in land grabs.

Emistesigo, “a very considerable headman and warrior in the Upper Creek country,” bemoaned the fact that “great numbers of traders come amongst them from all parts...and carry great quantities of rum.”7 A man called Jonathan Bryan, for example, would manage to obtain a 99-year lease on Creek lands “by giving rum and other presents.”8 By making the Indians drunk, Bryan prevailed upon them to cede their territory. As a well- connected member of the Tiger clan with numerous relatives, Emistesigo’s opinion would have garnered considerable cachet.9 He explained that white traders who sold rum made their young men drunk, ungovernable, and likely to be seduced into violence or into signing away their lands. Southern governors had to concede that they could not prevent the trespasses of unprincipled men because “there are numbers of traders who get

6 John Stuart to Brigadier-General Augustine Prevost, Pensacola, 24 July 1777, vol. 10, no. 180, photostat 629, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 7 Conference between Governor Sir James Wright and Upper Creek Indians, Savannah, 14 April 1774, DAR, vol. VIII, 93-94. 8 John Stuart to the Earl of Dartmouth, Charleston, 3 January 1775, DAR, vol. IX, 23. The man is referred to in this document only as “Mr. Bryan.” Jim Piecuch identifies him as Jonathan Bryan. Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 33. 9 Saunt, A New Order of Things, 19-21.

191 licenses from other provinces as well as this,” and they could not “regulate or prevent many of the abuses for want of proof against the offenders.”10

Land cessions distressed Southern Natives because prewar land grabs had already circumscribed their hunting areas. Despite the fact that Southern Natives used hunting to obtain deerskins, as the fur trade floundered, deer meat retained its importance in Indian foodways. The Creeks had been forced to relinquish land in 1773, and the Cherokees had done the same in 1775.11 At the Treaty of Stanwix in 1768, Iroquois delegates had sold away Cherokee lands without their permission.12 Cherokees and Shawnees both claimed hunting rights on the lands ceded by the Six Nations; the Cherokees, indeed, only found out about this cession when the Shawnees informed them of it (John Stuart had deliberately avoided telling them about it).13

Whereas in the North, American officials relied on food metaphors and Britons distributed food, poor food supplies in the South made it difficult to broker food diplomacy to maintain good relations with increasingly discontented Indians.

Consequently, almost everyone fell back on using figurative food language and metaphors. At a conference with Upper Creeks in Savannah, Governor of Georgia James

Wright told the Indians, “the consequences of a war are very bad and distressful, and we wish to avoid them...to raise our stocks and plant our ground.” “What are you to get by a war?” he asked. During peacetime they could “hunt and kill deer...without any fear of

10 Conference between Governor Sir James Wright and Upper Creek Indians, Savannah, 14 April 1774, DAR, vol. VIII, 93-94. 11 O’Donnell, Southern Indians in the American Revolution, vii-ix, 23-24. 12 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 189. 13 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 43.

192 interruption.”14 He appealed to the Creeks’ hunting customs, and their knowledge of colonists’ planting habits to emphasize that by going to war, everyone would feel obliged to fear hunger. Nevertheless, he offered no gifts of food to ensure peace.

Sometimes officials explicitly refused to supply food. In 1774 West Florida inhabitants in Pensacola feared a Creek war. A party of Creeks came to visit Governor

Peter Chester, “to demand Powder; and Ball; and a little Provisions.” Chester refused,

“’till such time as they gave Satisfaction for the Murders committed by their Nation.”

When the Indians requested food, the Governor denied it on the grounds that the Indians did not deserve it. Although the Creeks departed “without doing the least Mischief,” food metaphors were rapidly becoming ineffective at sustaining periods of calm.15

When war broke out, American and British officials scrambled to gain control of

Indian affairs.16 In 1776 Congress divided the colonies into three Indian departments, and

14 Conference between Governor Sir James Wright and Upper Creek Indians, Savannah, 14 April 1774, in DAR, vol. VIII, 91-92. 15 Alexander Dickson to General [Frederick Haldimand], Pensacola, 9 May 1774, f. 139, Add. MS 21731, BL. 16 The extant historical narrative of the Revolution in the South goes something like this: at first, the British would ask the Indians to remain ready to fight, without actually calling on them for assistance; the Americans, as in the North, asked only for neutrality. The Americans would work to enlist the Catawbas while keeping Creeks and Cherokees neutral. They would leave the Chickasaws and Choctaws alone because they believed they lived too far away to be of use. The British did not try to ally with the Catawbas, but worked hard to earn the allegiance of the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Chickasaws. In 1776 a group of Cherokees attacked the Americans against British wishes. In May 1777 the Americans would retaliate, and a group of older Cherokees sued for peace with the Americans at the Treaty of DeWitt’s Corner. The Cherokees fractured along generational lines when a younger group, led by Dragging Canoe, encouraged approximately five hundred families to secede with him and form new communities along the Chickamauga River. The power of Chota, the ceremonial, diplomatic, and political capital of the Overhill Cherokees, thus declined in power. Partially as a result of American attacks against the Cherokees, many Creeks initially refused to fight. Yet the Creeks enjoyed better security during the war. As Joel Martin points out, Americans never invaded Muskogee towns to burn crops or kill cattle; when victual warfare occurred, it was Creeks who carried out violence. In the Upper Creek towns of Oakfuskie and Tallassee, Indians pushed for neutrality because they too feared retaliation. Eventually some Upper Creeks, led by Emistesigo, would side with the British, which prompted Americans in Georgia to demand the Creeks’ lands. The Oakfuskies, Tallassees, and Lower Creeks would still treat with the Americans.

193 allotted ten thousand dollars to the Southern portion. Trade agent and go-between George

Galphin would eventually take over.17 John Stuart remained superintendent on behalf of the British, and would eventually command a company of Loyalists “Wholly Annexed and Attached” to the Indian department.18 British ministers—Lord North, who was replaced by Lord Dartmouth, and then by Lord George Germain in November 1775— dictated instructions from London.19

As in the North, provisioning problems frequently arose. In June 1777 John Stuart expressed his relief that he successfully provisioned a number of Indians who came to visit him in Pensacola, but worried that he had spent a “great Expence” on “Provisions of every kind.” His relief betrayed the urgency of the situation, and his feelings that Britons could not dispense with food diplomacy. Yet providing Indians with food took sustenance out of the mouths of other people: “If Supplies do not soon arrive,” Stuart worried, “many people must perish for want.”20 In 1778 one brigadier general fretted about “the means of supplying the Indians” near St. Augustine, who were “already too much wavering” as a result of American efforts.21 Native assistance was unlikely without the distribution of food; without provisions, the British could not expect them to fight, so they had to supply them even at the risk of starving themselves.

Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 26; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 54, 56; Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 43-45; Hatley, The Dividing Paths, 223; Martin, Sacred Revolt, 174. 17 O’Donnell, Southern Indians in the American Revolution, vii-ix, 23-24; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 67. 18 Brigadier-General John Campbell to General Sir Henry Clinton, Pensacola, 10 February 1779, vol. 13, no. 1, photostat 1737, box 8, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 19 Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 36. 20 John Stuart to General Sir William Howe, Pensacola, 16 June 1777, vol. 10, no. 189, photostat 586, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 21 Brigadier-General Augustine Prevost to Sir Henry Clinton, St. Augustine, 16 September 1778, vol. 8, no. 140, photostat 1361, box 6, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

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As a result of poor food security and Southern Indians’ continuing abilities to negotiate, Creeks and Cherokees, in contrast to their Northern Iroquois counterparts, used food to dictate the terms of their military service much earlier in the war. In the winter of

1776, for example, when John Stuart sought the aid of the Creeks, “their Answer was

‘That they were willing to assist us but it must be in their own Way...with White Men who would furnish them with Provisions.” Furthermore, the Creeks warned, “any great

Number of Red Men could not subsist in a Body together.” After refusing to fight unless they received food, Natives further established the terms of their engagement. In the same letter Stuart also wrote that another group of Indians would only agree to attack “the

Frontiers of Georgia, as soon as a sufficient Quantity of Corn could be got to support them upon the Expedition.”22

As always, Native service remained contingent on the arrival of food supplies— but in the South those supplies appeared even less frequently. Whereas in the North

British Major John Butler successfully obtained provisions for his combined group of rangers and Six Nations Indians, despite the protests of commanders such as Frederick

Haldimand, Southern Indian agents ran into greater obstacles while trying to maintain

Indian loyalties. In May 1777 General Howe wrote to John Stuart, and complained about

“the very heavy expence of supplying the Savages with provisions when joined with the

Troops, the difficulty in procuring them, and of carriage afterwards.” He suggested that in order “to obviate these extraordinary Inconveniencies, I should wish that the most persuasive arguments were used to strengthen the union now subsisting between the

22 John Stuart to Brigadier-General Augustine Prevost, Pensacola, 24 July 1777, vol. 10, no. 180, photostat 629, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

195 different tribes of Indians.”23 Howe voiced his unwillingness to create a combined soldier and Indian cohort, because the cost of providing food would prove too prohibitive. His solution of encouraging the Indians to ally amongst themselves, rather than giving them support in the form of provisions, was not likely to win the British any favors when

Natives could continue to receive food from the Americans.

Even during times of dearth, Creeks and Cherokees continued to expect food from

British officials. The Creek corn crop suffered in 1776, and failed almost entirely in July

1778.24 Concomitant wheat failures in Virginia and Maryland made it hard for British troops to steal grain; the British withdrawal from Philadelphia undermined ideas about

British success; and the implementation of Southern food embargos continued to threaten food supply. British officials likely faced the prospect of many mouths to feed—yet they made sure that diplomacy with Natives remained a priority.

Precisely because Indian allegiances remained uncertain, British agents felt responsible for sustaining food diplomacy. In 1778 John Stuart reported the arrival of 600

Lower Creeks because “the Scarcity of Provisions which prevailed in the Nation occasioned a much greater Number coming down.” Stuart chastised some of the

Creeks—“the Cussitalis Oakfuskees & Towns which misbehaved”—and praised “the

Behaviour of the Cowetalis and other friendly Towns.” Although Stuart criticized the

Creeks for wavering loyalties, he still felt that he could not afford to refuse to feed them.

The fact that Stuart gave food to Indians of questionable loyalties indicated British

23 General Sir William Howe to John Stuart, New York, 3 May 1777, vol. 1, no. 118, photostat 512, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 24 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 57.

196 officials’ worries about their abilities to use food to maintain Native allegiances. Indeed,

Stuart wrote, that “Many of the Creeks remain here the whole Winter for the sake of

Provision,” and “since November about five hundred Cherokees have lived here,” causing “a very great Expence of Presents and Provisions.”25

Southern food diplomacy was different because it was more explicitly linked to trade. Trade seems to have figured more heavily in the South than it did in the North because backcountry traders could more easily masquerade as the brokers who bartered on behalf of British and American military institutions. The uncertain motivations of such traders further confused an already volatile situation. Furthermore, trade goods remained inextricably linked to consumable ones. By the 1750s rice was garnering more money in export value than deerskins, and when Indians did trade their deerskins, they sought rum, cooking utensils, and gunpowder for hunting in return.26

John Stuart recognized this connection between food and trade when he warned the Creeks against admitting “Traders or Commissaries” into their Nation.27

Contemporary eighteenth-century definitions of the word “commissary” explicitly related to food; hence people who come bearing trade goods or food gifts were considered equally dangerous to Indians.28 Southern Indians sometimes preferred trade goods over gifts of food, so Britons needed to convince them that food was still valuable—they had to, because sometimes it was all they possessed.

25 John Stuart to General Sir William Howe, Pensacola, 4 February 1778, vol. 10, no. 171, photostat 925, box 4, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 26 Hatley, The Dividing Paths, 10-11, 70, 161; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 32. 27 Copy of a Talk by John Stuart to the Chiefs of the Upper Creek Indians at Pensacola, [c. January/February 1778], vol. 10, no. 165, photostat 926, box 4, British Headquarters Paper, NYPL. 28 Oxford English Dictionary Online, search under “commissary, n.,” esp. def. 4, http://oed.com/.

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The Americans also remained cognizant of the close connections between trade and food, which influenced American officials’ efforts to practice food diplomacy. The

Revolutionary governments of Georgia and South Carolina seemed even more reluctant to provide a budget for Indian gifts.29 In 1776 George Galphin wrote a furious letter detailing his dismay “that the Congress had stoped the Exportation of Deer skins, which will put a stop to the suplying the Indians with Goods.” Galphin possessed reliable insight into potential Creek actions because he was married to a Creek wife and spent time brokering trade relations between the Indians and Americans. He warned that the

Americans would lose the Creeks’ allegiance if they neglected all types of diplomacy.

Galphin continued that the Creeks “have great encouragement to go to the Florida’s” to be supplied by the British, but the Indians “will never go if we can suply them here.”30 In lieu of trade diplomacy, food diplomacy would have to do. Although he indicated that trade remained of the utmost importance, he also urged Congress to see to the transportation of rum and gunpowder.31 Galphin implied that because goods were scarce, rum and powder would need to suffice. Luckily, the government responded positively; the South Carolina Council of Safety agreed to grant him gunpowder “& the additional article of Rum,” which they hoped “will enable you to keep the Indians in our friendship for Some [tim]e longer.”32 They were wrong.

29 Martin, Sacred Revolt, 65. 30 George Galphin to [unknown], Silver Bluff, 7 February 1776, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 11, 93- 94. 31 George Galphin to [unknown], Silver Bluff, 7 February 1776, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 11, 96. 32 Council of Safety to George Galphin, Charles Town, 14 February 1776, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 11, 102.

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Because food diplomacy proved so difficult for Americans and Britons to execute, the act of preventing food diplomacy became as important as practicing it. Both sides did what they could to block the enemy’s ability to engage in food diplomacy with Natives.

In July 1775, Americans seized John Stuart’s estate as “a security for the behaviour of the

Indians in the Southern Department.” Then, they attempted to pressure him into providing “copies of all my correspondence on Indian affairs.”33 President of the South

Carolina Council of Safety Henry Laurens remarked that Stuart deserved such treatment, in retribution for his “turning the power of those Savages against a Country which gave him Bread.”34 The Americans did what they could to find excuses to limit Stuart’s contact with the Indians. They were right, at least, to suspect that Stuart was trying to use food diplomacy with the Southern tribes: in a later letter, Stuart revealed that he hoped to gather the Creeks and Cherokees together in St. Augustine. He planned to use “all possible means...for engaging the Indians firmly in his Majesty’s interest.” His fear that he would “find difficulty in getting a supply of provisions” testifies to the fact that he knew he would need food to accomplish this goal.35 Stuart recognized the need to court the Southern tribes; the Americans did too, which is why they tried to control his movements.

33 John Stuart to the Committee of Intelligence, St. Augustine, 18 July 1775, in Extracts of Letters, &c. Published by Order of CONGRESS (Charles Town: Printed by Peter Timothy, 1776), 4-5, Provincial Congress, Extracts of Intercepted Letters, 1775-1776, S165248, SCDAH. 34 Henry Laurens to James Laurens, Charles Town, 2 July 1775, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 10, 202. 35 John Stuart to General Gage, St. Augustine, 3 October 1776, in Extracts of Letters, &c. Published by Order of CONGRESS (Charles Town: Printed by Peter Timothy, 1776), 7, Provincial Congress, Extracts of Intercepted Letters, 1775-1776, S165248, South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, SC.

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Southern colonists worried that their dearth of supplies would make for poor diplomacy with Indians, which is why they tried to prevent similar British overtures. In

1776 the Georgia Council of Safety observed that the Indians would “expect to be well paid, even for neutrality,” but feared that “we have it not in our power to give them” the

“Ammunition & Cloathing” the Indians preferred. They decided that instead, they would send “Cattle as a substitute.” They also thought, however, that in order to increase the likelihood that this strategy would work, they would need to ensure that “the communication between them & our Enemies were cut off.” Only by preventing the

Indians from communicating with the British would the Indians “be well satisfied with a

Present of this kind.”36 Cattle made for only semi-decent food diplomacy, and the

Georgians needed to plan on blocking British food diplomacy so that their shoddy form of it was the only one available.

The British also attempted to block or downplay Americans’ overtures of food and trade diplomacy. In October 1777 George Galphin persuaded some Cussetah and

Oakfuskee Creeks to visit the Americans in Georgia, and then conveyed them from there to Charleston. British information revealed that the Indians had been “entertained on board a Number of French Vessels...in the genteelest Manner,” and that the Americans had told them, “that if they persisted in carrying on the War against the Provinces their

Ruin would be inevitable.”37 In response, John Stuart sent a message to the Creeks that informed them, that the British possessed “Plenty of ammunition & Provisions.” He

36 At a Council, 5 July 1776, volume 2, Georgia Council of Safety, MS 282, GHS. 37 John Stuart to General Sir William Howe, Pensacola, 6 October 1777, vol. 10, no. 175, photostat 695, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

200 claimed that the rebels, by contrast, “are naked themselves & the Harbour of Charles

Town is blocked up.”38 Stuart may have known that some forms of Native speech equated nakedness with food scarcity.39 He implied that the Americans could not adequately provision the Creeks; the British, by contrast, could. Given the difficulties in obtaining supplies in the South, however, Stuart’s claim was more bluster than truth. The

Creeks who had travelled to Charleston decided not to join the British, and Stuart admitted that he felt “mortified and disappointed” by his failure.40

Natives also tried to prevent other Indians’ access to food. David Taitt, Deputy

Superintendent of British Indian Affairs in the Creek Nation, related that one party of

Indians “were obliged to return from the lower Creeks who would neither let them pass nor give them Provisions.”41 Even if the Creeks had allowed other Indians to travel through their villages, they could not travel far without food. Divisions among Indian tribes also resulted in blocked food diplomacy: when, in 1776-77, the Chickamauga

Cherokees led by Dragging Canoe split off from the remaining Cherokee towns in order to ally with the British, British officials continued to provision the 500 Chickamaugas, but prevented supplies from reaching other Cherokees.42

38 Copy of a Talk by John Stuart to the Chiefs of the Upper Creek Indians at Pensacola, [c. January/February 1778], vol. 10, no. 165, photostat 926, box 4, British Headquarters Paper, NYPL. 39 People associated nakedness with starvation because the absence of certain clothes items, such as moccasins, or warm-weather clothes during wintertime, could prevent hunting trips. Mary Black-Rogers, “Varieties of ‘Starving’: Semantics and Survival in the Subartic Fur Trade, 1750-1850,” Ethnohistory, vol. 33, no. 4 (Autumn, 1986), 358-59. 40 John Stuart to General Sir William Howe, Pensacola, 6 October 1777, vol. 10, no. 175, photostat 695, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 41 David Taitt to [John Stuart], Little Tallassie, 13 August 1777, vol. 10, no. 182, photostat 644, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 42 Calloway, The Revolution in Indian Country, 202.

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Sometimes British endeavors to block American food diplomacy proved ineffective, and prompted Indians to engage in victual warfare. In 1777, David Taitt wrote to John Stuart to detail his attempts to stop the Creeks from interacting with the

Americans. Taitt promised two British-allied Creeks, Will Friend and the White

Lieutenant, “good Presents” in return for seizing “whatever Goods Mr. Galphin might send up to their Town.” Unfortunately, Taitt could give them no provisions to make his request more appealing; he could only advise them to “provide themselves with

Provisions as soon as possible.”43 Taitt tried to block American trade while encouraging the Creeks to provide food for themselves, but this strategy did not succeed: the Creeks stole food from British traders, instead. A month later Alexander McGillivray related that the “Tallapoossies...continued to plunder their Traders,” and were destroying “Stock,

Cattle & Horses.”44 Rather than refusing to deal with the Americans, some Creeks continued to interact with them, and stole British animals as a sign of victual warfare.

Southern Indians enjoyed more options when it came to obtaining food and trade goods. And even though some Natives agreed to help British and Americans war efforts, they could not guarantee the good behavior of their brethren. For the most part,

Americans, Britons, and Indians’ abilities to block food diplomacy failed. Consequently, victual warfare figured much more prominently in the South than food diplomacy ever did.

***

43 David Taitt to [John Stuart], Little Tallassie, 13 August 1777, vol. 10, no. 182, photostat 644, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 44 Alexander McGillivray to John Stuart, Little Tallassie, 25 September 1777, vol. 10, no. 176, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; see also John Lewis Gervais to John Laurens, Charles Town, 27 October 1777, John L. Gervais Letters, 1772-1810. Copies. Call number 43/0096, SCHS.

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Victual warfare existed in the South long before the Revolution began. The

Cherokee War of 1759-61 had pitted Carolinians against Cherokees. In 1761 future lieutenant-governor of Florida John Moultrie described burning houses and “destroying fine fields gardens [and] orchards” belonging to Cherokee Indians.45 Native warriors stockpiled dead domesticated animals during the Buffalo Creek raids of the 1750s.46

Colonists had been using the destruction of Indians’ food stores to send threatening messages for years, which engendered Native retaliation. Southerners, like Northerners, stole cattle and destroyed crops, and by 1776 the British began to employ victual warfare with the aid of Indians.

During the Revolution, Southern victual warfare diverged from its Northern equivalent. In addition to stealing domesticated animals, people in places such as Georgia and South Carolina also stole slaves as a way of circumscribing the enemy’s foodways.

People began to use victual warfare earlier in South than they did in the North. John

Sullivan’s expedition into upstate New York did not begin until 1779; the American expedition against the Cherokees, on the other hand, took place in 1776—three years prior, in retribution for Cherokee attacks earlier that year.47 The aims of the campaign mirrored the Sullivan expedition: “a Corps of at least fifteen hundred men” was

“supposed to be adequate” to ensure “the destruction of the Crops of the lower Nation,”

45 John Moultrie to Eleanor Austin, Fort Prince George, 10 July 1761, in M.C.B. Gubbins, Transcripts and abstracts of Moultrie family papers, 1746-1965, 43/36, SCHS. Tom Hatley points out that the Cherokee War served as “a field school for young ‘military leaders’” who would figure in the Revolution, such as William Moultrie and Owen Roberts. Hatley, The Dividing Paths, 145. 46 Hatley, The Dividing Paths, 162-3. 47 One could also argue that Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore’s 1774 war against Mingo and Shawnee Indians presaged the beginnings of Revolutionary-era violence.

203 and the ensuing “necessary terror” in Cherokees’ minds.48 In the South the Americans struck preemptively against the Cherokees to make an example of them to other tribes, and to curb other Natives’ attempts at retaliatory victual warfare. They would attack again the following year, when they fell “upon the poor distressed Cherokees,” and once more destroyed “their Villages and Crops.” They would only deign to make peace in

August 1777.49

Americans’ victual warfare tested Natives’ loyalty to the British. The Cherokee

Dragging Canoe sent word that “they cou’d not be of any Service” to the King, and that further, “if they shou’d not raise Bread this Year the white People nor no one else wou’d have occasion to kill them for they wou’d all die with Hunger.” Dragging Canoe’s words lacked the metaphorical tropes that Indians commonly used to request provisions; his men were not “naked,” nor were they “starving”: some of the Indians had already felt

“obliged to eat Horses & Dogs & any Thing they can get,” and some were “dead already.”50 Dragging Canoe’s information about dying Cherokees evokes similar worries of Iroquois men in 1779; in this instance, too, a Native leader feared that the deaths of his men indicated his misplaced trust in British allies.

But despite Dragging Canoe’s words, he and the rest of the Chickamaugas still seemed willing to assist the British in exchange for food. They called themselves Ani-

48 Copy of a letter from Charles Lee to Edmund Pendleton, Charleston, 20 July 1776, f. 30, Charles Lee Letterbook, 2 July-27 August 1776, South Caroliniana Library, Columbia, SC; Armstrong Starkey, European and Native American Warfare, 1675-1815 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 123. 49 John Stuart to General Sir William Howe, Pensacola, 6 October 1777, vol. 10, no. 175, photostat 695, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; for the peace, see J. Glasgow to Waightstill Avery and William Sharp, Hewington, 15 August 1777, folder 1, Revolutionary War Papers, SHC. 50 Jos. Vann to Alexander Cameron, vol. 10, no. 188, photostat 587, enc. in photostat 586, box 3, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

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Yunwiya, or “the Real People.”51 Older Cherokees opposed this move, as did many

Cherokee women. The cohesion of the different groups fractured even more when the

Lower, Middle, and Overhill towns each tried to make separate peace efforts with the

Americans after 1777. Victual warfare continued, however, because most Americans remained unwilling and unable to distinguish between hostile and friendly groups of

Cherokees.52

By autumn of 1778, victual warfare ushered in seemingly greater casualties.

During the scarce September of 1778, Indians not only “carried away with them many of the horses,” killed “cattle and hogs,” and “burnt & laid waste all settlements on Broad river”—they also “killed from 20 to 30 of the inhabitants.”53 Reports from the following month stated that Creeks drove “off large Gangs of our Horses & Cattle, and what they cannot conveniently carry away, they shoot down.”54 Most importantly, people were also dying when victual warfare took place. Whereas in the North victual warfare usually resulted in the destruction of crops and cattle, in the South people seemed more likely to die.

Southern victual warfare shared some points of commonality with the North, but departed from it in significant ways. Victual warfare proved more preemptive in the

South; violence occurred sooner than it did in the North because of each side’s failure to

51 Dragging Canoe was joined by Bloody Fellow, Hanging Maw, Young Tassel (John Watts), Oconostota’s brother Kitegiska, Outacite, and Little Owl, Dragging Canoe’s brother. Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 54; Hatley, The Dividing Paths, 225. 52 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 43-44, 182-212, esp. 190, 200-02. 53 Col. Williamson to John Lewis Gervais, Camp at Awly Station 20 miles from Okoney River, 17 September 1778, John L. Gervais Letters, 1772-1810. Copies. Call number 43/0096, SCHS. 54 John Houstoun to Henry Laurens, Savannah, 1 October 1779, The Papers of Henry Laurens, vol. 14, 375.

205 block the other’s food diplomacy, and because of the unpredictable nature of Southern

Indian affairs. Such competition, hunger, violence, and bloodshed foreshadowed the extent to which the Revolution would divide Native loyalties. Americans’, Britons’, and

Natives’ failures to broker food diplomacy portended their continuing inabilities to do so during the later years of the war. Like the Six Nations, Southern Indians would also experience a period of intense change during the key year of 1779—this time, in the form of escalating victual warfare.

***

Just as 1779 had marked a shift in British-Indian food diplomacy in the North, the

South also witnessed a transformation in Indian affairs during that year, in this case due to the death of superintendent John Stuart.55 Stuart’s death in 1779 ushered in a period during which Native loyalties became severely uncertain. Following his demise, the

Americans seized on the opportunity to attack the Cherokees again, and then to offer misleading food diplomacy to force Creeks and Cherokees back into a state of neutrality.

Stuart’s absence highlighted the extent of the problems that the British faced in provisioning Southern tribes. By the end of 1779 British victories in the South combined with Americans’ provisions scarcities would push Natives toward more frequent alliances with the British—but British officials sought to curtail their food diplomacy, much as

General Frederick Haldimand had attempted to do in the North. Because Creeks and

55 Colin Calloway argues that Stuart’s death resulted in Americans making brief overtures of peace with the Cherokees, but that the Americans “remained incapable of alleviating Cherokee hunger or protecting Cherokee lands.” Piecuch suggests that when Stuart died, “British relations with the Indians underwent no significant change” because the British so quickly replaced him with Cameron, and Stuart’s brother, Charles. These points gloss over concomitant American raids against the Cherokees, and the fact that Stuart’s successor, Alexander Cameron, had a very difficult time transitioning into his role. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 203; Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 152.

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Cherokees possessed more ways of obtaining food than Iroquois Indians, results proved disastrous.

On March 25, 1779, British Brigadier General John Campbell reported “the Death of Colonel John Stuart...on Sunday last the 21st.” The whole Indian department stood “in the greatest Confusion, owing to the Colonels long and lingering ill State of Health.”56

Contemporary letters indicate British officials’ dissatisfaction with Stuart’s work, and their efforts to reform his methods of diplomacy: Lord George Germain, who had not yet received the news of Stuart’s death, wrote to him at the end of March to berate him for

“the Expence of your Department,” which had “increased so prodigiously that it is become a matter of public and parliamentary observation.” He ordered that Stuart’s

“Expences may in future be Strictly confined within the Bounds of your Estimate.”57

Obviously, Stuart could do nothing more to manage the state of his expenditures on

Indian provisions and presents, but Germain’s missive boded poorly for the future state of

British diplomacy.

Alexander Cameron, who had until Stuart’s death acted as superintendent for the

Cherokees, feared that such changes would hinder British-Native alliances. “The

56 Brigadier-General John Campbell to Sir Henry Clinton, Pensacola, 25 March 1779, vol. 13, no. 12, photostat 1856, box 8, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. The British effectively split Stuart’s department into two. In October Alexander Cameron, who had been in charge of superintending the Cherokees, became superintendent of the Choctaws and Chickasaws; Colonel Thomas Brown was appointed to the Catawba, Creek, and Cherokee Indians. They received the sum of £1000 as “allowance for presents, Rum, Provisions, Carriage and all other contingencies.” That Brown was given money for the Catawbas points to the fact that unilateral Catawba support for the Americans might be overstated, given that the British still thought they would be giving them presents and provisions. Lord George Germain to Colonel [Thomas] Brown, Whitehall, 25 June 1779, vol. 12, no. 76, photostat 2079, box 9, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 57 Lord George Germain to Colonel John Stuart, Whitehall, 31 March 1779, vol. 10, no. 111, photostat 1871, box 8, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; see also Lord George Germain to General Sir Henry Clinton, Whitehall, 1 April 1779, vol. 10, no 107, photostat 1875, box 8, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

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Cherokees will all return to the Rebels,” he wrote, as “soon as they are informed that I am deprived of the management of their affairs.” Knowing that he would, in Stuart’s absence, become responsible for superintending the Chickasaws and Choctaws, Cameron worried that his departure would result in the Indians seeking out a new imperial power.

He indicated that such changes were possibly taking place already among the Creeks. “I am sorry to learn” that “Mr. McGillivray and the Chiefs of this upper Settlement...seem to be tired of the War, and would much rather hunt the Bear who are very numerous about them at present than the Rebels,” he wrote.58 Of course, the Creeks may have gone bear-hunting because they were hungry, not because they wanted to neglect their service to the British. Nevertheless, Cameron’s experience with food diplomacy made him inclined to interpret the Creeks’ interest in hunting rather than war as evidence of wavering loyalty. By September the Indian department was “in Confusion” because

Cameron had not yet left the Cherokee nation.59

Even if Indian loyalties were secure, Britons would soon find that they did not possess the means to maintain them because food proved impossible to come by. In

September a ship “laden with 300 Barrels of Provisions And a considerable Quantity of

Rum...ha[d] unquestionably fallen into the Enemy’s Hands,” and the Indians could not be employed “for want of Provisions” on the Mississippi.60 When food supplies made it through, British officials faced major distribution problems. Stuart’s extensive

58 Alexander Cameron to Major General Augustine Prevost, 15 October 1779, Creek Nation, Little Tallassie, vol. 15, no. 217, photostat 2372, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 59 Major General John Campbell to General Sir Henry Clinton, Pensacola, 14 September 1779, vol. 3, no. 38, photostat 2289, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 60 Major General John Campbell to General Sir Henry Clinton, Pensacola, 14 September 1779, vol. 3, no. 38, photostat 2289, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

208 expenditures had left him deeply in debt when he died. In February 1780, 500 barrels of pork destined for the Indian department had been sent to Stuart’s attention, instead; this slip in address meant that the pork was “seized upon” by Stuart’s executor, and “will probably be sold by him as private Property.” “This Pork would be of the utmost advantage to the Superintendent in Carrying through his proposed Congress with the

Indians,” complained another official.61 Without it, the British possessed little chance of success.

The British Indian department continued to suffer for the want of provisions. In

December 1779 Alexander Cameron complained that a group of Creeks had visited him and requested food, which he could not distribute because he was no longer their superintendent. In desperation, he wrote to Governor Peter Chester at Pensacola and recommended that he should “Order at least provisions and Ammunition to be Issued to those Indians” as a matter of “Interest and Safety of your Province.” Cameron warned that without provisions, the colony at Pensacola would “become a prey to” the Creeks, who would retaliate with victual warfare that interfered with “Communication betwixt this place and Savannah through the Creek Nation.”62 Chester ignored him.

In 1779 the lack of cohesion in the British Indian department encouraged

Americans to seize the moment to mount a campaign of victual warfare, which they then followed—somewhat disingenuously—with offers of food diplomacy. Alexander

Cameron later recalled how in April 1779, Virginians attacked “Chicgamaga a New

61 John Campbell to Henry Clinton, Head Quarters, 10 February 1780, vol. 20, reel 7, 2565, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers, DLAR. 62 Alexander Cameron to Governor Chester, Pensacola, 25 December 1779, vol. 13, no. 64, photostat 2499, box 11, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

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Settlement,” where they eventually destroyed “Their Homes & Corn,” and “carried off” all the Indians’ “Horses & Cattle.” This action reduced the Cherokees “to the utmost distress.”63 In attacking British-allied Chickamauga towns, the Americans struck at a moment when the Indians were already suffering from hunger, and when some loyalties remained uncertain.

When Briton Alexander Cameron arrived at the Chickamauga towns at the end of

May, he “found matters in very great Confusion.” He discovered that “a Commisssary appointed by the Stadtholders of Virginia to Superintend the Cherokee” was laboring,

“Through the Mediation” of the Cherokee warrior Oconostota, to convince the Indians to take him up on his offer “to Support them with Provisions and all the Necessaries of Life providing they would return to their Old Towns and live Neutral.”64 Luckily for the

British, Cameron’s arrival precipitated the American agent’s departure: “not Chusing to risque his Safety in my Neighbourhood,” the man “returned to Virginia” when Cameron appeared. Cameron convinced the Cherokees not to agree to peace and provisions, but to wait for their own corn to ripen, when “we should then march to Carolina or Georgia and take Revenge.”65 Obviously the disarray of the Indian department meant that Cameron could not offer the Cherokees food in exchange for their service. In this case, however, he

63 Alexander Cameron to George Germain, Pensacola, 18 December 1779, 2489, vol. 20, reel 7, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers, DLAR. 64 Before the Revolution, Oconostota had supported the idea of trying to get along with the Americans. He was a cousin of Attakullakulla, Dragging Canoe’s father, and he became principal chief of the Cherokees after Attakullakulla’s death. This change, however, meant less than it would have before the war, given the fact that Oconostota assumed his new role just as Dragging Canoe was separating from the other Cherokees. Oconostota thus represented an older generation of accommodationist Natives. 65 Alexander Cameron to George Germain, Pensacola, 18 December 1779, 2489, vol. 20, reel 7, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers, DLAR.

210 managed to get them to agree to fight by encouraging them to wait for their own crops of corn to mature.66

What happened next was not to Cameron’s favor. The Americans had heard of these future British-Chickamauga battle plans, and sent “a General Williamson from

South Carolina with 700 Cavalry” to march toward the Cherokee settlement from Fort

Rutledge.67 Williamson promised the Cherokees, “that he did not mean to hurt them or their Effects, providing they would lay neutral” and allow him “to take or destroy”

Cameron and his company (Cameron discovered that the Indians had received these talks after the fact, when it was too late).68 Cameron prepared to meet the Americans: he

“mustered about 305 Indians besides my Company of Loyal Refugees” of an additional

40 men or so, only to discover “that the Enemy was Marching towards us in Three divisions, and Five Hundred horsemen in each Division.”69

At first the Cherokees seemed to privilege the protection of their crops over their promise to fight with Cameron. The Indians called a council, and decided to send two of their own “to treat for Peace and save their Corn.” Williamson told them that if they would deliver Cameron “into his Hands,” he would agree to spare their crops. But then, the Cherokees told Williamson, “that if he would not treat upon any other Terms, he

66 Alexander Cameron to Major General Augustine Prevost, 15 October 1779, Creek Nation, Little Tallassie, vol. 15, no. 217, photostat 2372, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 67 Alexander Cameron to George Germain, Pensacola, 18 December 1779, 2489, vol. 20, reel 7, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers, DLAR. 68 This account varies a little with another letter that Cameron sent to Prevost, in which he said that Williamson offered the Indians peace “provided they would not oppose him, or give me any Assistance.” Alexander Cameron to George Germain, Pensacola, 18 December 1779, 2489, vol. 20, reel 7, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers, DLAR; Alexander Cameron to Major General Augustine Prevost, 15 October 1779, Creek Nation, Little Tallassie, vol. 15, no. 217, photostat 2372, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 69 Alexander Cameron to George Germain, Pensacola, 18 December 1779, 2489, vol. 20, reel 7, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers, DLAR.

211 might burn their Towns as soon as he pleased.”70 Williamson accordingly “Burned Six of their Towns and destroyed their Corn...after which he offered them every assistance and

Protection they could wish for Providing they would return to their Old Towns and live in peace.”71 By 1779, American policy consisted of engaging in aggressive victual warfare, reneging on promises made, and, once their campaigns ended successfully, to offer terms of peace. Failures in British food diplomacy could have offered the Americans the opportunity to practice it themselves. Given the fact that they, too, could not obtain provisions, however, they sought instead to pursue a campaign of victual warfare because they needed to continue to demonstrate American power.

Cameron explained that he had hoped to gather the Indians together, “and revenge the loss of their Corn,” but this plan was foiled by his receiving word that he was no longer in charge of superintending the Cherokees. “This Revolution has overset my

Plan,” he complained, “and I am much afraid that few of the Indians of this District will join or give Assistance to His Majesty’s Troops this Season.”72 After the American attack, the instability of the British Indian department meant that Cameron could not rally the Cherokees for a retaliatory campaign. He wanted to provide them with food, but the funds he possessed were not meant for Cherokee use. In December Cameron reported

70 Alexander Cameron to Major General Augustine Prevost, 15 October 1779, Creek Nation, Little Tallassie, vol. 15, no. 217, photostat 2372, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 71 Alexander Cameron to George Germain, Pensacola, 18 December 1779, 2489, 2489, vol. 20, reel 7, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers, DLAR. 72 Alexander Cameron to Major General Augustine Prevost, 15 October 1779, Creek Nation, Little Tallassie, vol. 15, no. 217, photostat 2372, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

212 that the Chickamauga Cherokees were “living in the Woods upon Nuts and whatever they can get besides.”73

The Creeks, meanwhile, had suffered the consequences of a hungry winter, and

British failures to practice food diplomacy began to engender victual warfare. One official recalled that the winter of 1779-80 had “almost” ushered in “a famine in the lower Creeks.” Unlike Alexander Cameron, this man had successfully convinced Peter

Chester, Governor of East Florida, “to incur a small expence to keep our red allies in a good temper,” but it seems that these efforts did not content the Indians.74 By the winter of 1780, “Parties of Creek Indians were continually coming” to Pensacola for provisions.

“But as Nothing was Allowed me to Gratify the demands of these Indians,” lamented

Cameron, “what I gave them was not Sufficient to satisfy them.”75 Perhaps this complaint explains a document signed by Alexander McGillivray upon receipt of two cows.76 The

British did not possess sufficient supplies to feed all Creeks, so they offered cattle to one significant man, instead.

Chester’s paltry diplomacy occasioned further Creek violence. After Chester gave in and used part of his annual allowance of £1,000 to furnish “them with a little

Provision,” the Creeks, “being disatisfyed with their Reception...began to kill the Cattle

73 Alexander Cameron to Major General Augustine Prevost, 15 October 1779, Creek Nation, Little Tallassie, vol. 15, no. 217, photostat 2372, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 74 Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Brown to General Sir Henry Clinton, Savannah, 29 May 1780, vol. 30, nos. 147 and 190, photostat 2778, box 12, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 75 Alexander Cameron to Sir Henry Clinton, Pensacola, 18 July 1780, vol. 13, no. 113, photostat 2919, box 13, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 76 Alexander McGillivray, A/c of Alex. McGillivray with Thomas Smith, 28 March 1780, vol. 13, no. 135, photostat 2660, box 12, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

213 about Town.”77 In part, this action may also have followed on the heels of Peter Chester’s sale of part of the Creeks’ lands. Chester had “granted to himself and others his Favorets and Dependents...large Tracts of Land within the Indian Boundary.”78 Chester’s actions sent the Indians a message of victual warfare. By encroaching on their lands, Chester and his cronies circumscribed Creeks’ foodways, and put an end to peaceful relations. No wonder they responded with victual warfare of their own.

By July 1780 the Creeks proved uninterested in British overtures: they “sold most of their provisions for Rum and when drunk they were very insolent and Riotous.”

Despite the fact that the Creeks rejected British food and killed animals, however, Britons possessed no choice but to overlook their behavior because “the Spaniards have sent many Flattering Talks to their Nation and the disaffected” Indians had “repaired to

Mobile in hopes of Receiving great presents.”79 In light of the recent declaration of war against Spain and the continuing British inability to feed the Indians, British officials possessed no choice but to tolerate the Indians’ victual warfare.

Shoddy diplomacy, coupled with new British encroachments on Indians’ lands and foodways, set the stage for factional violence. The British failed at food diplomacy with the Chickamaugas. The Americans seized on this opportunity to force the Cherokees back into a state of neutrality, first by bludgeoning them with victual warfare, and then with disingenuous talks of peace that promised to restore their foodways to them. At the

77 Alexander Cameron to Sir Henry Clinton, Pensacola, 18 July 1780, vol. 13, no. 113, photostat 2919, box 13, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 78 John Campbell to Henry Clinton, Head Quarters, 10 February 1780, vol. 20, reel 7, 2565, British Headquarters (Sir Guy Carleton) Papers, 1747-1783, DLAR. 79 Alexander Cameron to Sir Henry Clinton, Pensacola, 18 July 1780, vol. 13, no. 113, photostat 2919, box 13, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL.

214 same time, the British proved incapable of using food diplomacy with the Creeks because of their lack of food, combined with the disorganized nature of the Indian Department.

John Stuart’s death was a disastrous interlude, made worse by Peter Chester’s messages of victual warfare. Americans assumed that they needed to cow Natives into submission;

Britons remained unable to predict Indians’ actions; and Cherokees and Creeks did not know where their next meal would come from. Such battles over food indicate the extent to which uncertainties about loyalty and power relations remained in flux.

Changes in power relations engendered transformations in Indian foodways.

Cows earned a spot in their diets, and Indians increasingly used horses to hoe cornfields and herd cattle. In numerous records from the war, it is clear that when American attacked Indian towns they destroyed the domesticated animals they found there. That the

Americans found so many domesticated animals to destroy when they struck the

Chickamauga towns illustrates the extent of this kind of property holding among the

Cherokees. Americans’ victual warfare resounded so loudly because Creeks and

Cherokees raised and ate beef, and Natives’ victual warfare became so effective because

Indians increasingly targeted colonists’ dependence on domesticated animals for sustenance. The alimentary value of cattle became as important as the economic and social status that Natives associated with cattle-owning.

If before the Revolution the Creeks and Cherokees thought of crops as property, during the war they began to conceive of domesticated animals as property, too. Claudio

Saunt has stated that a “New Order of Things” in the postwar period made certain groups

215 of Natives more reliant on cattle ranching and slaveholding.80 When Creeks adopted cattle ranching, they did so because their experience with food diplomacy and victual warfare primed them to incorporate cattle into their foodways, as well as their trade paths.

When historians consider that Indians adopted, destroyed, and stole cattle and horses during the Revolution, it becomes clear that Americans, Britons, and Natives forged the

New Order during the war.

In the wake of American victual warfare and the failure of British food diplomacy, Indians who were supposedly at war with each other continued to provide food for their disaffected brethren. After the Americans’ attack against the Cherokees in

1779, Cameron related that he had managed to purchase “300 Bushels of Corn” for the

Chickamaugas from the other Cherokees—“those Indians who lie neuter and listen to the

Virginia Folks.”81 This moment testifies to the importance of food in retaining bonds between groups of related Southern Natives. It also foreshadowed the potent intra- and intertribal unity that would rise to the fore during the Early Republic. Creeks’ victual warfare demonstrated their growing frustration with British food diplomacy, but it also emphasized their burgeoning interest in cattle.

Alexander Cameron died on December 27, 1781, effectively extinguishing his power to broker diplomacy with Indians.82 The Spanish had entered the fray, and the violence in the Southeast was increasing. 1781 would also witness Cornwallis’s defeat at

Yorktown, at which point the war was effectively over for the Southern British troops.

80 Saunt, A New Order of Things, 49-51, 62-63, 67-135, 148-49; for trade and declension among the Cherokees, see Hatley, The Dividing Paths, 10. 81 Alexander Cameron to Major General Augustine Prevost, 15 October 1779, Creek Nation, Little Tallassie, vol. 15, no. 217, photostat 2372, box 10, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL. 82 Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King, 300.

216

From that point on, Creeks and Cherokees would have to deal with the new United

States, even as they clung to the hope that the British (or the Spanish, for that matter) would find a way to support them. Given the prevailing state of victual warfare, peace seemed far away, indeed.

***

U.S. food diplomacy, which proved contradictory at best, helps to explain the violence of the 1780s. The United States was not particularly united from the middle of the Revolution to the start of the War of 1812. Although historians have traced party divisions among Federalists and Anti-federalists, concerns about consumption habits and the growing absence of American virtue, and discontent between the old American aristocracy and the burgeoning, bumptious middle class, food diplomacy and victual warfare provide another way to examine how failed Indian-American relations challenged the cohesion of the Early American Republic on a visceral, daily basis.83

Indian experiences with shoddy British food diplomacy during the war set a precedent for victual warfare in the post-Revolutionary period.

The fragmented, competitive nature of the Southern colonies—states, eventually—mirrored the disorganization of the British Indian department in 1779. North

83 For representative histories of the Early Republic, see Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, NC: the University of North Carolina Press, 1998 [1969]); Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC: the University of North Carolina Press, 1980); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003 [1975]); John F. Kasson, Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1993 [1991]); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).

217

Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia fought with each other about the best ways to maintain allegiances with Indians, but they also needed to accommodate the demands of an increasingly powerful U.S. Congress, which also possessed its own agenda. The ways in which each state exercised or failed to exercise food diplomacy shaped their relationships with Native Americans, with each other, and with the U.S. government. Only in 1785, when Congress’s power grew strong enough, would the

Southern states articulate a fairly united policy regarding food diplomacy.

During this period, the fact remained that only some Natives desired peaceful relations with the United States. Thus although some states thought that they had succeeded in practicing good food diplomacy, they struggled to explain continuing victual warfare. The continuation of animal thefts and concomitant mutilations, alongside of crop destruction, testifies to the ongoing splintering among Creek and Cherokee groups.

Dwindling food supplies engendered self-interested behavior reminiscent of earlier war years. In July of 1781 North Carolina was short on food. Agriculture became

“much decayed,” and commerce was “struggling feebly with almost insuperable difficulties.”84 Governor Thomas Burke’s council agreed that “Corn and Peas may be exported,” but refused to send “Beef, Pork, Wheat or Flour” out of the state without

“particular agreeament” from the governor.85 In October when Virginia’s Governor,

Thomas Nelson, Jr., wrote to Governor Burke asking for salt and beef for the Virginia army, the council agreed “that it is not expedient for the Public to furnish a supply” of

84 24 July 1781, Governor’s Office, Minutes of Council, 1781-1790, G.O. 119.1, folder 1781-1784, NCSA. 85 25 July 1781, Governor’s Office, Minutes of Council, 1781-1790, G.O. 119.1, folder 1781-1784, NCSA.

218 beef “to the Commonwealth of Virginia at this time, unless with a view To establish a fund for obtaining arms, amunition and cloathing.” North Carolina proved unwilling to provide Virginians with beef unless Virginia offered them something in return.86 War was unlikely to breed altruism among states.

Wartime scarcity bled into Indian affairs, and Indian agents began to voice worries about provisioning shortages, and thus fears about acquiring food for Indian treaties. In July of 1781, when one Virginia Indian commissioner was headed to Holston

River, Virginia for a treaty with the Cherokees and Chickasaws, he worried, “The

Commissioners are exceedingly embarrassed for want of money” because the Virginia treasurer was “refusing to pay.” During Indian treaties, he remarked, “not only the

Ambassadours, but their Wives, and their Train &c; has to be fed by the European negociator.” He pointed out the strategic necessity of “amusing and keeping two numerous Indian Tribes still, or in suspense, during this critical Campaign,” but worried that this goal would prove impossible to achieve without food supplies.87 The experience of the war provided Indian agents with the knowledge of how food diplomacy was supposed to work; the man’s panic over food supplies indicates his doubt that it would.

When interstate cooperation failed, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and

Virginia were forced to act as individual political entities in their attempts at diplomacy, which—taking its cue from wartime diplomacy—relied on goods, as well as food provisions. Although North Carolina remained at odds with the Cherokees, Georgia’s

86 6 October 1781, Governor’s Office, Minutes of Council, 1781-1790, G.O. 119.1, folder 1781-1784, NCSA. 87 Arthur Campbell to [unknown], Washington, 10 July 1781, Revolutionary War Papers, 1774-1779, 2194- Z, folder 3, SHC.

219 relationship with the Creeks was perhaps the most fraught. It made sense for the

Georgians to try to effect peace as soon as possible, which they did as early as 1781.

Sometime that fall Governor Nathan Brownson sent a talk to the upper and lower Creeks.

Using food metaphors, he observed, “it is war that has made us...Change our sumtuous tables, for scancy coarse meals and our feather beds for the Ground.”88 Brownson knew that wartime made for empty bellies, and tried to convince the Indians that peace would allow everyone to eat. In another talk also sent around this time he mentioned the defeat of Cornwallis, the “British great Warior in Virginia,” as well as the fact that the

Americans now possessed control of Savannah.89 By telling the Creeks about their defeat of the British, he suggested that he could remedy their problems with scarcity—if they proved accommodating. He told them, “the Spaniards will be in possession of St.

Augustine, then our Ports will be opened again & we shall be able to Supply you as usual with Goods.”90 Brownson’s message was threefold: that the British had been defeated, that the Spanish were willing to side with the Americans, and that cooperative Indians would benefit from American control of trade goods and provisions. Southern Indians, however, knew what to expect after hearing promises about forthcoming provisions.

Given their experience with British attempts to use food metaphors, Creeks were unlikely to respond to anything but a physical supply of food, which the Georgians could not obtain.

88 Nathan Brownson [governor], [Oral presentation] [to the] Headmen and Warriors of the Creek Nation, 1781 [?], folder 7, box 38F, Telamon Cuyler Collection, Hargrett Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Athens, GA (hereafter HRB). 89 Nathan Brownson [governor], [Oral presentation] 1781, [to the] friends and brothers of the up[per] and lower Creek Nation, folder 6, box 38F, Telamon Cuyler Collection, HRB. 90 Nathan Brownson [governor], [Oral presentation] [to the] friends and brothers of the up[per] and lower Creek Nation, 1781, folder 6, box 38F, Telamon Cuyler Collection, HRB.

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Most problems related to procuring food stemmed from the fact that Americans in

Georgia disliked that Indian commissioners and the army took food from them even when supplies ran low. Georgian inhabitants did not willingly part with their edible goods. In the fall of 1782 soldiers received permission to “Impress Cattle where they are to be most conveniently spared, Taking particular care to distress Individuals as little as possible.”91 Such an order was worded to ensure that Georgians would be compensated for their cattle, but the fact that cattle had to be impressed meant that inhabitants did not want to sell them. In November one American official stated that after arriving in

Augusta with the Creeks, he “applid to separate persons and they Refused to let me have provisions for the said inDions” [sic]. Only after begging someone in South Carolina was he able to obtain “one hundred Bushels of sour InDion Corn...and fore good Beevs.”92

Georgians did not want to sell corn and cattle to Indian agents, even for high prices.

When provisions remained unforthcoming, Natives engaged in victual warfare. In

January 1782 the new governor of Georgia, John Martin, sent a talk to the Creeks, in which he criticized them for the fact that “some of your mad people and the Torys, and bad people” still chose to “remain among” the British.93 He chastised them for the murder of one person, and criticized the fact that they had carried off “some of our horses and cattle.” Martin tried to convince the Creeks, that “Our good friends the french have already taken most of the rum sugar and Salt islands from the English, and will this winter take the whole of them.” After this victory he anticipated that the French “will

91 J. Clarke to Frederick Rolfes, Savannah, 5 October 1782, John Martin Papers, MS 543, GHS. 92 Richard Henderson to [John Martin], 10 November 1782, 36, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, 1705-1839, Part 1, 1705-1793, Transcripts, GDAH. 93 John Martin was not related to North Carolina’s Governor Alexander Martin.

221 supply us with plenty of rum, sugar and salt, and we shall be able to supply you with those articles.”94 Martin’s argument echoed Brownson’s of the previous fall: the British had fallen, and with the assistance of another imperial power the Americans would become able to supply Creeks with comestibles in the future. Martin probably did not realize that Indians who stole horses and cattle did not need the British to encourage them to do so; Indians stole cattle as a way of demonstrating their anger at unfulfilled food diplomacy. They also did it because they needed meat, and because cattle increasingly fit within the purview of the New Order.

Nearly simultaneous food diplomacy and victual warfare betrayed the infighting between Old and New Order Creeks. By May it seemed that one faction of the Creeks had begun to listen to the Georgians’ food diplomacy, and appeared willing to reciprocate in kind. On May 28 the Tallassee King (also known as the Tame King, Good Child King, or Hoboithle Micco) gave a talk, stating that “it was ordained that our Children should eat out of one Dish that is one with a Red Hand and the other with white.”95 Although eating out of one dish was an old metaphor, it was not one employed during wartime.96

Furthermore, the Tallassee King used a metaphor—the same form of diplomacy the

Georgians made use of—to express his desire for peace. He did not ask for food, nor did he offer any to the Georgians, a fact which possibly indicated the degree to which

Americans and Indians could use similar iterations of diplomacy when it suited them.

94 [John Martin], talk to [the Creeks], Augusta, 11 January 1782, John Martin Papers, MS 543, GHS. 95 A talk given by the Tallasee King and head men of the Upper and Lower Creek Nation, 28 May 1782, folder 12, box 78, Telamon Cuyler Collection, HRB. For more on the Tallassee King’s various names and position in Creek society, see Saunt, A New Order of Things, 80. 96 Richard White has pointed out the use of the phrase among Algonquian Indian language groups in the North and the West. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 441-42.

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Indians and non-Natives could only sit down to eat together when they placed enough trust on the metaphorical table. The Tallassee King’s group of Creeks belonged to the

Old Order, and cared less about cattle; thus for them, using victual warfare to obtain cows may have mattered less than trying to attain some form of peace.

Just because one Creek said he was willing to eat out of one dish with the

Georgians did not mean he had convinced the other faction, now led by Scots-Creek

Alexander McGillivray, to desist from victual warfare. Only a week before the Tallassee

King’s talk, Martin received word of “a party of Indians Braking in on the setlement” a few miles from “Fort Wators,” and running “of Towards the midle grounds betwen the

Cherakees and Creeks whare the Disaffected of Both Nations Resort with the outlying

Torys.”97 This was a different type of middle ground: a lingering no-man’s land between two tribes who were unable to unify from within or with each other to treat entirely successfully with the Georgians.98

Some Creeks continued to eschew American overtures. Martin indicated that the

Creeks could only obtain peace from Georgia if they returned the “Negroes, horses &

Cattle” essential to Americans’ farming habits. Only these actions would allow the

Creeks and Georgians to “live like friends & Brothers, living upon the same land and

Eating out of the Same Dish.”99 The rub here was that McGillivray’s faction of Creeks owned the majority of slaves and cattle in the nation, and the Tallassee King could not

97 Colonel Clarke to John Martin, Fort Wators, 21 May 1782, 22, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH. 98 Saunt, A New Order of Things, 61-63. 99 A Talk deliver’d at Savannah the 19th July 1782. by Governor Martin of the state of Georgia & Sent to the Tallasee King & the head men & Warriors of the upper & Lower Creek Nation, John Martin Papers, MS 543, GHS.

223 compel them to comply.100 By withholding what Georgians considered the property they needed to produce food, these Creeks were making it unlikely that they would ever eat of the same dish. In September those Creeks continued to say, that they “would not Deliver up the Negroes.” These men were “either gon or sone will to augustine,” where they could depend on the Spanish for good food diplomacy.101 By withholding what

Georgians considered the property they needed to produce food, these Creeks made it unlikely that a United Creek nation would ever eat out of the same dish with the

Georgians.

In the 1780s, Georgians began to try to use the threat of victual warfare to obtain peace with the Creeks. Unluckily for the Cherokees, who had recently suffered a defeat at

Georgian hands, Georgians discovered that they could use victual warfare against the

Cherokees as leverage to threaten the Creeks. The Americans sent expeditions against refractory groups among the Cherokee nation, during which soldiers burned crops and houses. Governor Martin described the Cherokee incident when he spoke to the Tallasee

King and his group of Creeks. “See what the Cherokees are now reduced to,” he warned,

“by their folly and pride.” Instead of bowing to Georgia’s demands, the Cherokees had tried to hedge their bets with the English, which had resulted in punitive actions against them. Now, Martin noted, “they are almost brought to nothing.” Once again, Martin offered the Creeks food diplomacy, rather than the expedition he implicitly threatened.

He said, we “shall soon raise plenty of Rice, Indigo, and other produce. The Ships from

100 Saunt, A New Order of Things, 62-63. 101 Daniel McMurphy to John Martin, Augusta, 22 September 1782, 30, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH.

224 all nations will flow in upon us, and we shall be able to supply you with goods of all kinds, and take your Skins in return.”102 Martin could not immediately offer the Creeks goods, but he implied that future trade goods were preferable to imminent violence.

Martin dangled the carrot of food diplomacy while wielding the stick of victual warfare.

Southern food diplomacy slowly became even less appealing. Georgians, for example, indicated their plans to offer a less compromising form of it. As fall came to a close, Governor Martin found himself growing ill, and consequently could not attend to the Creeks gathered at Augusta. Unwilling to miss the opportunity to use food to exercise power, however, he sent a message via Richard Henderson, assistant deputy superintendent for Indian affairs. Martin indicated, that if four or five of the Creeks’

“principle Head Warriors,” including his “friend the Tallasee King,” could “Come to

Savannah I should be very Glad to see them & hear their talk here.” He continued,

“unless these four or five head men can come here by themselves,” they were “by no means to come down.”103 Martin wanted the Creeks to come to him, and sought to limit the number who showed up. Martin knew what to expect when he invited the Creeks to meet him, but knowing that stores at Savannah could not feed a large Indian party, he opted to circumscribe the extent of Georgian food aid by reducing the number of Natives who came to visit.

102 A Talk delivered by Governor Martin at Savannah, To the Tallesee King and the head Men & Warriors of the upper & Lower Creek Nations, 29 October 1782, Telamon Cuyler Collection, box 38F, folder 84, HRB. 103 Copy of Colonel McMurphy’s Instructions, & Sent by him to Mr. Richard Henderson, Assistant Deputy Superintendent for Indian Affairs. Signed by John Martin. Savannah, 4 October 1782, John Martin Papers, MS 543, GHS.

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Creek Indians, especially those who sought peaceful co-existence with the

Americans, tried to negotiate between this new Georgian diplomacy and older British iterations. By December the Tallassee King wrote to Martin, and informed him, “that the

Head Men of the Nation in general were intirely devouted to deliver up the Prisoners and

Negroes.” With the exception of “some Roguish disposed Indians...who has carried numbers to Pensacola and sold them to the Spaniards,” nearly all of the other Creeks wished to return stolen slaves.104 He suggested that almost the whole nation was ready to comply with Georgia’s demands, save for a few lingering factions. The Tallassee King was even “bringing down some Negroes himself,” and requested, “that some Corn might be provided for them to Eat and a little Powder and Bullets given them to kill their own meat & a little Salt untill he came himself.”105 He sent a powerful message with these two requests: he would return slaves to the Georgians in exchange for food, and he asked for the ability to kill food for himself, implicitly suggesting that he would not rely on

Georgians for indefinite gifts of food. He used a form of food diplomacy that benefited him as well as Georgia. Perhaps by obtaining food for the Creeks, the Tallassee King hoped to undermine McGillivray’s agenda and persuade the other Creek moiety to cooperate.

And indeed, some of the other Creeks followed suit. Some Natives, led by the Fatt

King—a Lower Creek who supported the Tallassee King—“chearfully gave up” additional slaves, but “expect[ed] some acknowledgement” in return. Although one

104 Richard Henderson to John Martin, Augusta, 23 December 1782, 43, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH. 105 Richard Henderson to John Martin, Augusta, 23 December 1782, 43, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH.

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American official “indeavoured to procure something for them here,” he could not obtain more “than forty Bushells of Corn.”106 The Creeks’ return of property was a huge coup for the Georgians, but a mere forty bushels of corn did not make for proper diplomacy.

The spring of 1783 also witnessed Georgia’s governors implementing insufficient food diplomacy with the Cherokees. Lyman Hall, the new Governor, sent a talk to them in May, expressing his pleasure, “that you are so well Inclined to be at Peace with us.”

“We have some goods which we will give you before we part...and we now will open a

Trade with you,” he said. Hall hoped, “That we may embrace each other as Friends...Eat out of the same Dish and drink out of the same Cup.”107 By giving gifts of goods, and invoking the by now familiar metaphor of eating of the same dish, Hall expressed a desire to maintain good relations with the Cherokees. Yet the fact that Hall offered merely a food metaphor when he could have offered provisions testifies to the changing nature of

Southern food diplomacy.

In contrast to some Creeks’ acquiescence to this new American diplomacy, other

Indians remained stalwart holdouts, and sought to punish their brethren for giving in.

When Governor Lyman Hall convened the 1783 Treaty of Augusta, the Creeks initially refused to appear.108 When the Tallassee and Fat King showed up, they ceded approximately eight hundred square miles to Georgia, an extremely controversial move

106 James Rae to Lyman Hall, Augusta, 29 January 1793, 47, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH; for more on the Fat King, see Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 96. 107 A Talk Delivered at Augusta in May by his Honor the Governor To the Headmen and Warriors of the Cherokee Nation, Governor – Executive Dept. – Governor’s Subject Files – 1781-1802, folder “Treaty of Augusta between Commissioners of Indian Affairs and the Cherokee,” box 1807, GDAH. 108 Meeting, 31 May 1783, Governor – Executive Dept. – Governor’s Subject Files – 1781-1802, folder “Treaty of Augusta between Commissioners of Indian Affairs and the Cherokee,” box 1807, GDAH.

227 that McGillivray disavowed.109 Later, he would encourage his group of militant Creeks to attack the Fat King’s house, kill his cattle, and obliterate his family’s garden in a clear message of victual warfare.110

Anti-American Creeks also recognized that they needed to seek out other sources of diplomacy from the Spanish. By January of 1784 Alexander McGillivray was whispering to the governor of West Florida that the “Indians will attach themselvs to and serv them best who supply there neccessitys.” It was “much more convenient for this upper Nation to have the trade from West Florida,” he implied.111 McGillivray employed his skills as a manipulator of trade and suggested that Creek loyalty could be bought for a price—and preferably from the Spanish, rather than the British or the Georgians.112

In May 1784 the Spanish invited the Creeks to Pensacola. The Spanish supposedly told the tribes assembled that, “it was Impossible for any Other Nation Except the King of spain to supply their wants in Every perticular and that in a short time they should be at War with the Americans or Virginians.” By June McGillivray’s Creeks had joined the Spanish following the Treaty of Pensacola, and rumor had it that the

Chickamaugas would join the Creeks (this rumor proved false because Spain neglected to court the Cherokees).113 The Americans would need to do something—something beyond the purview of Georgia alone—to keep American-Indian relations in the South from descending into a permanent state of warfare.

109 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 284; Saunt, A New Order of Things, 80. 110 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 96. 111 Alexander McGillivray to the Governor of West Florida, Little Tallassie in the Upper Creek Nation, 1 January 1784, 52c, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH. 112 For more on McGillivray’s machinations on behalf of the Creeks, see Saunt, A New Order of Things, esp. 67-89. 113 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 284.

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From the Battle of Yorktown until 1785, the weakness of the Southern states meant that food supplies suffered. Americans, consequently, built their food diplomacy on promises of food and food metaphors, rather than the physical article. Southerners undertook campaigns of victual warfare against the Cherokees, and used these actions as an example when dealing with the Creeks. Southern Natives used victual warfare to obtain meat and to send messages of violence when food diplomacy proved inadequate.

Victual warfare exposed factions within the Creek nation, between the cattle-ranching

New Order and older Indians like the Tallassee King, who remained sympathetic to the

Americans. At the same time, Americans tested the tenuous loyalty of would-be allies by attempting to implement more restrictive forms of food aid.

***

From 1785 to 1789 competing factions of Indian tribes, Indian commissioners from the Southern states, and U.S. Indian commissioners fought for control of Southern

Indian affairs. In a milieu that recalled competitive food diplomacy in the 1770s, U.S. and state commissioners tried to block one and other’s food diplomacy. This rivalry provoked the Southern tribes into victual warfare and engendered an ongoing state of hostility. This competitive environment indicated the extent to which the events of the Revolution bled into the postwar period; from Indians’ points of view, the war had just begun.

On March 15, 1785 the Continental Congress passed an act providing for the appointment of United States Indian commissioners; a week later, on March 21,

Benjamin Hawkins, Daniel Carroll, William Perry, Andrew Pickens, and Joseph Martin received the power to draw on Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia for

229 funds.114 This decision contrasted sharply with previous Indian policy, which left the appointing of Indian commissioners to the power of the states.115 The problem, however, was that previously-appointed state commissioners still held those positions, and they were bound to butt heads with U.S. Indian agents as they competed to practice the best food diplomacy.

People tried to offer Indians food before others could do so, and they sought to trade food aid for land cessions. Their actions foreshadowed a burgeoning struggle between the federal and state governments. Battles over food diplomacy between United

States Indian commissioners and state commissioners began almost immediately. In June

1785 one Georgia assemblyman learned that Creeks (led by the Tallassee King and the

Fat King) were headed towards Beard’s Bluff, “with a request that we would have provisions ready for them.” The procurement of provisions was “a matter entirely out of our power,” because Georgians encountered trouble obtaining transportation to Beard’s

Bluff. To solve this problem the Georgians told the Creeks to come to Savannah, instead, where officials expected them “in the Course of five or six days.” Georgians knew that their “immediate attendance” could prove “of the first Consequence...especially as the

Commissioners from Congress will shortly be on the same errand.” “If we get through

114 Carroll and Perry dropped out and were replaced by Lachlan McIntosh. Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, 7- 8, in H. Thomas Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810 (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2003). Note: this volume’s pages are not numbered consecutively; it contains sections where the numbering begins anew. I have retained the volume’s page numbers, and I provide the section from which a quote is taken. 115 Such was the case in 1783, for example, when the General Assembly of South Carolina suggested, “that three Commissioners of Indian affairs be appointed” so that “the Cherokee Indian Nation, should be supplied,” until “the Congress of the United States, shall make arrangements for this purpose.” General Assembly Committee Reports 1783, folder #103, 5-11, South Carolina General Assembly Committee Reports, 1776-1879, S165005, SCDAH.

230 with this before they Commence,” they speculated, “it may be a capital point gained.”116

The message contained in this letter was clear: the Creeks were coming to Savannah, and it was expedient for Georgia to feed them first. Georgia’s governor, Samuel Elbert, expressed his “hopes that the boundary line between us and the Indians will be fixed before the Commissioners appointed by Congress can enter upon their business.”

Georgians wanted to practice food diplomacy before the U.S. commissioners because boundary issues remained at stake.

In August U.S. Indian commissioners made their own plans to treat with the

Creeks and Cherokees, and these plans unnerved the Southern states. Georgians received word that the commissioners anticipated meeting the Creeks at Galphinton on October

24, and the Cherokees on November 15, at American Indian commissioner Andrew

Pickens’s Hopewell plantation on the Seneca River.117 Georgia’s executive council resolved to appoint three of its own commissioners “authorized to attend in behalf of the

State,” and “strictly charged to protest against any measures that may appear to them to exceed the power given by the Confederation aforesaid and which may be contrary to the

Constitution and Laws of the State.”118 Georgia expected that the U.S. commissioners would try to win concessions from the Indians that would compromise Georgia’s power.

Once again regionalism reared its ugly head to ensure that competition between the

116 [Anonymous] to Elijah Clarke, Savannah, 9 June 1785, 33, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH. 117 Andrew Pickens to Colonel Lewis, 14 September 1785, and Samuel Elbert to William Houston, John Habersham, and Abraham Baldwin, Augusta, 14 September 1785, both in Force Transcripts, Georgia Records, Council Correspondence 1782-1789 & Governors Correspondence, 47, 53, GDAH; Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 8-9. 118 31 August 1785, Augusta, Georgia Executive Council Papers, MS 284, folder 1, GHS.

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Southern states and the United States government would make treating with Indians difficult at best, and impossible at worst.119

As the second half of the 1780s would demonstrate, periods of calm in Georgia never lasted for long. In fact, from the appointment of U.S. Commissioners in 1785 to the end of 1789, Indians and whites in the Southern states experienced an upsurge in violence. Provisions remained scarce, and drought conditions prevailed. These conditions combined to ensure that loyalties shifted, conflict erupted, slaves and domesticated animals changed hands, and people died.

Federal-state conflicts led to failed food diplomacy. Although Georgia had demonstrated its own self-interest in treating with the Creeks, North Carolinians also entered the fray. In January William Blount, state senator of North Carolina wrote to John

Steele, the state’s Indian commissioner. He reminded Steele that “the only object of the

State in complying with the Recommendation of Congress was to have a Treaty held with the Cherokees, the only Indians that are troublesome to here.” Blount said that when he met with the other commissioners, “your grand Object will be to get them to hold the treaty with the Cherokees first.”120 Blount suggested that when Steele met Andrew

Pickens, another one of his fellow commissioners and “a cunning artful man,” Steele

119 Treating with the Southern Indians did indeed prove near impossible: the Creeks at Galphinton were not united. The seventeen who showed up—including the Tallassee King—confirmed a cession of land encompassed by the Oconee and Apalachee rivers on one side, and the Ogeechee on the other. They also ceded land east from the fork of the Ocmulgee and Oconee to the fountainhead of the St. Marys. This move would outrage others in the Creek nation, and the U.S. commissioners disapproved so heartily that the treaty was signed only by the Georgia commissioners. U.S. commissioner Benjamin Hawkins and the Cherokees signed the treaty at Hopewell on 28 November, but it was “roundly denounced by the whites.” Saunt, A New Order of Things, 80-81; Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 8. 120 William Blount to John Steele, Greenville, 11 January 1789, John Steele Papers, 1716-1846, Collection 689, Series 1.2, folder 4, SHC.

232 needed to push for a Cherokee treaty: “Pickens trades much more with the Cherokees than with the Creeks,” wrote Blount, “consequently peace with them will be most advantageous to him.” According to Blount, Pickens would comprehend the need to treat with the Cherokees first, because “such as are first treated with fare best as to Provisions and Presents and consequently a better Treaty may be made with them.”121 A “better” treaty resulted in generous land cessions. Blount knew that no state could practice adequate food diplomacy with all of the Southern Indians, so he sought to appeal first to the tribe that could offer North Carolina something it wanted.

The U.S. Congress, however, had anticipated North Carolina’s actions; U.S. commissioners planned to undermine North Carolina’s food diplomacy. It seemed that

Congress, “by private instructions have absolutely forbidden” the commissioners “to demand the cession of a Single foot of land from the indians.”122 This piece of information meant that even if North Carolina succeeded in treating with the Cherokees first and plied them with a considerable amount of provisions, presents, and trade goods, they could not ask for cessions of land in exchange. The Continental Congress was finally well-informed enough regarding Indian affairs to recognize that for the time being, asking for any land was an ineffective way to broker peace. Their best chance for harmony rested on their ability to prevent the Southern states from asking Indians for land. This change meant that on the cusp of 1790, the very nature of food diplomacy shifted yet again.

121 William Blount to John Steele, Greenville, 11 January 1789, John Steele Papers, 1716-1846, Collection 689, Series 1.2, folder 4, SHC. 122 John Steele to Alexander Martin, Salisbury, 19 February 1789, John Steele Papers, 1716-1846, Collection 689, Series 1.2, folder 4, SHC.

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Indian-American violence followed on the heels of failed food diplomacy and crop scarcities. By July 1785, several Indians were said to “have perisht with Huguer.”123

In spring of 1786 reports of Indians stealing horses reached the governor’s office—and although North Carolinians seemed “to be at a loss to know with Certainty by what hand we Suffer in particular,” they assumed the attacks were made “in part by the Cherokees and...by the Creeks.”124 North Carolinians were quick to assume that Creeks and

Cherokees stole their horses. Crop dearth engendered accusations of victual warfare. By

1787 fresh reports again depicted Indians attacking crops, domesticated animals, and white inhabitants in North Carolina. One man confirmed that Creeks and Chickamaugas had set about “Murdering Numbers of our peaceful inhabitants, Stealing our horses,

Killing of Cattle, Hoggs, [and]...Cutting down our Corn.”125 By November Indians had

“intercept[ed] some Boats that was coming up this River to trade with us,” and “Kill’d” all of the passengers and “plundered” the boats.126 In May 1789 “three hundred Creeks set off from their towns,” and were rumored “to fall on the Frontiers of Georgia.” By the end of May thirty Indians had attacked a fort in Wilkes County. The Cherokees reported

“that five hundred Creeks possessed orders from Alexander McGillivray “to distroy the new counties at all events by burning of houses; and in case of resistance to take their

123 James Durouzeaux to William Clark, Cowitter, 25 May 1785, 76, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH. 124 Anthony Bledsoe to Richard Caswell, Nashville, 12 May 1786, Governor’s Papers, Series 2, folder “Governor Richard Caswell (2nd Administration), Correspondence, January 14-December 21, 1786,” NCSA. 125 Anthony Bledsoe to John Sevier, Sumner County, 5 August 1787, 158, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH. 126 Thomas Evans to Richard Caswell, Nashville, 25 November 1787, Governor’s Papers, Series 2, folder “Governor Richard Caswell (2nd Administration) Correspondence, January 7-November 25, 1787,” NCSA.

234 property & kill them.”127 Creek Indians were indeed bound for Georgia, bent on destroying Georgian houses, animals, and foodways.

By this time, failed food diplomacy, Indian factionalism, and competition between state and federal officials engendered violence that made it difficult to distinguish the postwar years from Revolutionary events. By 1788 Georgia also sought to revive their war with the Creeks.128 By February Governor George Handley promised,

“we shall make their Towns Smoak with fire, and their Streets run with blood—the whole will be consumed in one general conflagation [sic].”129 War was in the air.

***

As a result of the competitive nature of food diplomacy and the efforts of Britons and Americans to prevent their enemies from using it, in the Southern theater of war victual warfare became the predominant form of communication. Though victual warfare shared some similarities with its Northern counterpart, it was more violent, and more dependent on stealing slaves, horses, and cattle. John Stuart’s death in 1779 highlighted the failure of British food diplomacy, the increase in victual warfare, and Indians’ burgeoning use of domesticated animals. The experience of Revolutionary victual warfare led to one faction of Creek Indians’ widespread implementation of cattle ranching as they became part of a New Order.

127 Brigadier General Clark to [George Walton], Washington, 29 May 1789, John Steele Papers, 1716- 1846, Collection 689, Series 1.2, folder 4, SHC. 128 For the continuing Spanish and British presence, see George Handley to William Few and Abraham Baldwin, 26 April 1788, Governor’s Letter Book, October 20, 1786-May 31, 1789, 167-68, Transcripts, GDAH. 129 George Handley to John Sevier, 19 February 1788, Governor’s Letter Book, October 20, 1786-May 31, 1789, 139, Transcripts, GDAH.

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Americans encountered great difficulties trying to implement postwar food diplomacy. In the years immediately preceding the Revolution, food shortages among white inhabitants translated into Southern states’ inabilities to successfully broker Indian treaties. Initially the states competed amongst themselves over Cherokee and Creek loyalties. Indians’ experiences with failed wartime food diplomacy meant that they turned to victual warfare in the postwar period, especially after Americans attempted to impose a less compromising form of food diplomacy. When the Revolution officially ended,

Natives did not let go of the idea that they could appeal to more than one imperial power to obtain edible goods. Competition between U.S. Indian commissioners and Southern

Indian commissioners replaced battles between different imperial entities.

With the advent of U.S. Indian commissioners, food diplomacy took on characteristics reminiscent of British and American food diplomacy during the

Revolution. Those who practiced food diplomacy best were those who practiced it first, meaning that U.S. commissioners began to look for ways to block Southern food diplomacy, while Southern commissioners tried to beat U.S. commissioners to treaty grounds. U.S. and state commissioners alike tried to emphasize their power by dictating the number of Indians who came to eat at meetings, and by refusing to compromise on treaty locations. They failed to see that they did not yet possess the power to compel

Natives to listen. Indians came to treaties without the entire support of their nations. Thus hunger prevailed, and a state of victual warfare threatened to blanket the Southern United

States.

236

Whereas Northern food diplomacy allows historians to consider the ways in which Indians controlled the terms of their military service, victual warfare in the south enables scholars to contend with the factionalism among and between British, American, and Indian actors. Battles over foodways tied the 1770s to the 1780s to the 1790s, and set the stage for Southern violence during the later years of the Early Republic. Yet some of those factions would, in the interim, learn how to use food to forge a pan-Indian movement that eventually allowed them to resist the changing food diplomacy of the new

United States. They called themselves the Western Confederacy.

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Chapter 5: “From hunters to husbandmen”: Culinary Imperialism and the Pan-Indian Western Confederacy War

“When the white people came to this Island, the Indians lived chiefly by hunting and fishing. But the white people immediately began to till the ground, to grow corn, wheat, and other grain...and to raise abundance of cattle, sheep and hogs,” said Timothy

Pickering to Cornplanter, a Seneca chief, in July of 1791. Although Natives witnessed the industry of these white colonists, Pickering recalled, they continued to hunt and fish,

“growing only a little corn.” They “were often in want of food,” and “exposed to great hardships.” The time had come, Pickering proclaimed, for Indians to “adopt some of the ways of the white people. Instead of depending on hunting,” he urged, “let your children be instructed in farming, raising of cattle, Sheep and hogs.”1

By highlighting colonists’ triumphs in husbandry over Indians’ failures in hunting, Pickering painted a misrepresentation of early American history.2 But his speech to Cornplanter accurately denoted his hope that American officials could change Native foodways with the newly-imagined “Plan of Civilization.” Although the plan was in essence a land grab that sought, in a roundabout way, to seize territory from Indians, it was also a proposal that tried to fundamentally alter Native foodways. The Plan of

Civilization is thus also an example of culinary imperialism.

1 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 5 July 1791, ff. 84a-85, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, P-31, MHS. 2 Early American colonists in Jamestown were more interested in searching for merchantable commodities than they were in growing their own food, and rather than posing good examples to Indians, they instead depended on them for gifts of corn and deer meat. Colonists at Plymouth were only a little better; both colonies struggled through periods of intense dearth and hunger. Rachel Herrmann, “The ‘tragicall historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” the William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 68, no. 1 (January 2011): 47-74.

238

In the 1780s and very early 1790s American commissioners followed British officials’ examples in allowing Six Nations Indians to dictate the terms of food diplomacy. As the task of diplomacy nominally passed from British to American hands, however, Americans sought to decrease Indians’ longstanding habit of requesting food by encouraging them to farm and raise animals. A myriad of problems stymied the implementation of this overly optimistic system. For one thing, the British still practiced food diplomacy at their posts in Upper Canada, so Indians could obtain a ready supply of food from that venue. For another, Indians had been farming and raising domesticated animals for decades, but in specifically Indian ways that clashed with the United States’s definition of husbandry. Most important was the fact that one increasingly powerful group of Indians adamantly refused American officials’ offers to implement the Plan of

Civilization in their villages. Americans called these dissenters the Western Confederacy.

In the post-Revolutionary period Americans hoped that other Natives could convince the Western Confederacy to reconsider. U.S. Indian commissioners placed their trust with the Six Nations, much as the British had done before them. Although Mohawk hearts and minds remained too closely tied to British interests, many American officials readily believed that the Senecas could convince other Indians to embrace the Plan of

Civilization. So long as these Iroquois seemed willing to focus on husbandry, the

Americans trusted them. Their trust meant that they willingly used the Six Nations to attempt to broker peace between them and the Western Confederacy—peace that could only take place if the Western Confederacy agreed to become husbandmen, and to move

239 beyond the disputed boundary along the Ohio.3 Once the Six Nations’ growing disinterest in husbandry and their loss of power among other Natives became apparent, the

Americans readied for war with the Western Confederacy.

Histories of the American Revolution and the Western Confederacy War frequently diverge in 1783, the year that the Revolution officially ended for Britons and

Americans. The war for the Ohio Valley becomes either an epilogue or a prologue: it ends the American Revolution, or foreshadows Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the Redstick

Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Writing food into the Western Confederacy War provides a bridge from the Revolution to the early 1800s and makes it clear that the ways

Delawares, Miamis, and Shawnees used food to wage war and broker peace remained stable even as the worlds around them changed.4

***

3 As keepers of the Western Door, the Senecas were traditionally responsible for communicating with Indians who occupied the lands west of the Iroquois. That the Senecas stepped naturally into this role in the 1790s, then, is not surprising. Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from its beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984), 35. 4 The Western Confederacy was comprised of a number of Indian tribes during the 1780s and 1790s. A 1786 council included Chickamaugas, Delawares, Miamis, Ottawas, Pottawatomis, Shawnees, Six Nations, and Wyandots; a 1792 meeting at the Glaize drew together Cherokees, Chippewas, Conoys, Creeks, Delawares, Hurons, Miamis, Mingoes, Mohikons, Munseys, Ottawas, Pottawatomies, Reynards, Sacs, and Shawnees. Because the Delawares, Miamis, and Shawnees were some of the only Indians remaining by the time they met Anthony Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, I have chosen to focus on these three tribes. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 95, 105. For descriptions of the Delawares, Miamis, and Shawnees see Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York: Viking, 2007), xv-xvii; Collin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in North American Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 160; Harvey Lewis Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle: First Sagamore of the Wabash (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 12. For a treatment of the Shawnees from the early Republic to their removal to Oklahoma in 1870, Stephen Warren, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

240

Although these tribes lived further west than their Six Nations, Creek, and

Cherokee counterparts, the decades of warfare that preceded the American Revolution had prepared them for the violence that followed in its wake. Starting in the mid- seventeenth century the Iroquois claimed to speak for Indians such as the Shawnees and

Delawares by citing right of conquest. As Francis Jennings and other historians have demonstrated, however, historians have overstated Iroquoian pretensions to empire.5 The

Delawares, for example, assumed the title of women not because the Iroquois controlled them, but because Delawares saw themselves as peacemakers and mediators.6 In the

1730s the Shawnees did not abide by the Iroquois Covenant Chain established with the

British, whom they called their brothers. Instead, they tried to form ties with New France in order to play one imperial power off of the other.7 Shawnees also introduced Miamis to the British sphere in the late-1740s, thus strengthening a potential alliance against the

Iroquois.8

Yet although Iroquois claims to empire were weaker than previously acknowledged, Six Nations Indians still managed to sign away land in ways that curtailed the foodways of future Western Confederacy Natives. In 1768 the Six Nations made land cessions to the British at Fort Stanwix that were “inconvenient to the Indians of the

5 Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from its beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984), esp. 112, 296-7; see also chapter 3. 6 For the older interpretation of Delawares’ gendered position, see, for example, Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1991]), 225. For the corrective see Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, 162, 215. 7 Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 29. 8 Laura Keenan Spero, “‘Stout, Bold, Cunning, and the greatest Travellers in America’: The Colonial Shawnee Diaspora,” (Ph.D. diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 2010), 288.

241

Ohio,” most notably the Shawnees.9 By 1770 the British reported that the Delawares and

Shawnees “find much fault with the Six Nations for their giving up so large a tract of

Country to the English.”10 Despite the fact that they appear frequently in the records as warriors, one historian has demonstrated that Shawnees had been moving to avoid violence wrought by such cessions at least as early as the 1715 Yamasee War.11

Colonists, too, went looking for excuses to engage in campaigns of victual warfare against Natives that would lead to cessions of land. In Virginia, Governor Lord

Dunmore promoted the formation of white communities at Harrodsburg and Louisville in the 1770s, and in 1774 he led an expedition against the Shawnees of the upper

Muskingum River, burning cabins and cornfields along the way.12 Led by Cornstalk, a

Shawnee sachem who would attempt (and fail) to maintain Shawnee neutrality during the

Revolution, the Indians made peace—a peace which ended in the cession of a large portion of Shawnee lands, and the subsequent migration of many Shawnees west. After the Revolution began, Cornstalk’s death at American hands at Fort Randolph in 1777 effectively destroyed Shawnee neutrality. The nation split around 1778, but Americans disregarded changing loyalties and burned Shawnee crops and villages almost yearly.

Between 1774 and 1794, Shawnee settlements bore the brunt of eight different attacks;

Chillicothe received particular attention from its enemies, who attacked it four times even though the Shawnees kept rebuilding it in different locations. At the end of the war,

9 Thomas Gage to Frederick Haldimand, New York, 3 June 1773, Add. MS 21665, BL; Timothy J. Shannon, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier (Viking: The Penguin Group, 2008), 169. 10 [Anonymous], Indian Conference, Pittsburgh, 5 July 1770, folder 11, box 204, Cadwalader Family Papers, Collection #1454, HSP. 11 Spero, “‘Stout, Bold, Cunning, and the greatest Travellers in America,’” 173-74, 199. 12 Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 54.

242

Shawnees from the Ohio were living in present-day Missouri.13 Like so many other

Indians who faced the specter of torched crops and towns, these Indians now asked the

British for food.14

As the effects of the Revolution spread west of the conflict, pan-Indian alliances began to cohere. By the end of the War for Independence Creek Indians possessed ties to the Shawnees, who were also allied with Delawares and Miamis.15 When Americans attacked a pacifist village of Moravian Delawares at Gnadenhütten in 1782, that act brought neutral Shawnees and pacifist Delawares closer together in desires for war.16 The

Chickamauga Cherokees and Shawnees created an alliance after 1776, and continued to communicate regularly from 1783 onward.17 Indians who in the past had drawn upon their resistance to American, British, and Iroquois imperialism consequently became well-prepared to form a Confederacy that opposed the expansion of the new United

States.

Looking specifically at foodways during the Western Confederacy War makes sense for a number of reasons, especially when historians consider historiographical discussions of postwar Native religion, diplomacy, and anti-imperialism. Gregory Evans

Dowd has argued that militant religion—which he calls “pro-Nativism”—between the

13 Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, xiii, 39, 55, 164-70. 14 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 77. 15 Joel Martin points out that because Creeks could not marry into the same clan, the Creek clan system “encouraged the assimilation of strangers.” Some of these “strangers” were Shawnees. Angela Pully Hudson notes that various roads helped to connect Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Iroquois, and Shawnee towns. Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 50, 116; Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 21. 16 John Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 52; Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 72. 17 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, xviii, 52, 91.

243 outbreak of the Revolution and 1795 went on “something of a hiatus during those years.”

Yet despite this lapse in militant religion, intertribal networks continued to form. If religious impulses were waning, it makes sense that ideas about food may also have helped Indians to unify.

The Western Confederacy cohered in part because of their aversion to the

American Plan of Civilization, and because of Western Indians’ abilities to use victual warfare to resist it. Although Dowd has described pro-Nativism as a religious movement, it was also as a reaction against the Plan of Civilization, as well as a response to the Six

Nations’ ostensible disposition to adopt the Plan in their villages.18 According to

Americans’ definitions, willing Native husbandmen raised cattle and horses, and farmed in one place. The Western Confederacy, by contrast, remained mobile and unwilling to remain on one plot of land; most of them depended on game animals for food.19 As inter-

Indian go-betweens and travelers the Shawnees became particularly adept at navigating decades-old networks, criticizing American imperialism, and offering modes of resisting it. Indeed, the word “Shawnees” has been linked to the Algonquian term for salt, a

18 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, xviii. 19 This assertion is not meant to suggest that the Confederacy eschewed farming—the destruction of their crops by the Americans is a testament to the fact that they farmed extensively. I only mean that they farmed in ways that the Americans did not recognize as adequate. According to Anthony Wayne, Indians possessed plenty of corn and game in the fall, but in the spring they were “half starved and dispirited.” Shawnees’ seasonal foodways depended on corn, beans, and squash that women planted in semi-permanent villages. They performed Bread Dances during the spring to ask for a plentiful harvest and hunting season, and again in the fall to give thanks. Families dispersed to hunt after the harvest, and then men went in pursuit of bears, buffalo deer, elk, and turkey. Early spring was a time for gathering sap and clearing fields in time for the women to plant once more. In a similar fashion, the Miamis farmed seasonally, and then dispersed to the Grand Prairie to hunt buffalo. Like the Shawnees, they returned to their villages in the spring to tap trees for sap and to plant crops. For “half starved” see Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Pittsburgh, 24 August 1792, f. 38, vol. XXI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. For Shawnees’ seasonal foodways and attitudes against domesticated animals see Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, xxxiv, 15; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 11; for the Miamis see Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 16-17.

244 commodity that made a mobile hunting lifestyle possible by its capacity as a preservative.20 Shawnee experiences in their eighteenth century diaspora had primed them to use food to wage war, and to use food diplomatically to obtain peace in the post-

Revolutionary period.

***

The ostensible transfer of power from Britain to America did not proceed smoothly. At the October 1784 Treaty of Stanwix, the Americans made it abundantly clear that they expected fealty and obedience from formerly British-allied members of the

Iroquois. In the 1783 Treaty of Paris between America and Britain, “no mention [was] made by the King of Great Britain of any Indian nation or tribe whatsoever,” noted

American Indian commissioners to a group of Natives.21 When Captain Aaron Hill, a

Mohawk, proposed to treat for peace on behalf of the Cherokees, Chickasaws,

Chippewas, Choctaws, Creeks, Delawares, Hurons, Miamis, Mississaugas, Potawatomis, and Shawnees, the Americans “ridiculed their profession of speaking ‘for all the Indian

Nations from the North to the South,’” stating, that “they had Summed the Six Nations only” to the treaty.22 “You are a subdued people,” the Americans continued a few days later. “You have been overcome in a war which you entered into with us, not only

20 On the Shawnees connection to salt, see Spero, “‘Stout, Bold, Cunning, and the greatest Travellers in America,’” 31, 37. 21 12 October 1784, f. 30, Indian Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. Note: most of the Wayne Papers are organized into numbered volumes that proceed chronologically. This volume, however, is an unnumbered volume called “Indian Treaties,” and consists of different sections pasted together. Whereas the other Wayne Papers contain consistent folio number at the top right-hand corner of each page, this volume contains consistent folio numbering at the bottom of each page, in addition to sections where the numbering starts over again. I have chosen to stick to the folio numbering at the bottom for this volume only. 22 17 October 1784, f. 115A, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

245 without provocation but in violation of the most sacred obligations.”23 Responses to

Indians who spoke on their own behalf seemed much the same. Other American commissioners expressed similar sentiments at Fort McIntosh to the Chippewas,

Delawares, Ottawas, and Wiandots gathered there, arguing, “we claim the Country by conquest, and are to give not to receive.”24

The words of such American officials displayed the chasm between American and

Indian notions of power. U.S. agents may have believed they held the upper hand because they possessed the opportunity to “give” concessions and gifts. Yet Natives’ participation with wartime diplomacy had left them well-apprised of the fact that as long as other imperial powers remained willing to distribute goods and food, they did not need to feel obligated to receive anything from the Americans.

In the 1780s not all Indians bowed to such strident terms. Some Natives took advantage of the fact that British officials at posts in Upper Canada continued to distribute food as a way of avoiding American hegemony. In May 1784 the Mississaugas agreed to sell the British 2,842,480 acres of land for the Six Nations to settle upon, running “about Six Miles on each Side of the Grand River.” Upon moving in, the

Mohawks asked the British to “assist them with a reasonable Quantity of Provisions.”25

In exchange, Briton Frederick Haldimand asked Mohawk Joseph Brant to find out “what

23 20 October 1784, f. 30, Indian Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 24 15 January 1785, f. 49, Indian Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 25 Substance of Captain Brant’s Wishes respecting forming a Settlement of Mohawk & others of the Six Nation Indians upon the Grand River &ca., [N.D.], f. 67, Add. MS 21829, BL; see also Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 153.

246 the Commissioners from Congress” were saying, and to “report the same to him.”26 The

British sought information about the Americans, and the Mohawks wanted food and security against American encroachment; by retaining their posts and providing Indians with sustenance and a place to live, Britons and Mohawks worked out a diplomatic exchange.

Slowly, however, the Americans also began to practice food diplomacy with

Natives. By 1784 they had appointed federal commissioners to superintend the northern and middle Indian departments, which lent a modicum of organization to diplomacy.27 At times American-allied Natives provided Americans with information regarding their food preferences. Captain Hendrick Aupaumut, a Stockbridge Mohican trying to make peace with the Western Confederacy on behalf of the United States, schooled the Americans regarding Indian likes and dislikes.28 His assertion that Indians preferred pork to beef tallied with earlier British claims, and he suggested the Americans could save money on flour “By giving them corn...every fourth day.”29 During other moments, Americans blindly fumbled through conventions of etiquette.

When he began to work as an Indian commissioner, Timothy Pickering figured out much of this food etiquette on his own. As he made ready to meet the Senecas in

November 1790, Pickering received a message via five Indian runners. Little Billy

26 Copy of a letter from P. Langan to Lt. Governor Hamilton, Montreal, 18 November 1784, f. 633, Add. MS 21735, BL. 27 Richard Butler, George Rogers Clark, Nathanael Greene, Stephen Higginson, Timothy Pickering, and Oliver Wolcott were among them, ff. 25-26, Indian Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 28 Alan Taylor, “Captain Hendrick Aupaumut: The Dilemmas of an Intercultural Broker,” Ethnohistory, vol. 43, no. 3 (Summer, 1996), 431. 29 Questions relative to the proposed Indian Treaty and Hendrick’s Answers, 24 February 1793, f. 55, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

247 informed him of the impending arrival of a numerous group of Senecas.30 He asked

Pickering “to help them on their way, by having provisions prepared for them” at two locations called the Painted Post and Newtown Point.31 Pickering learned that this act of providing food for Indians on their way to a meeting was one of many “Antiant customs,” also known as “hang[ing] some kettles.” In addition, Indian agents customarily provided

“a little Staff,” or “walking staff.”32 The kettles were code for food—sometimes cooked, sometimes not—and the staff was a draught of liquor.33

Pickering readily stepped into his role as a cautious supplier of food. “It will give me pleasure to help them forward on their journey,” he responded. Further, he promised to “have ready plenty of beef, flour, & corn...and Some rum to cheer their hearts.” “But the provisions furnished at those two places can be no more than what will be absolutely necessary to enable them to come on to this place,” he warned, in an effort to limit their consumption.34 Before two weeks had passed, however, Pickering panicked and regretted his stinginess; rumors “that the Indians were coming on in good humour” made him anxious to keep them that way, “and apprehensive that the restricted provision...would be

30 Pickering calls him “Tishkaaga...usually called Seneca Billy.” From Granville Ganter’s notes I believe this is Gissehhacke, or Little Billy. Granville Ganter, ed., The Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 1-3. 31 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 30 October 1790, f. 43, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 32 Horatio Jones to Timothy Pickering, 24 October 1790, f. 50, reel 61, Timothy Pickering papers, MHS. 33 When Pickering eventually agreed to provide the walking staff, he stated that it should “consist of two thirds whiskey and one third water.” Every grown person was to receive “one jill...and no more.” It is significant that during this time Simon Girty—an American-born, Seneca-raised man who eventually allied himself with the British—lived in a place that the Indians called “Kettle Town.” Natives knew that by going there, they could receive ready food supplies, but perhaps more importantly, they would experience good food diplomacy. It is also notable that the Americans distributed whiskey, rather than rum—perhaps a fact that indicated their inabilities to obtain rum from the West Indies (though at times it does still appear in treaty minutes). For the walking staff, see Timothy Pickering to Captain William Ross, Tioga Point, 30 October 1790, f. 58a, reel 61, Timothy Pickering papers, MHS; for Kettle Town, see Deposition of Christian Miller to Anthony Wayne, Head Quarters, Greene Ville, [no month, possibly December], 1794, f. 3, vol. XXXIX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 34 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 30 October 1790, f. 44, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

248 insufficient,” he dispatched someone “to procure all necessary additional Supplies” to contend with the Indians’ “voracious eating.”35 Pickering’s insecurities about his decisions indicated that during this moment in 1790—a full six years after American

Indian commissioners told the Iroquois that they had defeated them—Americans remained anxious to please Seneca members of the Six Nations with generous gifts of food.

Pickering comported himself particularly well at that 1790 treaty with the

Senecas. After everyone finally arrived, the Farmer’s Brother, another Seneca chief, put

Pickering in a potentially awkward situation. The chief observed that because Pickering had welcomed the Seneca men, “Our women expect you will Show them equal attention...Perhaps in taking them by the hand, you may See one who may please you.”36

The fact that women attended, and that they made an unusual appearance in the treaty minutes, might indicate that the Senecas seriously considered the meeting a peaceful one.

Yet although Indian commissioners frequently enjoyed the sexual company of Native women, Pickering declined the offer. Perhaps he did not know how to choose well without giving offense. The invitation evoked “a general laugh” from those in attendance, but surely everyone watching wanted to see how Pickering would respond. He dealt with the situation by offering food diplomacy rather than sexual commerce. “I am very glad to meet you here,” he said. “I invite you to my quarters, where we may eat & drink together

35 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 9 November 1790, f. 47, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. Pickering may also have recanted after considering a letter from one Bezaleel Seely, a resident of Chemung, who asked Pickering to make sure the Indians were well fed so that they would refrain from “killing & pilfering” the property of the town’s inhabitants. Seely observed that when passing through their town, Indians often stole food from colonists “for lack of Provisions.” Bezaleel Seely to Timothy Pickering, Chemung, 28 September 1790, f. 30, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 36 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 15 November 1790, f. 64, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

249 in friendship.” And walking around and shaking hands “with every woman present,”

Pickering said, “I now take you by the hand as my sisters.”37 He showed similar respect to the Seneca women that he had shown to the men by inviting them to dine with him; but by calling them his sisters, he created a temporary bond of kinship that would have made sexual overtures inappropriate.

Americans continued to seek out ways to cultivate allegiances with Native allies; some of this information involved acquainting themselves with Indian foodways.

Benjamin Rush, the renowned American doctor, sent Timothy Pickering a number of questions about Indians, including queries about their diets. Pickering responded that

Indians dealt with periods of hunger by “tying their belts closer & closer” and eating

“Spikenard root, which allays hunger.”38 After a bit of experience holding treaties, he noticed that Indians counterbalanced these periods of hunger by eating “two or three pounds of beef a man per day, besides bread and vegetables” when they could get them.39

Such assertions helped Indian commissioners understand why Native appetites could prove so very voracious. Pickering even described in detail how Indians who had eaten

“often, & a great deal” experienced “excretions by Stools...more frequent than those of the white people.”40 Officials were doubtless concerned with the alimentary (and sometimes execratory) habits of Native Americans. So too did they express interest in more refined nuances of table manners and ways of communicating about food: an

37 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 15 November 1790, f. 64, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 38 Benjamin Rush, Questions to be asked of the Indians by Col. Pickering, Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, f. 184-185a, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. Rush’s letter has Pickering’s answers written underneath the list of questions. 39 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 9 November 1790, f.47, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 40 Benjamin Rush, Questions to be asked of the Indians by Col. Pickering, Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, f. 186a, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

250 undated journal in Pickering’s papers lists food-related words in an unidentified Indian language. “Om-de-quau-quau” translated to “table,”; “kau-gauhne-ai-hah” meant

“knife.”41 Men like Rush may have sought such information for their own edification, but such details also allowed the American government to decide how much time and money they needed to spend on provisioning Indians.

During other meetings, however, American commissioners remained rather clueless, and perhaps somewhat powerless. In the summer of 1791 Pickering was supposed to meet the Senecas again, this time in the company of a number of other Six

Nations Indians. Once more, the Senecas sent runners who asked Pickering “to hang on the kettles & furnish them with a walking Staff...15 miles above the Painted Post.”42

Pickering responded that this time it would “be exceedingly difficult” to fulfill their request because “the lowness of the water of the Tioga river” made the “great weight and bulk” of “the goods and provisions” impossible to transport. In what he thought was a compromise Pickering proposed to hang the kettles only so far as the Painted Post, where the Indians would find “beef & corn in plenty...a quantity of potatoes,” and the requisite

“walking Staff.”43 When the Oneidas arrived an Indian named Good Peter chided him, supposing, “that the business of holding treaties with Indians was novel to me, or I should have hung on the kittles for their refreshment.” Good Peter implied that Pickering had neglected the proper form of diplomacy, and drove home his point by telling Pickering that he had been “obliged to ask for provisions at Canadasago.” Duly chastised, Pickering

41 F. 41a, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, P-31, MHS. 42 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 21 June 1791, ff. 73-74, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 43 Letter sent from Timothy Pickering by the Oneida Runners to the Senecas, &c., 21 June 1791, f. 74, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

251 agreed to “make him a just compensation” for the food the Indians had purchased on their way.44 Even as late as the summer of 1791, Six Nations Indians succeeded in telling

American officials how best to practice food diplomacy. Commissioners in the late-1780s and early 1790s expected Northern Indians to request food, and they subsequently made plans to supply it.

By 1791, however, the United States began to try to change Six Nations’ foodways, and to turn them into ones more representative of husbandmen. Such changes may have taken their cue from Britons’ wartime efforts to circumscribe Indians’ consumption of foodstuffs, or similar exertions on the part of postwar American governors in the South. The American Plan of Civilization—which was in large part a strategy to obtain Indians’ lands—rested on the idea that by getting Indian men to trade hunting for farming, they could live better on less land.45 The plan proved unrealistic for two key reasons. First, because American land-grabbers who were bent on expanding westward tended to seize Indian hunting grounds before American officials “converted” those Indians from their hunting state.46 Second, because the plan ignored the not insignificant number of Natives who had been farming and raising domesticated animals for years by the time the plan made its rounds through Congress.47

44 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 25 June 1791, ff. 74-74a, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 45 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 116. 46 For this “expansionist impulse” see Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 267. Colin Calloway usefully observes that although the idea of civilizing Indians and taking their lands were two ideas in tension with each other, the two projects were not mutually exclusive. Americans who sought to steal land wanted to physically remove Indians; those who would civilize Indians were bent on “severing their spiritual connection to the land.” Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, xxxii. 47 For scholars who have pointed out this second contradiction, see Daniel K. Richter, “‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 19, no. 4 (Winter, 1999): 601-628, esp. 602-3, 611; Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World

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Americans entertained ideas about the plan at least as early as 1790.48 Before the conclusion of the Western Confederacy War many Senecas—and a few other Six Nations

Indians—verbally approved of the plan, and the Western Confederacy Indians vehemently opposed it. Attitudes about husbandry (and thus food and diplomacy) became integral to concomitant discussions of accommodation, resistance, and warfare, and are useful for tracking inter-tribal battles as well as pan-Indian unity.

The Seneca named Cornplanter became one of the first Natives to point out the inconsistent nature of the Americans’ plan. “The Game which the Great Spirit Sent into our country for us to eat, is going from among us,” he observed in a December 1790 speech sent to George Washington. Although he claimed that the Senecas previously believed that the Great Spirit “intended, that we Should till the ground with the plough,”

Cornplanter wondered “whether you mean to leave us and our children any land to till.”49

(Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 15; James H. Merrell, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, vol. 69, no. 3 (July 2012), 469-73. 48 For scholars who have pinpointed the emergence of the Plan of Civilization in 1795, see Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 114. Daniel K. Richter has traced some of these changes to Quaker meetings in 1795. In his discussion of the Indian Affairs Committee of the Baltimore Yearly Meeting, which “first convened in 1795,” Quakers “throughout the United States were beginning to concentrate on the agricultural transformation of Native Americans.” James Merrell dates the inception of the plan to 1790. Theda Perdue traces its inception in the South to the 1791 Treaty of Holston with the Cherokees, though she also points out that in 1793 the Indian Trade and Intercourse Act “committed the United States to providing agricultural implements and draft animals to all Indians and to appointing agents to instruct Native people in their use.” I nitpick over dates here not simply to move the implementation of the Plan half a decade earlier, but to illustrate that the plan grew directly out of the Revolution and British policies about food diplomacy. Indeed, Richter observes that such policies continued well into the “first decades of the 1800s” as Republicans gained control. Richter, “‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food,’” 603 (“first convened” and “throughout the United States”), 610 (“first decades”); Merrell, “Second Thoughts,” 471; Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 110-11 (quote 111). 49 Cornplanter’s speech to the President of the United States, 1 December 1790, enclosed in Henry Knox to Timothy Pickering, Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, f. 15, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. It is important to note that Cornplanter seemed so willing to farm because he was prefacing a complaint about lands the Six Nations ceded at the second Treaty of Fort Stanwix (the Six Nations had refused to ratify the cession once they returned home, but the United States acted as if the cession was valid). A few days after

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Cornplanter voiced his skepticism that Indians possessed enough land to become the farmers the Americans envisioned. In his reply, Washington promised, “that all the lands

Secured to you by the treaty of Fort Stanwix...are yours...only your own acts can convey them away.” “Speak therefore your wishes on the Subject of tilling the ground,” he encouraged. “The United States will be happy to afford you every assistance.”50 Despite

Cornplanter’s reservations, Washington’s reassurance would suffice for the moment—in part because Iroquois communities were particularly hard-hit by food shortages in 1789, and needed additional aid.51

In January 1791 Timothy Pickering became one of the first officials to put forth his ideas for “the means of introducing the art of husbandry, and civilization, among our

Indian neighbours.” Even though Pickering conceded that many people might “think the idea of civilizing the Indians perfectly Eutopian,” he approved of the recent Treaty of

New York, which furnished Creek Indians “with domestic animals and instruments of husbandry, with a view to change these people from hunters to husbandmen.”52 Pickering bemoaned the current system, in which young men left for American schools to learn agriculture away from home. Although this type of education succeeded in teaching this speech, on 10 January 1791, he and the Senecas complained that they ceded lands under duress, and asked Washington to “reconsider that treaty and restore to us a part of that land.” Washington refused. See Corplanter, half Town, and the Great Tree’s speech to the President of the United States, Philadelphia, 10 January 1791, enclosed in Henry Knox to Timothy Pickering, Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, f. 23, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS; for background on the second Stanwix Treaty, see Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 78. 50 President’s reply to the Speech of the Cornplanter, Half Town and Great Tree, Chiefs and Counselors of the Seneca Nation of Indians, 29 December 1790, enclosed in Henry Knox to Timothy Pickering, Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, ff. 19-19a, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 51 Alan Taylor, “‘The Hungry Year’: 1789 on the Northern Border of Revolutionary America,” in Alessa Johns, ed., Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 1999), 166. 52 Timothy Pickering to [George Washington], 7 January 1791, f. 164, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

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“Indian youths” to farm, those men returned “to their own country,” and, according to

Pickering, once more transformed into “mere Savages.”53

“The remedy Seemed obvious” to Pickering. He proposed leaving Indian youths in their villages, educating them with “reading, writing and arithmetic,” and allowing them to “practically learn the art of husbandry” in the process. Natives would also receive “a cow, a yoke of oxen, a plough, a cart, and the other proper instruments of husbandry” as further encouragement.54 By definition, American husbandry meant raising domesticated animals and planting orderly rows of vegetables. In subsequent iterations, it became clear that American officials would dissuade Indian women from farming by encouraging them to become spinners and weavers, and so the plan also reworked conventional gender divisions by forcing women to stop laboring in fields.55

Pickering assumed that enthusiasm for the plan would spread from village to village.56

It took only a month for the United States to begin implementing Pickering’s plan.

In February when the Senecas asked if the United States would “teach us to plough and to

53 Timothy Pickering to [George Washington], 7 January 1791, f. 164a-65, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 54 Timothy Pickering to [George Washington], 7 January 1791, ff. 164a-65, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 55 See, for example, Cornplanter, half Town, and the Great Tree’s speech to the President of the United States, Philadelphia, 10 January 1791, enclosed in Henry Knox to Timothy Pickering, Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, f. 25a, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 56 Pickering was not the only one to display such excitement about teaching Indians to farm in ways that he deemed proper. In May 1791 Samuel Kirkland, longtime acquaintance of Mohawk Joseph Brant and missionary among the Oneidas, had devised his own plan of Indian agriculture. He proposed a school reminiscent of the one he attended with Brant in 1761. For more on the Brant-Kirkland relationship, see Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); for Kirkland’s plan and his exchanges with Pickering see [Undated entry], ff. 39-41, Journal of Samuel Kirkland, Missionary from the Society in Scotland & Corporation of Harvard College to the Oneidas & other tribes of the Six United nations of Indians from February 16 to May 30 1791, Society for Propagating the Gospel Among the Indians and Others in North America Records, 1752-1948, Ms. N-176, MHS; Timothy Pickering to Samuel Kirkland, Philadelphia, 4 December 1791, f. 304, reel 61, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

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Grind Corn,” and offered “to Send nine Seneka boys to be under your care for education,” George Washington agreed conditionally.57 He delegated Secretary of War

Henry Knox to say that the President believed that rather than sending “your children among us,” “sending one or two Sober men to reside in your Nation, with proper implements of husbandry” would “be the best mode of teaching you.”58 The fact that some of the Six Nations seemed so willing to embrace agriculture pleased U.S. leaders, but Washington and others wanted to make sure that the plan took hold.

By summer of 1791 the United States had resorted to rhetorical arguments to convince the Indians that their plan of agriculture was a good one. Americans’

Revolutionary food metaphors thus gave way to the language of logic. It was at a July meeting that Pickering offered his misremembering of early American foodways. In a conversation with Cornplanter he also discoursed at some length about how and why

American husbandry trumped Indian methods. Pickering described a society in which each man played a specialized role in food production. Farmers obviously farmed, but they were the endpoint of a long chain that enabled them to do so. Smiths made “plough- irons, hoes, axes, scythes, and all other iron tools” that enabled people to plow fields.

Carpenters built “houses and barns” for storing food, in addition to “ploughs, carts, and other things...for the use of the farmers.” With these types of aid, farmers raised

“abundance of cattle and corn, wheat and other grain,” which in turn allowed them to

57 For “teach us,” see Cornplanter, half Town, and the Great Tree’s speech to the President of the United States, Philadelphia, 10 January 1791; for “nine Seneka boys” see Cornplanter, Half Town, and the Big tree to the Great Councilor of the Thirteen Fires, 7 February 1791, both enclosed in Henry Knox to Timothy Pickering, Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, ff. 25, 29, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 58 [Henry Knox’s] reply to Cornplanter’s speech, 8 February 1791, enclosed in Henry Knox to Timothy Pickering, Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, ff. 30-31, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

256 feed “thousands of families,” as well as their own.59 If they adopted this system,

Pickering implied, Indians would not need to ask the Americans for food because they would produce enough of a surplus to feed themselves.

Pickering acknowledged that the Senecas might feel reluctant to alter their foodways so completely, so he used a curious analogy to convince them that some

Indians were already willing farmers. “On the other side of the Great Water, far beyond the nations of white people,” he said, “there are many nations of Indians who have dark skins, black hair & black eyes, like you.”60 By conflating Indians from India with Native

American Indians, Pickering set the stage for the next part of his argument.61 Indian

Indians labored as “farmers, carpenters, Smiths, Spinners and weavers, like the white people.” In other words, they already enjoyed a food system similar to the one Pickering described. “But above all,” he continued, “the tea which you may see the people of the

United States drinking every day”—the tea which so frequently appeared at Indian treaties—“comes from people of your colour on the other Side of the Great Water.”62

According to Pickering’s reasoning, Native Americans could turn themselves into farmers because other “Indians” already farmed, and in so doing they would enjoy access to one of the most valued of consumable commodities.

59 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 5 July 1791, f. 84, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 60 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 5 July 1791, f. 86, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 61 Pickering’s description of these Indians is misinformed, but it seems clear that this is indeed the geographic region he hoped to talk about. He argued that these Indians produced gunpowder, which would have originated in China, but he also mentioned silk and calico—products that placed the Indians firmly in South Asia. 62 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 5 July 1791, f. 86, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. At one treaty, for example, the estimate of supplies included 20 pounds of Bohea (black) tea and 10 pounds Hyson tea. Estimate of the Supplies for the Commissioners and their attendants, on the proposed treaty with the Indians at Sandusky, [1793], f. 276, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

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Despite his verbal optimism Pickering knew that the Americans’ chances of successfully transforming Native foodways would increase if he paved the way with proper food diplomacy. At the end of this meeting, which eventually included 1,050 Six

Nations Indians, he invited “four, five or Six...of their most able & prudent chiefs” to

Philadelphia, where “the plan of introducing the proposed improvements could be most usefully & Satisfactorily fixed,” or agreed upon.63 In order to “put them in good humour,” he sent them on their way with “one barrel of rum for a walking Staff,” and a promise of “hanging on the kettles for them at Sundry places” on their return home.64

Despite the fact that “the great expences of the treaty mortif[ied]” him, Pickering had performed well.65 In March 1792 the U.S. Senate agreed to devote $1,500 for “clothing, domestic animals and implements of husbandry, and for encouraging useful artificers to reside” in the villages of the Six Nations.66 By 1796 that annuity had grown to $4,500.67

In American eyes, willingness to adopt the Plan of Civilization translated into declarations of allegiance. Officials began to interpret Iroquois Indians’ moves toward the

Americans’ definition of husbandry as evidence that the Six Nations could make peace with the Western Indians. Cornplanter’s “attachment and fidelity,” for example, “could be relied upon.”68 The U.S. must have clung to his promises to “persuade the Wyandots and other Western Nations, to open their eyes and look toward the bed which you have

63 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 17 July 1791, f. 111a, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 64 [Journal of Timothy Pickering], 17 July 1791, f. 112, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 65 Timothy Pickering to Henry Knox, Philadelphia, 10 August 1791, f. 117, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 66 In Senate, 26 March 1792, f. 13, reel 62, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 67 Timothy Pickering to James McHenry, Philadelphia, 10 March 1796, f. 68, reel 2, James McHenry Papers, 1775-1862, MSS32177, microfilm 19,006, LOC. 68 Henry Knox to Timothy Pickering, 2 May 1791, ff. 4-4a, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

258 made for us, and to ask of you a bed for themselves.”69 Arthur St. Clair’s defeat by the

Western Confederacy on the Wabash River in 1791 had placed the Americans in a weak bargaining position, and they held out hope that a different group of Indians could achieve peace on their behalf.70 Yet in 1793 Americans began to lose faith that the Six

Nations would be able to treat with the Western Confederacy.

***

Three things happened in 1793 to fracture this trust: Iroquois Indians became significantly less inclined to practice husbandry in the ways that Americans wished; the

Western Confederacy articulated their unwillingness to become American-style farmers; and Iroquoian and American efforts to make peace with the Western Confederacy tribes failed. Six Nations’ reluctance to become American-style husbandmen stemmed from broader fractures that remained from the Revolution. Mohawk Joseph Brant continued to distrust the Americans who had destroyed Six Nations’ villages, crops, and cattle, and criticized other Iroquois Indians’ willingness to work with the United States. Although he offered Americans verbal reassurance that he would negotiate with them, in his interactions with other Indians he made it clear that he would not. In 1791 he asserted

69 Cornplanter, Half Town, and the Big tree to the Great Councilor of the Thirteen Fires, 7 February 1791, enclosed in Henry Knox to Timothy Pickering, Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, f. 28, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. It is possible that the word “bed” connoted two meanings here. One, as a bed for planting things—herbs, carrots, or other garden produce. The other reading recalls Indians’ claims that war was a time for leaving one’s bed and sleeping on the ground; once again possessing a bed would indicate a desire for peace. In both meanings, however, the Western Confederacy Indians were unlikely to be convinced. They displayed little desire to plant using American methods, and the possession of a bed would indicate a desire for a sedentary life that ran counter to their desires to be travelers. Oxford English Dictionary Online, search under “bed, n.,” esp. def. 8, http://oed.com. 70 Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 93-94.

259 that he should “never...do any thing for the United States.”71 In 1792, he mocked George

Washington’s invitation to Philadelphia, especially the part relating “particularly to planting & Sowing.” This offer “was not important” to Brant, “for he already knew how to plough & to Sow.” Significantly, Brant also indicated that if he went to Philadelphia,

“the hostile Indians...would See and blame him.”72 And indeed, the Americans had already lost faith in Brant’s ability to achieve peace: he was “too late, to render us any service with the hostile Indians,” they thought.73 Too much contact with sedentary

American husbandmen did not bode well in the eyes of the Western Confederacy.74

If Joseph Brant’s reluctance to adopt the Plan of Civilization came as little surprise to the Americans, maybe they felt more disappointed with their failures converting other members of the Six Nations. In Philadelphia U.S. officials experienced less success than they expected in doling out plows and domesticated animals. Samuel

Kirkland reported that the Oneida and Tuscarora members of the Six Nations “gave but a cool reception to the benevolence & generosity of Congress.” The Indians “cared nothing for oxen, or plows.”75 Even Cornplanter came under scrutiny when the U.S. learned that other members of the Six Nations no longer trusted him. The Six Nations at Buffalo

71 [Captain Hendrick’s narrative of his journey in July, August, September, and October 1791], f. 10a, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 72 [Captain Hendrick’s Narrative of his journey to the Niagara & Grand River, in February 1792], f. 19, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 73 Anthony Wayne to William Irvine, Pittsburgh, 20 July 1792, f. 88, vol. XX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 74 Of course, Brant’s ability to sway the Western Indians had waned before this time. Although Brant would have liked the Confederacy to present itself as an extension of the Iroquois covenant chain, Western Indians’ longstanding suspicions of the Iroquois made this alliance unlikely. White, The Middle Ground, 441. 75 Samuel Kirkland to Timothy Pickering, Oneida, 31 May 1792, ff. 45-6, reel 62, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

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Creek had forbidden Cornplanter from coming to Philadelphia without their permission, which he had “not been able to obtain.”76

When it became clear that the Six Nations would not fully adopt the Plan of

Civilization, the United States began to question their loyalties, and to lose hope that those Indians could bring Western Confederacy Natives to a treaty. After the Iroquois refused the tokens of American husbandry, it became “Necessary to watch every motion of our Brothers the Six Nations.” If the Indians were “not employed by us...they will

Certainly be our greatest Enemies.”77 Indian and American ideas about husbandry, it turned out, were fundamentally opposed.

The 1793 meeting planned for Sandusky was the last time the United States reposed their faith in the Six Nations. The president appointed Benjamin Lincoln,

Timothy Pickering, and Beverly Randolph, former governor of Virginia, to treat with the

Western Confederacy at Sandusky River, near Lake Erie.78 The commissioners possessed no way of knowing that the meeting would never take place, so they went ahead with the usual arrangements for food diplomacy.79 In February the War Department made

76 Henry Knox to Anthony Wayne, War Department, 9 March 1793, f. 74, vol. XXV, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 77 Nicholas Rosencrantz to Anthony Wayne, Fort Franklin, 8 February 1793, f. 15, vol. XXV, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. I am inclined to trust Nicholas Rosencrantz’s opinions of the situation here for a few reasons. He was an interpreter for the Senecas, and thus spoke their language. But Anthony Wayne also pointed out that his note-taking at treaties was a bit different from other men. He seems to have been a particularly fast writer, and according to Wayne he committed sentences to writing “sentence, by sentence, as they [the Indians] delivered it.” Rosencrantz’s notes and opinions were “Therefore not as liable to mistake, as if wrote in a hurry by a third person, taken from the mouth of an illiterate interpreter.” Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Legion Ville, 18 January 1793, f. 76, vol. XXIV, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 78 Henry Knox to Anthony Wayne, War Department, 2 March 1793, f. 57, vol. XXV, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP; Henry Knox to Benjamin Lincoln, 9 [March] 1792, f. 24, reel 10, Benjamin Lincoln Papers, P-40, MHS. 79 The American commissioners made it to British Indian agent Matthew Elliott’s farm across from Detroit, but did not meet with the Western Confederacy. White, The Middle Ground, 461.

261 preparations for obtaining treaty provisions from Niagara.80 The commissioners obtained a cheese “Called American Glocester,” “much in Esteem” for the treaty, in addition to the usual supply of “Bread, Beef, hams and wine.”81 Other items included Madeira, Port,

Rum, and Sherry; 100 pounds of butter; 50 pounds of chocolate; two barrels of neat’s tongues; pickled pork; coffee, sugar, and tea; and a slew of cooking equipment to prepare it all.82 By June the commissioners expected that over 100 of the Six Nations would attend; they possessed no numbers for the Confederacy.83

The meeting at Sandusky was the last in a decade-long history of feeble and frequently disingenuous American attempts to treat with the Western Confederacy.

Treaties at Fort McIntosh in 1785, Fort Finney in 1786, and Fort Harmar in 1789 elucidate the Confederacy’s complaints against the United States. At the Treaty of Fort

McIntosh the United States demanded territory from the Delawares, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Wyandots. The Indians ceded lands, but retained hunting rights on those areas. At

Fort Finney the following year the Americans rallied any Shawnees they could find who were willing to treat with them. 150 men and 80 women showed up, ceded land, and complained that they possessed no place to raise corn. Many Shawnees repudiated this treaty. At the January 1789 Treaty at Fort Harmar, the Americans met the Delawares,

80 Henry Knox to Anthony Wayne, War Department, 2 February 1793, f. 121, vol. XXIV, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP; Anthony Wayne to Brigadier General James Wilkinson, Head Quarters, Legion Ville, 19 February 1793, f. 47, vol. XXV, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 81 Sebastian Bairman to [Timothy Pickering], New York, 27 April 1793, f. 89, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 82 Estimate of the Supplies for the Commissioners and their attendants, on the proposed treaty with the Indians at Sandusky, [1793], and Estimate for the Supplies of the Commissioners & their Attendants On the intended Treaty with the Indians at Sandusky, ff. 276-8, reel 59; Timothy Pickering to Sebastian Bairman, Philadelphia, 23 March 1793, f. 137a, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 83 Benjamin Lincoln, Beverly Randolph, and Timothy Pickering to Henry Knox, Navy Hall, 20 June 1793, f. 150, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

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Potawatomis, Ojibwas, Ottawas, Senecas, Sauks, and Wyandots—the Shawnees stayed away. For $9,000, the tribes confirmed the problematic cessions at Forts Stanwix and

McIntosh.84

During these meetings, U.S. officials offered peace while threatening victual warfare. At Fort Finney the U.S. commissioners told the Indians that the end of hostilities would allow “your young men [to]...attend to their hunting, and your women and children to tend their Corn fields.”85 Although at this point the Americans conceded that Indian women would remain responsible for tending to fields, they still implied that failure to accept U.S. demands would lead to war. Furthermore, they ignored Natives’ complaints that American encroachments threatened their corn supply. Indians who refused to meet the Americans, they blithely warned, could “rest assured that the United States will take speedy and effectual measures to...reduce you to such terms, as may cause you to regret the loss of so advantageous a peace.”86 The Americans drove their message home by burning twelve thousand bushels of corn at Shawnee towns in October 1786.87

Even when the Americans offered diplomacy rather than practicing victual warfare, by the early 1790s American food diplomacy was merely an offer to implement the Plan of Civilization. In March 1791 George Washington sent a talk to the Miamis and

Wabash tribes, indicating the Americans’ desire to make the Indians “understand the

84 For Fort McIntosh, see Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 78; for Fort Finney, see Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 80, 83; for Fort Harmar, see Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 89; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 84. For a primary source summary from the Americans’ point of view, see Henry Knox, The CAUSES of the existing HOSTILITIES between the UNITED STATES, and certain Tribes of INDIANS North-West of the Ohio, stated and explained from official and authentic Documents, and published in obedience to the orders of the PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES, 26 January 1792, f. 15, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 85 23 December 1785, f. 68, Indian Talks and Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 86 26 January 1786, ff. 79-80, Indian Talks and Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 87 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 75.

263 cultivation of the earth,” and to teach them “how much better it is...to have comfortable houses, and to have plenty to eat and drink...than to be exposed to all the calamities belonging to a Savage life.”88 Secretary of War Henry Knox sent a speech the following month that extended another peace offer to the tribes of the Miami and Wabash Rivers—

“the Wyandots, Delawares, Ottawas, Chippewas, Pattiwatamas, and all Other tribes residing to the Southward of the lakes east of the Mississipi, and to the Northward of the

River Ohio.” The Americans invited them to Philadelphia along with the Six Nations, where the U.S. sought “the opportunity of imparting to you, all the blessings of civilized life.” Such largesse once again included the chance “to cultivate the earth, and raise corn...oxen, sheep and other domestic animals, to build comfortable houses,” and “ever to dwell upon the land.”89 Washington’s message conveyed a threat in case the Indians refused his invitation: if they chose to reject the way of life he offered, he warned, “your doom must be Sealed forever.”90

While most members of the Western Confederacy avoided meeting the

Americans, they also spent time banding together: the years between the 1786 Treaty of

Fort Finney and the 1789 Treaty at Fort Harmar ushered in a period of Native unification

88 [George Washington], talk sent to the headmen and warriors of the tribes of Indians of the Miami Towns and its neighborhood, and inhabiting the waters of the Miami River, of Lake Erie, and to the tribes inhabiting the waters of the River Wabash, 11 March 1791, enclosed in Henry Knox to Timothy Pickering Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, f. 41, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 89 Henry Knox to Alexander Freeman, War Department, 3 April 1792, f. 209, Indian Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 90 [George Washington], talk sent to the headmen and warriors of the tribes of Indians of the Miami Towns and its neighborhood, and inhabiting the waters of the Miami River, of Lake Erie, and to the tribes inhabiting the waters of the River Wabash, 11 March 1791, enclosed in Henry Knox to Timothy Pickering Philadelphia, 2 May 1791, f. 41, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

264 and cooperation.91 Near the end of 1786 a council of Six Nations, Wyandots, Delawares,

Shawnees, Ottawas, Chippewas, Potawatomis, Miamis, “Wabash Confederates,” and

Chickamauga Cherokees came together and called themselves the United Indian Nations.

They sent a message to congress that rejected the 1784 Fort Stanwix cession, the 1785

Fort McIntosh cession, and the 1786 Fort Finney cession.92 By July 1787 “authentic information” circulated about “a confederation of the five nations with the Wabash

Indians, the Shawanese & a number of other tribes on the North West side of the Ohio.”93

A powerful triumvirate led by Buckongahelas of the Delawares, Little Turtle of the

Miamis, and Blue Jacket of the Shawnees further bound the Indians together.94 A 1792 meeting at the Glaize (the area where the Auglaize and Maumee Rivers met) drew together Cherokees, Chippewas, Conoys, Creeks, Delawares, Hurons, Miamis, Mingoes,

Mohikons, Munseys, Ottawas, Pottawatomies, Reynards, Sacs, and Shawnees.95

The Western Confederacy explicitly rejected the American Plan of Civilization, and described their disinterest in becoming the husbandmen the Americans described.

91 It might be argued that the 1783 meeting of Cherokees, Creeks, Delawares, Iroquois, Shawnees, Three Fires, and Wyandots that Joseph Brant headed was the first instance of such post-Revolutionary unity. With Brant’s waning power, however, the pan-Indianism of the Confederacy transformed. Sugden, Blue Jacket, 66. 92 Hinderaker, Elusive Empires, 235-36; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 95. 93 William Grayson, Richard Henry Lee, and Edward Carrington to [Edmund Randolph], New York, 22 July 1787, box 6, Robert Alonzo Brock Collection, mssBR, HL. 94 Relying on an early newspaper account by a man called Thomas Jefferson Larsh, historians have long asserted that Blue Jacket was in fact a white man known as Marmaduke van Sweringen. Over time they have come to agree that Blue Jacket was Native, and older than van Sweringen. John Sugden presents a summary of this debate in his biography of Blue Jacket. I am not interested in debating the relative merits of Blue Jacket and Little Turtle. It was not my goal to determine the true leader of the Western Confederacy Indians, but rather to explore how each man used food to gain peace and make war. For the debate about Blue Jacket versus Little Turtle’s preeminence, see Sugden, Blue Jacket, and Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle. Colin Calloway asserts that Blue Jacket’s role was greatest, but was surpassed by Little Turtle’s after the war was over. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 86-87. For Van Sweringen, see Sugden, Blue Jacket, 1-4. 95 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 105-06.

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“The great spirit” gave them “land and fill[ed] it with abundance of wild creatures,” the

Wyandots, Ottawas, Chippewas, Delawares, and Muncies said in 1791. They did not want to become husbandmen because the Great Spirit had provided them with animals they could hunt for sustenance. Perhaps the Indians’ use of the word “abundance” conveyed the fact that they had heard the speeches coming from the Americans—even if they refused to acknowledge them. They told mediators that they, too, enjoyed a surfeit, but they enjoyed it in Indian forms.96 At the 1792 meeting at the Glaize, Painted Pole, a

Shawnee, warned the Indians that Americans would force men to hoe corn, and make them labor like domesticated cattle.97 They stood ready to defend their foodways with war.

After Arthur St. Clair’s defeat in 1791 the Confederacy’s power waxed as they readied for campaigns of victual warfare against the Americans. Victorious Indians stuffed dead soldiers’ mouths with soil in a symbolic act against those who hungered too deeply for Natives’ lands.98 Such actions sent a warning against those who would try to subdue them. By November 1792 Anthony Wayne was convinced “that there is a new

Nation joined” from the Northwest, “who say they are hungre for white mans flesh,” and

96 [Captain Hendrick’s narrative of his journey in July, August, September, and October 1791], f. 8a, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 97 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 105-6. 98 White, The Middle Ground, 454. For a comparative example in colonial Virginia, in which Natives near Kecoughtan killed colonists and left them “with their mowthes stopped full of Breade,” see George Percy, “A Trewe Relacyon” (Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 1922), in James Horn, ed., Captain John Smith: Writings with Other Narratives of Roanoke, Jamestown, and the First English Settlement of America (New York: Library of America, 2007), 1098.

266 would “feast upon the Army.”99 The Sandusky meeting was the Americans’ last chance to make peace with an increasingly powerful enemy.

It soon became clear that the Western Confederacy Indians did not plan to meet the American commissioners in person; while Americans Lincoln, Pickering, and

Randolph assembled at Niagara with British Governor John Graves Simcoe, and then at

British Indian commissioner Matthew Elliott’s house on the Detroit River, the Western

Confederacy gathered at Briton Alexander McKee’s storehouse at the bottom of the

Maumee rapids.100 The Americans and the Western Confederacy passed messages to each other through the Six Nations and the British.

In June 1793 the commissioners sent Mohican Hendrick Aupaumut to the

Western Confederacy Indians to try to open negotiations. They charged him with the task of ascertaining whether the Confederacy would budge on the question of a boundary line, which had formed the main cause of those Indians’ complaints since the end of the

American Revolution. Natives demanded the Ohio as a boundary because they required the land for hunting. Obviously, American officials who remained intent on implementing the Plan of Civilization would not readily agree to the terms of this ultimatum. Lincoln, Pickering, and Randolph wanted the Indians to consider the fact that if they changed their minds, the United States would give them “a large annual Rent” and permission to “hunt on the same lands as long as you can find any game.”101 For a brief moment it seemed that the commissioners were ready to abandon recent American ideas

99 Anthony Wayne to Thomas Hughes, Head Quarters, Pittsburgh, 12 November 1792, f. 83, vol. XXIII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 100 Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 99; Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 120. 101 Memo. of Instructions given to Captain Hendrick by Colonel Pickering, Niagara, 4 June 1793, f. 146, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

267 about the proper mode of husbandry insofar as they acknowledged that the Western

Indians would likely remain hunters.102

Back in the Western Confederacy camp, the Indians split into two groups to fix upon a proper answer. The Iroquois, Ojibwes, Ottawas, and Potawatomis broke into one group, and the Delawares, Miamis, Shawnees, and Wyandots formed another. Without waiting to hear Joseph Brant’s opinion, the Shawnees, influenced by Alexander McKee, sent a response to the American commissioners.103 Brant observed “that the letter had been wrote without consulting” the Six Nations, and “was not agreeable” to their minds, but his refusal to sign it did not stop the Indians from sending it.104 That the McKee faction ignored the Iroquois served as further proof that the Six Nations now held little influence among the more powerful gathering of Western Confederacy Natives.

The Indians’ response indicates the extent to which concerns about their foodways figured into their debates. The Western Confederacy responded that they could

“retreat no farther; because the Country behind, hardly affords food for its present inhabitants.” Money was “of no value” to them, and “no consideration whatever” would convince them “to Sell the Lands on which we get Sustenance for our women and children.”105 These Indians insisted on retaining their hunting right, and argued that the lands west of the Ohio would not support their additional numbers—perhaps because the

102 This concession was not unusual; Indian treaties usually allowed Natives to continue hunting on ceded lands, but years of experience by this point had demonstrated that when Indians hunted on lands occupied by white Americans, violence inevitably resulted. 103 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 498. The Western Confederacy, especially the Miamis and Shawnees, began distrusting Joseph Brant in 1786. After this time British Superintendent Alexander McKee enjoyed much of the power that Brant lost. Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 60, 418, 420. 104 Nicholas Rosencrantz to Anthony Wayne, Fort Franklin, 23 September 1793, f. 71, vol. XXIX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 105 16 August 1793, At the Mouth of the Detroit River, ff. 173-173a, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

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1780s had witnessed particularly severe periods of food shortages.106 After invoking this logic, the Indians offered the commissioners a tongue-in-cheek solution that they could only have written with the intent to offend. “We hope we may be allowed to point out a mode by which your Settlers may be easily removed,” they said. Because whites living in the Ohio valley were poor, the Indians proposed that the commissioners should

“divide...the large Sum of Money which you have offered to us, among these people,” who “would most readily accept of it in lieu of the lands you sold to them.”107

The fact that the Confederacy split over the offer highlights the uncertain outcome of this moment in 1793. In their portrait of a hypothetical future, the Americans admitted that Western Confederacy Indians would want to search for game, rather than remain on one spot of land in order to farm and herd. Whether or not they genuinely planned to retreat on this matter is not clear. Yet ultimately the commissioners accepted the

Delaware, Miami, Shawnee, and Wyandot response as representative of the whole

Confederacy. By suggesting that American inhabitants would accept the money that the

106 The Ohio Valley suffered famines in 1782, 1784, and 1787, and in 1788 heavy snows made the situation worse. Natives experienced serious dearth in 1789 because they delayed their planting in case of an American invasion, and the winter of 1790-91 was severe enough that buffalo became scarce on the Illinois prairie. Although Richard White argues that game animals actually increased in the 1770s and 1780s because no one had time to hunt them, he remarks that famines remained a problem because of weather conditions, and the fact that warfare interfered with planting. Alan Taylor notes that during “the hungry year” of 1789, people suffered the worst in northeastern Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and western Vermont; the area in present-day Canada from Niagara to Quebec and into the Maritimes was also hit particularly hard. He traces the famine to the Hessian fly’s impact on the 1788 wheat harvest, followed by a cold 1789 spring, “market incentives” that drained provisions in affected areas from 1788-89, and alarmist reports that caused grain prices to surge. White, The Middle Ground, 487, 487n27; Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 97; Taylor, “‘The Hungry Year,’” 145-81, esp. 145-47. 107 Extracts from the Journal of the Commissioners of the United States, appointed to hold a Treaty at Sandusky, with the western Indians, in the year 1793, f. 260, Indian Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

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Indians would not, the Confederacy sent a message that suggested that they knew better than to value money over food.

The Americans were furious, and rightly implicated the British in influencing the

Indians against making peace.108 The British enjoyed success in part because they continued to block American food diplomacy with the Western Confederacy, and to practice it themselves. By 1793 British Governor John Graves Simcoe was leaning on a previous standing order “that no Supplies should be conveyed to the Indians by the

United States...on any pretence whatever.” If they received “their dinners from the party with whom they were treating,” he contended, Natives could not “treat on independent grounds.” The Indians “objected to...being supplied by the United States,” he concluded.109 This last point was patently wrong, because Indians had received food from

British and Americans alike at previous treaties. Simcoe nevertheless insisted that no food from the United States would reach Indian mouths.

British food diplomacy, by contrast, continued virtually uninterrupted. In 1791

Hendrick Aupaumut reported that the British were encouraging the Shawnees’ and

108 It should be noted that Anthony Wayne may have also contributed considerably to the inabilities of the commissioners to obtain peace with the Western Confederacy. After they warned him not to advance beyond Fort Washington Wayne made the mistake of doing just that in July 1793. The Western Confederacy knew Wayne had moved forward because they observed “large quantities of provisions...and numerous herds of horses and cattle assembled beyond Fort Jefferson, guarded by considerable bodies of troops.” After receiving panicked letters from Henry Knox and the commissioners, Wayne retreated, but not before accusing the Indians of wanted to steal the cattle and packhorses. It is possible that the damage was already done by the time he retreated. For the commissioners’ warning, see Extract of a letter from Benjamin Lincoln, Beverly Randolph, and Timothy Pickering to [unknown, possibly Henry Knox], Niagara, 27 May 1793, f. 16, vol. XXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. For news of Wayne’s motions see Benjamin Lincoln, Beverly Randolph, and Timothy Pickering to Henry Knox, f. 10 vol. XXVIII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. For Knox’s panicked letter to Wayne, see [Henry Knox] to Anthony Wayne, War Department, 20 July 1793, f. 9, vol. XXVIII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. For Wayne’s accusation against the Indians, see Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Head Quarters, Hobsons Choice Near Fort Washington, 7 August 1793, f. 54, vol. XXVIII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 109 William Hull to [Alexander Hamilton], Niagara, 6 February 1793, ff. 47-48, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

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Miamis’ desire for war by promising “three years provision” at a fort at the mouth of the

Miami River.110 When Miamis sought to leave their village at Kekionga in 1792 in order to reestablish a town called Little Turtle’s Village, close to the Shawnees and the burgeoning confederacy, they did so with food that Briton Matthew Elliott gave them.111

When the Western Confederacy gathered at the Maumee rapids to await word from the

American commissioners at Niagara, they lived off of British food supplies given out at

McKee’s storehouse.112 By June 1739 reports stated that in addition to receiving food at

British posts, Natives also enjoyed supplies that were “transported into their country.”113

British gifts of food enabled Governor Simcoe and Indian administrators such as

Alexander McKee to convincingly counsel the Indians against treating with the

Americans. McKee successfully persuaded the Indians not to go to meet the commissioners on June 1, the date initially fixed by the Americans.114 Lincoln, Pickering, and Randolph also heard of a rumor (that turned out to be true) from “a Mohawk from

Grand River,” suggesting “That Governor Simcoe advised the Indians to make peace, but not to give up any of their lands.”115 Because everyone knew that the Americans insisted on taking the Ohio as a boundary line, Simcoe’s advice was akin to declaring war. Later missives indicated that Simcoe “had positively said, That there would be no peace

110 [Captain Hendrick’s narrative of his journey in July, August, September, and October 1791], f. 8a, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 111 Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 116. 112 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 146. 113 Memorandum of John Heckewelder for the information of the Commissioners, River La Frenchée, 17 to 23 June 1793, f.186, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 114 Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Hobson’s Choice near Fort Washington, 2 July 1793, f. 87, vol. XXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 115 [Commissioners] to General Simcoe, 7 June 1793, F. 171, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS.

271 between the Indian Nations & the United States,” and that McKee had promised them food supplies “in case they went to war.”116

After receiving the Confederacy’s negative response, the American commissioners decided to give up. Upon hearing that the commissioners had left,

Alexander McKee “ordered three Beeves to be killed in order to make a War feast.” A

Shawnee chief observed that now they would be “able to war with Ameri[c]a,” given the fact that McKee “sais we shall not want for Amunition Clothing or Provisions.”117

Alexander McKee provided both a present and future testament of British goodwill; he offered meat in preparation for war, as well as the promise of food to come. When the

Indians offered Joseph Brant the war hatchet, he refused it, though he promised to return to Buffalo Creek and make a decision in the future. In the meantime the Western

Confederacy made plans to meet at the Glaize and prepare for the forthcoming war.118 On

August 23, 1793 Lincoln, Pickering, and Randolph wrote to Wayne and informed him that the meeting had failed.119 In September General Anthony Wayne received a letter that hoped that the Infantry of the 1st Sub Legion (Wayne’s forces) would “be adequate to make those audacious savages feel our superiority in Arms.”120 A final showdown had become inevitable.

116 Memorandum of John Heckewelder for the information of the Commissioners, River La Frenchée, 17 to 23 June 1793, f.184, reel 59, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS; William Wells, Deposition to Anthony Wayne, Hobsons Choice, 16 September 1793, f. 46, vol. XXIX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 117 Nicholas Rosencrantz to Anthony Wayne, Fort Franklin, 23 September 1793, f. 71, vol. XXIX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 118 John Hamtramck to James Wilkinson, Fort Jefferson, 11 September 1793, f. 28, vol. XXIX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 119 Benjamin Lincoln, Beverly Randolph, and Timothy Pickering to Anthony Wayne, Fort Erie, 23 August 1793, f. 96, vol. XXVIII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 120 Henry Knox to Anthony Wayne, War Department, 3 September 1793, f. 120, vol. XXVIII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

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***

As Anthony Wayne formulated his strategy against the Western Confederacy he thought carefully about tactics concerning food. He knew that he had to protect his supply line, sever any remaining ties between the Six Nations and the Confederacy, and implement victual warfare against Indian holdouts. In answer to past and anticipated future campaigns of victual warfare, the Confederacy came up with a multifaceted campaign of its own. By the end of the Revolution Indians obviously knew that American tactics involved burning crops and villages, so they pursued cattle and crop destruction on their own terms.

Wayne’s supply line stretched over 100 miles, and proved difficult to maintain and defend. He tended to squirrel away rations at Greenville, and to store food at the various forts along the way.121 “I am here under the order of the Commander in Chief, with a Strong Detachment of the Legion...to protect your beef Catle,” one general proclaimed to suppliers in November 1793.122 The War Department’s agreement with the contractors who provisioned the Western posts contained stipulations that guards would

121 Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 128. 122 James Wilkinson to Messrs Elliot & Williams, Contractors, Camp on Deer Creek, 18 November 1793, f. 118, vol. XXX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. It should be noted that Wayne and Wilkinson really did not like each other. Wilkinson had once described Wayne as “a liar, a drunkard, a Fool, the associate of the lowest order of Society, and the companion of their vices, of desperate Fortune, my rancorous enemy, a coward, a Hypocrite, and the contempt of every man of sense and virtue.” Quoted in Andrew R. L. Cayton, “‘Noble Actors’ upon ‘the Theatre of Honour’: Power and Civility in the Treaty of Greenville,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 249.

273 escort the convoys safely to the forts, as well as agreements on financial compensation for “losses sustained by the depredations of the enemy.”123

Much of Wayne’s information about forthcoming attacks came from William

Wells, who was raised among the Miamis, but turned spy for the Americans after

1793.124 Wells indicated in September 1793 that a force of 1,800 warriors (out of a total of 2,400 Indians) planned “to attack the convoys” carrying Wayne’s provisions, “to kill the pack horses” responsible for transporting said provisions, and “to harrass the Army by firing frequently upon them in the Night.”125 Wells conveyed a plan of Indians’ victual warfare against the Americans’ “plenty of Cattle & Corn,” coupled with Indians’ desire to mentally intimidate Wayne’s army. “This is not a common or little predatory war,”

Wayne worried; “it is a confederated War forming a chain of Circumvalation round the

Frontiers of America from Canada to East Florida.”126

Wayne focused part of his attentions on driving further divisions between the Six

Nations (who had not yet declared for either) and the Western Confederacy by fomenting accusations about poison. In January 1794 a Seneca war chief named Captain Big Tree

“put a period to his own existance.”127 The man had committed suicide. In an attempt to ensure the loyalty of the Senecas and other Indians of the Six Nations, Wayne set about implying that the Delawares had poisoned Captain Big Tree. He sent a talk to the Six

123 Copy of a Contract for supplying the Western Posts with provisions for the year 1792 made and concluded in Philadelphia, 24 September 1791, f. 192, Indian Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 124 Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 121. 125 William Wells, Deposition to Anthony Wayne, Hobsons Choice, 16 September 1793, f. 46, vol. XXIX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 126 Anthony Wayne to General Charles Scott, Head Quarters, Hobsons Choice, 26 September 1793, f. 78, vol. XXIX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 127 Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Head Quarters, Greenve Ville, 25 January 1794, f. 62, vol. XXXII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

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Nations in which he observed that after the night that Captain Big Tree engaged in “some

Angry talk with the Delawares” he was “from that time to the moment of his

Death...Melancholy & deranged, until the fatal moment that he stabbed himself with his own knife.” Whether he “eat or drank with them...or whether they gave him something, that put him out of his reason,” Wayne could not say. But it became clear from his speculating that he intended to cast blame on the Delawares. Wayne also made a point of remembering that the previous summer, many of the Six Nations died, “in consequence of Something that you had eat when at the Council with the Hostile Indians at the rapids of the Miami.” Cornplanter was sick—“also near dying” (though he survived his illness).

“This mode of Making war,” Wayne continued, “is Cowardly & base, & Capt. Big Tree was determined to have revenge had he lived.”128 Wayne made the jump from conjecture to accusation by calling the actions of the Western Confederacy cowardly and dishonorable; he also tried hard to urge the Senecas to take revenge.

In spite of Wayne’s efforts, the loyalties of the Six Nations remained uncertain.

When Wayne sent the accusatory talk to the Senecas, he instructed his interpreter to “Feel the pulse of the Seneka’s with respect to joining the Legion,” but not to “press it” if he found them “cool & backward.”129 At a meeting between the Mohawks, Cayugas,

Senecas, Oneidas, Delawares, and Tuscaroras, Brant asked the Americans for more time before the Iroquois tendered their allegiance. “In such very weighty business” it grew

128 Anthony Wayne, Speech to the Six Nations, Greene Ville, 26 March 1794, f. 81, vol. XXXIII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 129 Anthony Wayne to Nicholas Rosencrantz, Head Quarters, Greene Ville, 26 March 1794, f. 82, vol. XXXIII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

275 impossible to deliberate quickly.130 By spring of 1794, Brant had once more declared for war against the Americans.131 That part of Wayne’s plan had failed.

In the meantime the Confederacy continued to obtain and protect Native food supplies while practicing victual warfare against the Americans. In September 1790 the

Miamis burned their own town rather than allow advancing American troops to do so.

This preemptive destruction meant that the American military could take no corn before setting fire to the remaining crops; the Indians, on the other hand, could find food and take shelter in increasingly unified neighboring villages.132 As the Confederacy gathered strength the Miami named Little Turtle instructed the war chiefs to divide into messes of twenty men. Four men out of each of these groups took responsibility for supplying the other sixteen people with game by high noon each day.133 When the Confederacy was on the move they usually stopped to hunt in the afternoon, instead. By the end of June 1794

1,200 warriors could kill approximately 200 deer and 200 turkeys per day.134

Natives’ motions against Wayne’s supply line focused more on making life difficult for Wayne than on feeding Indian mouths; in other words, Indians did not usually attack the convoys with the intention to steal food.135 The Americans puzzled

130 Proceedings of a council holden at Buffaloe Creek, 9 February 1794, enclosed in Israel Chapin to Henry Knox, Canadaraqua, 25 February 1794, f. 13, vol. XXXIII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 131 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 157. 132 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 100; Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 90. 133 Although I am willing to lend credit to Carter’s assertion that it was Little Turtle who came up with this system of Indian messes, his claim that Little Turtle’s method of attacking convoys was “entirely different” from all those previously “used by the Indians” is incorrect. As evidenced by earlier chapters in this dissertation, Natives attacked food convoys and wagons throughout the American Revolution; it might be more appropriate to claim that Little Turtle’s strategy was one formed by the war. Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 105, 125. 134 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 162, 164. 135 For an exception, see Jonathan Smith to James Wilkinson, Fort St. Clair, 29 September 1792, f. 20, vol. XXII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

276 over the fact that Indians who struck at their convoys left edible goods behind, but

Indians’ actions actually make a lot of sense; they possessed little cause to steal food when men like Alexander McKee promised to keep them well-fed. In June 1792 for example, sixty or seventy Indians set fire to “a large quantity of hay,” making it hard for

American soldiers to feed horses, and thus less easy to transport food supplies or reconnoiter the area around Wayne’s forts.136 In October 1793 the Indians attacked twenty wagons “Loaded with Indian Corn” seven miles from Fort St. Clair. They abandoned “the Waggons & stores standing in the road,” but “killed or carried off about

Seventy horses.” Wayne’s assertion that “The Savages...can’t continue long embodied for want of provisions” was more bluster than truth.137 The Confederacy’s abandonment of such supplies merely demonstrated their power, and their capacities to obstruct Wayne’s operations. It may also have revealed Natives’ determination to ignore food stores produced by imperial American farmers.

Unfortunately, victual warfare comprised only part of the battle, and in June 1794 the Confederacy mounted an attack against Fort Recovery that resulted in the shattering of their union. Testimony from a Potawatomi woman captured during the attack revealed that 1,454 Chessaw, Delaware, Eel River, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Six

Nations, and Wyandot warriors had gathered outside the fort’s walls on June 30.138 What

136 Major Strong to James Wilkinson, Fort Jefferson, 25 June 1792, f. 60, vol. XX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 137 Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Camp SW Branch of Miami, Six Miles advanced of Fort Jefferson, 23 October 1793, f. 35, vol. XXX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 138 The Examination of a Potawatime Woman who was in the Attack upon Fort Recovery, & taken prisoner by Mr. Wells, 23 July 1794, f. 101, vol. XXVI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. Reports after the action demonstrate the extreme variation in post-battle reporting. Initial accounts of the Indians’ numbers ranged from 500 to 2,000 men. For 500, see Alexander Gibson to Anthony Wayne, Fort Recovery, 30 June 1794, f.

277 the Shawnee Blue Jacket had envisioned as an ambush against a party of dragoons turned into a frontal assault led by the Ottawas.139 They attacked a convoy, stole the horses, and drove of the cattle.140 After failing to penetrate the fort, the Indian retreated beyond the line of fire, where they “killed & eat several Cattle & Packhorses” in sight of the garrison.141

Indians may have eaten the horses and cattle as a symbolic act of defiance against the Americans watching them, but their actions may also have boded poorly for the future of the Confederacy. It is possible that their heavy consumption portended their preparations for a journey. The Ottawas’ attack resulted in a barrage of American artillery, and after June 30 those Indians voiced their desire to go home. The Ojibwas and

Potawatomis followed them. By the time that Anthony Wayne built Fort Defiance at the junction of the Maumee and Auglaize Rivers—the former home of the Indians’ confederacy—Little Turtle also relinquished his hopes of defeating the Americans.142

Shawnees taken prisoner by Wayne’s forces even articulated rising doubts about British support.143 By August 1794, Blue Jacket presided over a heavily-diminished force of only

52, vol. XXVI; for 1,000 and 1,500 see Anthony Wayne to Messrs Elliot & Williams, Head Quarters, Greene Ville, 4 July 1794, f. 68; for 2,000 see Extract of a letter from Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Head Quarters, Greene Ville, 7 July 1794, f. 77, vol. XXVI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 139 Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 102. 140 Alexander Gibson to Anthony Wayne, Fort Recovery, 30 June 1794, f. 52, vol. XXVI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 141 Alexander Gibson to [Anthony Wayne?], Fort Recovery, 5 July 1794, f. 72, vol. XXVI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 142 Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 102-03. 143 Anthony Wayne, Examination of two Shawanoes Warriors taken Prisoners on the Miami of the Lake, 22 June 1794, f. 46, vol. XXVI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

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300 Delawares, 100 Miamis, 200 Shawnees, and 100 other Indians of various tribal affiliations.144 Urged on by the British, they decided to carry on the war.145

In the weeks before the Battle of Fallen Timbers, Wayne’s actions demonstrate his simultaneous confidence that he would defeat the Confederacy and his uncertainty regarding his own future.146 On August 13 he sent the remaining Delawares, Miamis,

Shawnees, and Wyandots a talk telling them that only by surrendering could the Indians save themselves and their “distressed & helpless women & children from danger & famine during the present fall and ensuing winter.”147 Only a month before he threatened to carry out such victual warfare, however, he had composed his last will and testament.148 Although the starvation of the Indians, and thus the outcome of the Western

Confederacy War was a certainty in Wayne’s mind, he could not guarantee his own survival.

The Indians’ diminished numbers, compounded by the fact that they had been fasting for several days when Wayne attacked them, contributed to their final defeat. The

Battle of Fallen Timbers commenced around 10 a.m. on the morning of August 20, lasted about an hour, and concluded in the defeat of the remaining Western Confederacy

Indians.149 “It is with infinite pleasure that I now announce to you the brilliant success of

144 Examination of a Shawanoe Prisoner taken by Cap. Wells, 12 August 1794, f. 4, vol. XXXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 145 Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 132. 146 The Battle of Fallen Timbers was so creatively named because the ground was “cover’d with old fallen timber probably occasioned by a tornado.” Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Head Quarters, Grand Glaize, 28 August 1798, f. 15, vol. XXXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 147 Anthony Wayne, talk sent to the Delawares, Shawanoes, Mineamis & Wyandots, 13 August 1794, f. 5, vol. XXXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 148 Copy, Will of General Anthony Wayne, 14 July 1794, f. 86, vol. XXVI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 149 Numbers of the Confederacy range from 400 to 1,300. Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 135; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 113.

279 the Federal Army under my Command,” crowed Wayne to Secretary of War Henry Knox a week later.150 Wayne devastated the surrounding countryside to ensure Natives’ total compliance in the ensuing months.151 For three days after the battle the Americans wrecked nearby houses and cornfields around the British-held Fort Miamis on the banks of the Maumee River.152 They laid “waste the villages & Corn fields for about Fifty miles on each side of the Miamis,” and then looked toward the Auglaize River for more opportunities of victual warfare.153 Soldiers pulled up bean vines, cut pumpkins “to pieces,” and “destroyed all the Vegitables they could find.”154 Clearly, soldiers who had practiced victual warfare during the American Revolution remembered how to do so during the decades that followed.

Wayne’s campaign effectively undermined British and Western Confederacy power, thus guaranteeing a longstanding American victory. When Wayne’s legion of

3,000 soldiers struck, they faced half-starved Indians, which is partially why the

Americans’ subsequent destruction of Indians’ settlements and food stores hit them so particularly hard.155 Whereas during the Revolution, Iroquois Indians who dealt with torched villages remained fairly well-provisioned before the Sullivan campaign, the weakened Western Confederacy was already strapped for food by the time Wayne’s forces burned their crops and towns. The Americans did so to “produce a conviction to

150 Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Head Quarters, Grand Glaize, 28 August 1794, f. 15, vol. XXXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 151 Carter, The Life and Times of Little Turtle, 137; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 113. 152 Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Head Quarters, Grand Glaize, 28 August 1798, f. 15, vol. XXXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 153 Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Head Quarters, Grand Glaize, 28 August 1794, f. 15, vol. XXXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 154 John Caldwell to Charles Scott, [location unknown], 1 September 1794, f. 31, vol. XXXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 155 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 113.

280 the minds of the Savages, that the British have neither the power or inclination to afford them that protection which they had been taught to expect.”156 Yet Indians’ faith in the

British broke during the battle, when British officials Alexander McKee, Matthew Elliott, and Simon Girty looked on from afar rather than fight, and the British refused to shelter retreating Indians inside Fort Miamis after their defeat.157 The destruction of their food stores, combined with their lack of faith in future British food diplomacy, put an end to

Native resistance. Although some Indians held out hopes that the war would continue, most acknowledged that they had lost the War for the Ohio. As the Americans’ power waxed, Indians experienced a nearly complete overhaul of their foodways.

***

The following months witnessed the definitive transfer of power—with all its new trappings of culinary imperialism—from British to American hands.158 Blue Jacket arrived at Fort Defiance on January 29, 1795 to sue for peace, along with his sister, the

Shawnee Nianimseca, the Delaware Grand Glaize King, also known as Tetabokshke or

Branching Tree, and a Stockbridge Indian named Stephen Young as their interpreter.159

Although Blue Jacket disingenuously claimed that all of “the Shawanoes, Delawares, &

156 General Orders, Head Quarters, Banks of the Miami, 23 August 1794, f. 10, vol. XXXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 157 Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 104. 158 The British made one last attempt to retain their credit with the Confederacy, but their efforts came to naught. In October 1794 Governor Simcoe sent for Joseph Brant, Blue Jacket, Buckongahelas, Little Turtle, and Captain Johnny in order to ensure that they remained “well & regularly Supplied with provision.” They spent the winter at Swan Creek, eating the beef, butter, flour, peas, pork, and rice that the British sent from Detroit via the Maumee River. When the Americans fixed on a time and date for a treaty with the Indians in June 1795, McKee and Elliott held “large Feasts, and Drunken parties daily in order to keep the Indians back from the treaty if possible.” They failed; the Indians went to meet the Americans, anyway. Narrative of Lassell, 16 October 1794, f. 92, vol. XXXVII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP; Sugden, Blue Jacket, 181; Thomas Hunt to Anthony Wayne, Fort Defiance, 9 June 1795, f. 57, vol. XLI, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP; Cayton, “‘Noble Actors’ upon ‘the Theatre of Honour,’” 238. 159 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 188.

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Miamis,” agreed that Blue Jacket spoke “in behalf of the whole,” Wayne took him at his word that they desired peace.160

Almost in the exact order of their earlier professed acceptance of American culinary imperialism, the Indians began asking the United States to provision them. In

October 1794 the Six Nations, including Cornplanter, arrived to meet Timothy Pickering; he expected that 1,500 Indians “must be fed here at least fifteen days; and then be amply

Supplied” for their return journey.161 In April 1795 the Potawatomis delivered up prisoners in a demonstration of goodwill, and asked for “something to eat, & not a little

Keg, but a big one.”162 In May the Delawares appeared at Fort Defiance “almost

Starved,” and requested not only beef and corn, but “a little Corn to plant,” or “seed

Corn.”163 And Blue Jacket appeared again, to relinquish his British stipend to earn the

Americans’ trust, and to promise to “Bring his Nation to Make a Village” near the

Americans, if they would “Supply them with Corn to plant.”164 These requests for food translated to more than Indians demonstrating their physical alimentary need—though they certainly suffered the pangs of hunger. The Delawares and the Shawnees finally promised to do what the Americans had been trying to convince them to do since the

160 Summary of Speeches Deliver’d by the Shawanoes & Delawars on the 8th, 9th, & 10th February 1795, f. 56, vol. XXIX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. Colin Calloway writes that in making peace, Blue Jacket overstepped his duties as a war chief and encroached on the responsibilities of the civil chiefs. This action angered many in his nation, and he had to work hard to convince the Shawnees to treat with Wayne at all. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America, 106. 161 Timothy Pickering to the Secretary of War, Kanandaigua, 15 October 1794, f. 204, reel 60, Timothy Pickering Papers, MHS. 162 Proceedings of a council held at Fort Knox by Capt. Pasteur with the Potawatomis, Fort Knox, 19 April 1795, f. 58, vol. XL, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 163 Thomas Hunt to Anthony Wayne, Fort Defiance, 9 May 1795, f. 104, vol. XL, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 164 John Hamtramck to Anthony Wayne, Fort Defiance, 7 May 1795, f. 98, vol. XL, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

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1780s: to stay in one place and plant corn. Clearly, it is possible that Native notions of husbandry remained unchanged, but what matters is that Americans interpreted their assurances as signs of peacefulness.

Americans responded with cautious enthusiasm, and sought to begin implementing the Plan of Civilization more broadly among the Western tribes. When the

Delawares surrendered prisoners, Wayne wrote to a major at Fort Defiance to give him permission to invite the Delawares “to plant in the Vicinity of Your post.”165 This land,

Wayne told the Delawares, was “the same ground” that they “used to occupy in the vicinity of Grand Glaize.”166 The corn Wayne sent to Fort Defiance, he specified, was

“for the purpose of planting.”167 Wayne sought to encourage Indians to grow grain, but in typical fashion he also tried to control where they settled. He never considered the potential trauma involved in returning to scorched villages. Or perhaps he did, and his choice of territory also served as a deliberate warning.

The Treaty of Greenville in the summer of 1795 demonstrated that although

Indians continued to use food diplomacy, their requests for food became the only recourse they still possessed. Over 1,130 Indians eventually assembled at Greenville, an imposing fort surrounded by beautiful natural meadows.168 Wayne’s food diplomacy started promisingly.169 In addressing the tribes who arrived early, Wayne promised them

165 Anthony Wayne to Major Thomas Hunt, Head Quarters, Greene Ville, 21 March 1795, f. 121, vol. XXIX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 166 Anthony Wayne to the Sachems & Chief Warriors of the Delawares at Swan Creek, Head Quarters, Greene Ville, 21 March 1795, f. 121, vol. XXIX, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 167 Anthony Wayne to James Hamtramck, Head Quarters, Greene Ville, 13 May 1795, f. 109, vol. XL, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 168 Cayton, “‘Noble Actors’ upon ‘the Theatre of Honour,’” 255. 169 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 206.

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“a little drink to wash the dust out of our throats...without however, passing the bounds of temperance and sobriety.”170 He wanted to ensure that everyone remained sober so that no Indians could later claim that Americans had taken land from them while they were under the influence of too much rum.

After more of the Indians arrived they made it clear that they expected to enjoy all the trappings of food diplomacy. “We expect to be treated as warriors,” said Le Gris, a chief of the Miamis. “You have told us we should share your provisions whilst we stayed with you...You have some things of which we have not yet had any.” The Indians, he asserted, “would like some Mutton & pork occasionally.”171 In depicting himself and his fellow men as warriors, Le Gris set himself on a level with Wayne, even though Wayne had defeated him. Because the Indians preferred pork, and because they saw the sheep in

Wayne’s camp, they too demanded their fair share of meat. The Indians implied that failure to comply with their requests would result in a failed treaty. The Sun, a

Potawatomi chief, complained, “we get but a small Allowance” of food. “We eat it in the morning and are hungry at night,” he said, indicating that Wayne was not dispensing enough of it. Finally, he warned, “we become weary & wish for home.”172

170 16 June 1795, Minutes of a treaty with the tribes of Indians called the Wyandots, Delawares, Shawanoes, Ottawas, Chipewas, Putawatimes, Miamis, Eel River, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias; begun at greene Ville on the 16th day of June, and ending on the 10th day of August 1795, f. 262, Indian Talks and Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 171 30 June 1795, Minutes of a treaty with the tribes of Indians called the Wyandots, Delawares, Shawanoes, Ottawas, Chipewas, Putawatimes, Miamis, Eel River, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias; begun at greene Ville on the 16th day of June, and ending on the 10th day of August 1795, f. 265, Indian Talks and Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 172 30 June 1795, Minutes of a treaty with the tribes of Indians called the Wyandots, Delawares, Shawanoes, Ottawas, Chipewas, Putawatimes, Miamis, Eel River, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias; begun at greene Ville on the 16th day of June, and ending on the 10th day of August 1795, f. 266, Indian Talks and Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

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Wayne handled the situation skillfully by bending on issues of etiquette while making it clear that he remained in charge. He singled out the Sun by noting that he

“alone complains of scarcity.” He told the Indians “to consult generally,” and to let him know if they “really [did] not receive enough.” Pork, he responded, was unobtainable, so the Indians could have none of it. Mutton, he said, “are for the Comfort of our Sick,” and on occasion, for the officers. Wayne acquiesced that sick Indians “shall most chearfully share” the sheep, and he would also “with pleasure” share a meal of mutton “with your

Chiefs.”173 When Blue Jacket and his cohort arrived, Wayne warned them, “my plate and my table are not very large,” but he hoped “to see all your Chiefs in season and in due rotation.”174 When Little Turtle complained that the cession the Americans demanded would “confine the hunting of our young men within limits too contracted,” Wayne ignored him.175 He was interested in making farmers out of Indians, not leaving them enough land for hunting. By relegating sheep to officers and sick men, depriving the

Indians of pork, and deciding when and how he would sup with the Indian chiefs, Wayne seized control of future food diplomacy, and thus future Indian-American relations.

173 30 June 1795, Minutes of a treaty with the tribes of Indians called the Wyandots, Delawares, Shawanoes, Ottawas, Chipewas, Putawatimes, Miamis, Eel River, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias; begun at greene Ville on the 16th day of June, and ending on the 10th day of August 1795, f. 266, Indian Talks and Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 174 23 July 1795, Minutes of a treaty with the tribes of Indians called the Wyandots, Delawares, Shawanoes, Ottawas, Chipewas, Putawatimes, Miamis, Eel River, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias; begun at greene Ville on the 16th day of June, and ending on the 10th day of August 1795, ff. 284-85, Indian Talks and Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 175 29 July 1795, Minutes of a treaty with the tribes of Indians called the Wyandots, Delawares, Shawanoes, Ottawas, Chipewas, Putawatimes, Miamis, Eel River, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias; begun at greene Ville on the 16th day of June, and ending on the 10th day of August 1795, f. 294, Indian Talks and Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

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On July 30th the Indians relinquished their claim to the Ohio.176 Sixty

Potawatomis died after the council, and although the Indians accused the Americans of poisoning their leaders, the British suspected that Native opponents of the treaty had poisoned those who acceded to its terms.177 Regardless, the battle was won: by

September Anthony Wayne anticipated “the pleasing prospect of eating my Christmas dinner at Waynesborough,” in Pennsylvania; his job was done.178

***

The history of the Western Confederacy War enables scholars to track the shift from Native food diplomacy with Britons to a new, less compromising American system.

Diplomatic efforts to establish Indians as husbandmen heralded important shifts in Native foodways. As scarcity and hunger forced the Senecas to give in to the Plan of

Civilization, American officials established a precedent of dictating the terms of their diplomacy. Although the Western Confederacy’s resistance to the plan, and their victual warfare against Anthony Wayne’s troops serves to accentuate the uncertainties about power struggles in the early 1790s, those Indians also eventually felt compelled to surrender. By 1795, Native food diplomacy became less of a symbolic way to broker power, and more of an ineffective posture.

In the 1780s the new United States sought to implement its Plan of Civilization among various Indian tribes. When American officials told Indians that men needed to plant corn and women had to spin and weave, they ignored longstanding gendered Native

176 Sugden, Blue Jacket, 205. 177 White, The Middle Ground, 494. 178 Anthony Wayne to Margaretta Atlee, Head Quarters, 12 September 1795, f. 112, vol. XLII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

286 habits of agricultural production. Nevertheless, for a time American officials enjoyed success with the Senecas and other members of the Iroquois. Their subsequent faith in the

Six Nations gave the Americans hope that they could also convert the Western

Confederacy. In the late 1780s and early 1790s, however, the Six Nations themselves showed less inclination to become the husbandmen that the United States envisioned. At the same time, the Western Confederacy refused the plan and readied for war. Although the Western tribes effectively used victual warfare to fight the Americans, their unity faltered, and finally dissolved, after the Battle of Fallen Timbers. British officials’ failures to provide food diplomacy, coupled with the Americans’ destruction of their crops and villages, put an end to the movement led by the Delawares, Miamis, and

Shawnees.

The months following the Treaty of Greenville ushered in a new era of restrictive food regulations as Americans sought to further curtail Indians’ freedom of choice regarding their foodways. Earlier that year Timothy Pickering became the second U.S.

Secretary of War. This was the man who, less than four years prior, had admitted his own ineptitude in matters of Indian food diplomacy, and the change did not bode well for

Native Americans living near and within the frontiers of the American states. Although

Pickering held the office for less than a year, his policies of anti-accommodation remained after his departure. In 1796 Pickering wrote to his successor, James McHenry, and suggested that American generosity had to end. “While the Indian war continued at the westward, and a British war was apprehended,” he explained, “the Government was unceasing in its endeavours to Secure the friendship of the Six Nations.” Treaties “were

287 held and liberal Supplies furnished.” “Now,” however, “circumstances are so changed as to render a restriction of Such Supplies both proper and practicable.”179

American officials would extend such sentiments to include Western Confederacy

Natives. Pickering encouraged McHenry to confine his budget within the annuity advanced to the Indians. From these funds, blacksmiths would receive money to forge ploughs and shoe horses, and officials would pay schoolmasters to teach and enforce the art of American-style husbandry. “Provisions and cloathing,” Pickering cautioned, should be “issued very Sparingly.” Although he admitted that no one would be able to enact these changes immediately, the Americans could “curtail” the supplies “more and more, until the expenditures come nearly to the fixed annuity.”180

And yet Natives, especially the remnants of the Western Confederacy, continued to travel and move in ways that allowed them to avoid American culinary imperialism. A month after the Treaty of Greenville, the Delawares called one official into council and informed him of their imminent departure. They “were sensible how much they had cost us for provision,” he said. The man enthusiastically wrote that their exit would “save us

10,000 Rations per month.”181 He did not consider the possibility that the Delawares’ offer to save the Americans the expense of rations was really a foil. Perhaps what the

Delawares really wanted was to disguise the fact that they were leaving to avoid

179 Timothy Pickering to James McHenry, Philadelphia, 10 March 1796, f. 68, reel 2, James McHenry Papers, LOC. 180 Timothy Pickering to James McHenry, Philadelphia, 10 March 1796, f. 68, , reel 2, James McHenry Papers, LOC 181 James Hamtramck to Anthony Wayne, Fort Wayne, 24 September 1795, f. 125, vol. XLII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP.

288 becoming sedentary farmers tied to the area around Fort Defiance; for the time being,

Indians could remain relatively mobile.

The Western Confederacy left behind a legacy. Indians’ abilities to obtain food and engage in victual warfare became partially responsible for the rise of the pan-Indian movements of the mid-1800s. Other historians have correctly pointed out that the

Shawnee Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, the leaders of this movement, served as mere players in a long history of pan-Indian involvement. This history extends to

Native concerns about eating and diet.182 Indians had resisted American imperialism through foodways before the colonists officially became American, and Indians’ methods of fighting back became some of the first notably well-organized instances of victual warfare in the postwar period.

Despite the definitive defeat of the Western Confederacy, Southern Natives also continued to battle the implementation of the Plan of Civilization. They too struggled against the increasingly coercive food system that American officials envisioned. In the intervening years between the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 and the rise of Prophetstown,

Cherokees and Creeks would make one last attempt to use a food diplomacy of their own.

182 In the early 1760s the Delaware prophet Neolin promoted a program built on avoiding trade and connections with white people. He also proposed the idea of fasting as a way of combating disease epidemics. When rumors of Pontiac’s War began circulating at the close of the Seven Years’ War, people heard that Pontiac planned on destroying cattle and corn, cutting off supplies, and starving men at British forts. Spero, “‘Stout, Bold, Cunning, and the greatest Travellers in America’: The Colonial Shawnee Diaspora,” 380, 382, 406-07; Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 33, 39.

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Chapter 6: “A denial of bread to many hungry families”: the State- Federal Battle in Postwar Creek and Cherokee Country

In the 1790s and 1800s, U.S. Indian commissioners and Southern state commissioners fought it out for Indian allegiance. By the mid-1790s Indian commissioners acting on the part of Congress seemed to hold the upper hand, but enduring periods of peace remained elusive. Especially after Anthony Wayne’s triumph over the Western Confederacy in 1795, it became clear that Americans planned to attempt to institute the Plan of Civilization among Creek and Cherokee towns. The efforts of U.S. commissioner Benjamin Hawkins reveal the tension between Americans’ attempts to convince the Indians to implement their ideas about husbandry, but so too do they illustrate Indians’ expectations that U.S. officials would continue to practice generous food diplomacy.

Foodways clarify late-eighteenth-century changes in diplomacy, gender relations, types of violence, and intra- and intertribal affairs. Creek and Cherokee women remained resistant to American efforts to turn them into spinners and weavers, but they also requested food from U.S. officials more frequently and in more official capacities than in years prior. Their tribes experienced greater factionalism and strife in these years as

American-allied Old Order and anti-American New Order factions fought it out with each other—sometimes quite literally. The tribal divisions of the 1780s caused still greater violence within Indian villages, and continued to splash blood over the frontiers of North

Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia.

By the early 1800s the times when non-Natives and Indians sat down to eat together resulted in some key moments of violence. The table, a physical and

290 metaphorical place for breaking bread and brokering peace, transformed into a site of conflict. Although some of these incidents demonstrated the continuing possibility for peace between Southerners and Indians, others showed how American food diplomacy during the time of the Early Republic changed from its previous iterations. It became less flexible, more restrictive of Indians’ mobility, and increasingly incapable of ensuring peace. By the turn of the century, food became a means by which U.S. officials controlled the actions of progressively powerless Natives.

***

The 1790s, which began promisingly with the Treaty of New York between

Alexander McGillivray and the Creeks on one side, and the United States on the other, witnessed a period of increased violence. In American eyes the treaty seemed successful:

27 Indians came to New York at the express invitation of President George Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox. McGillivray’s faction of Creeks, who had, in the past, refused to treat with the Americans, agreed to deliver prisoners, “white inhabitants or negroes” alike. The Creeks also conceded that if they failed to return the prisoners and runaways before June of the following year, Georgia could send three men after them.

This stipulation differentiated the Treaty of New York from previous attempts at peace because it provided for an alternative method for Americans to reclaim slaves without prompting Indian retaliations.

The treaty opened the way for the United States to make an offer to instruct New

Order Creeks in the methods of their idealized version of husbandry. This meeting occurred almost at the same time that Americans officials such as Timothy Pickering

291 sought to invite Iroquois and Western Confederacy Indians to Philadelphia in order to make similar proposals that only thinly disguised their desires to acquire Native lands. At the Treaty of New York, the Americans also made their customary promises. “No citizen or inhabitant of the United States shall attempt to hunt or destroy the game on the Creek lands,” the treaty stated.1 This point would hypothetically prevent whites from making incursions into the frontiers and committing acts of victual warfare that would interfere with Creeks’ abilities to hunt.

In return for good behavior the U.S. proposed to “furnish gratuitously...useful domestic animals, and implements of husbandry,” so that “the Creek nation may be led to a greater degree of civilization, and to become herdsmen and cultivators.”2 By promising domesticated animals perhaps the United States hoped to prevent Indians from stealing those that belonged to white Americans; by giving the Creeks tools for farming, they wished to encourage them to assimilate, to become farmers, to raise cattle and horses, and to desist from hunting. Like the Shawnees, Delawares, and Miamis, the Creeks approached the offer with skepticism, but like the Senecas, they eventually accepted it.

Given the fact that at this point the Creeks retained room to maneuver, some men made requests for extra concessions. McGillivray covertly asked for and received a spot as a brigadier general in the United States army, as well as the right to import goods through Pensacola, Florida, without paying taxes on those goods.3 Other proponents of the New Order doubtless appreciated the windfall of domesticated animals; calves and

1 Treaty of New York, 7 August 1790, 224-32, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH. 2 Treaty of New York, 7 August 1790, 224-32, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH. 3 Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 196.

292 cows cost approximately ten dollars, and they could sell beef steers at two and a half dollars per year for every year the animal had lived. Bacon sold for around thirty cents per pound.4

Yet after 1790 the state of Indian-American relations deteriorated. Alexander

McGillivray died in 1793, and his prior disagreements with the Tallassee King blossomed into greater intra-Creek conflict.5 Crop failures throughout the South engendered additional clashes, and the situation remained tense because United States commissioners’ efforts to encourage husbandry generally floundered. At the same time,

Indians’ inabilities to feed themselves led Indian commissioners to offer new compromises regarding food gifts and diplomacy because they worried that Native violence threatened American security. This was no powerful United States, but rather an inchoate, disjointed nation. These security fears were not worries about an invasion from abroad, but rather trepidations about the fact that Indians and white inhabitants increasingly shared territory; insofar as Indian affairs were concerned, the foreign and the domestic became inextricably intertwined.

Throughout this decade, as the U.S. and the Southern states sparred for the loyalty of the Southern Indians, the Cherokees’ and Creeks’ interactions with these separate entities made the Indians much more fluent in the language of food diplomacy. In the

1790s American Indian commissioners felt compelled to practice generous food

4 Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 161. 5 Saunt, A New Order of Things, 81.

293 diplomacy with Senecas in the North, even as they tried to implement the more restrictive

Plan of Civilization. The Southern situation proved much the same in this regard.6

In 1791, 1792, and 1794, crop failures raged throughout the Southern nations, and

U.S. officials recognized the necessity of offering food aid to Natives. In 1791 James

Seagrove, U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs, sent a talk to the Creek nation and acknowledged “the failure of your Crops of Corn.”7 The following year he wrote to

Henry Knox and informed him that once again, “the unfortunate people of the Creek nation must perish as their crops of Corn are nearly destroyed by the drought.”8 Drought conditions prevailed among the Cherokees as well. In 1794, a group of Cherokees comprised of “three old Fellows and a Squaw” grew so famished—“almost starv’d with hunger”—that they approached Woffort Fort and begged for food.9 Drought wrought crop failure, and Indians who had recently begun to farm more and hunt less proved even more susceptible to food shortages.

American officials believed that in order to prevent Indians from lapsing back to a state of nomadic hunting—and more importantly, to keep them from practicing victual warfare—they would need to provide food. U.S. commissioners demonstrated their awareness of the causes of Indians’ hostility, the necessity of continuing food diplomacy, and the need to control white traders’ circulation through Indians’ territories. They feared

6 Theda Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 110-11. 7 [James Seagrove] to the Kings & Chiefs of the Cussetas & Cowettas with all other Chiefs of the Creek Nation, St. Mary’s in Georgia, 6 October 1791, 221, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, film 455, DLAR. 8 James Seagrove to [Henry Knox], Rock Landing on Oconee, 5 July 1792, 172, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 9 Joseph Blackwell to George Mathews, Woffort Fort, 7 June 1794, 15, Cherokee Indian Letters, Talks and Treaties, 1786-1838, Transcripts, GDAH.

294 that famine and instability in Indian towns would lead to Natives making incursions onto white lands for crops and cattle, thus making violence inevitable.

American officials’ awareness of Indian-American antagonism mimicked the cognizance of British officials in the prewar years. U.S. commissioner Benjamin

Hawkins eloquently delineated the roots of Indians’ grievances. In a letter to George

Washington, he explained that during the Revolution the Indians remained “possessors of the soil on which they lived.” After “the close of the war,” Hawkins continued, the

Americans deliberately forgot “altogether the rights of the Indians. They were treated as tenants at will, we seized on their lands, and made division of the same.” “This doctrine,” he suggested, “might be expected would be disliked by the independent tribes, it was so, and complained of by them.” American land policy, he concluded, was “the source of their hostility.”10

At the time of his description of Indian affairs, Hawkins argued that the

Americans had shown no great capacity to mollify Natives diplomatically. Whereas colonists had vowed to furnish the Indians with “such comforts as they had been accustomed to receive” from Britain, American inhabitants had yet to make good on those promises.11 Especially in the South, where supplies remained scarce, men like

Hawkins knew how difficult it had proved to exercise effective diplomacy. These failings became particularly problematic in an age when, by certain American dictums, Indians required more land for “civilized” farming. Hawkins’s accurate interpretation of the state

10 Benjamin Hawkins to [George Washington], Senate Chamber, 10 February 1792, 1790-1794, folder 9, Hawkins Family Papers, Collection 322, Series 1.1, SHC. 11 Benjamin Hawkins to [George Washington], Senate Chamber, 10 February 1792, 1790-1794, folder 9, Hawkins Family Papers, Collection 322, Series 1.1, SHC.

295 of Indian affairs in the 1790s seemed to bode well for the future of Indian-American relations.

United States officials knew that they needed to practice diplomacy as a counter against the government’s failure to control white traders and land-grabbers on the frontiers. The actions of such men drew attention to divisions between the American states, as well as to the continuing allure of other imperial powers.12 In May of 1792

James Seagrove spoke to the Creek Indians assembled in Georgia about a conniving trader named William Augustus Bowles.13 Bowles was a man of shifting loyalties, who, according to Alexander McGillivray, tried to convince the Creeks to renounce the Treaty of New York, “as the British were Sending Supplies to Support the Nation in a War with the United States.”14 Seagrove gently berated the Creeks for trusting Bowles. He hoped that, “in future they [would] only listen” to him or “their beloved Man General

McGillivray.”15 At the same time, Secretary of War Henry Knox decided that the time had come for Seagrove to take up residence among the Creek nation, “at least for a considerable portion of the year,” to counteract dissension with “Goods, Corn, and

12 In accordance with the Treaty of New York’s terms, the U.S. government had established the Factory System in order to establish trading houses (otherwise known as factories) on the frontiers of Creek territories. Unfortunately the system was never particularly successful. Ethridge, Creek Country, 129. 13 Bowles was a Maryland-born American who began trading with the Creeks and Seminoles in Spanish Florida in 1788 in an effort to secure the trade for a British firm in the Bahamas. Saunt, A New Order of Things, 86-88. 14 Alexander McGillivray to [Henry Knox], Upper Creek Nation, 18 May 1792, 230-31, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 15 A Talk delivered by James Seagrove Esquire Commissioners of Indian affairs, from the President of the United States, to the Kings, Chiefs, Headmen and Warriors of the Creek Nations, Assembled at the Rock Landing on the Oconee river in the State of Georgia, 18 May 1792, 148-51, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR.

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Money,” and to ensure that Creek loyalties remained stable.16 American diplomacy thus continued to depend upon preventing other entities from practicing diplomacy, and to do a good job of practicing it themselves.

Food diplomacy was only one of many concessions that Americans offered to

Indians as a means of maintaining stability, but its unique nature as a barometer of power relations underscores the extent to which Americans felt compelled to practice it. The almost untenable nature of Indian affairs and the rise of hostilities due to crop scarcities meant that the U.S. needed to engage in food diplomacy, or else take part in a costly war.

Although the cost of feeding Indians would prove almost prohibitive, Seagrove explained that, given “our Critical situation at this juncture,” he had “been obliged to give way to their craving dispositions” because he “thought it would be bad policy to fall out with those people, and let them go home discontented on that account.” “There is no middle road with these people,” he warned. “So soon as the United States decline purchasing their friendship as above; I would recommend by all means that they have a force ready to oppose them in the field.”17 During this time of uncertainty, Indian agents remained aware that failed food diplomacy led to violence.

At the same time that men like Seagrove feared an Indian war, one can also see

American food diplomacy becoming less compromising. The U.S. government expressed its determination that officials who brokered food diplomacy in the 1790s would do so by employing stricter rules and caveats. “Out of his great humanity & kindness toward your

16 [Henry Knox] to James Seagrove, 31 August 1792, 93, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 17 Extract of a letter from James Seagrove to [Henry Knox], Rock Landing on the Oconee, 27 July 1792, 204, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR.

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Nation,” wrote Seagrove to the Creeks in 1791, President Washington had “ordered from

Philadelphia a very large supply of Corn sufficient to support your whole nation until another year.” Seagrove made sure to let the Creeks know that their needs posed an imposition to the United States, and that only out of great benevolence did the president deign to assist them. Then he informed them that in order to obtain the corn, the Creeks would have to come to him. Once met, they would “make arrangements for distributing the provision...Which your people can receive at any time afterwards.”18 Seagrove let them know that only by appearing (and by inference, by showing loyalty) would Natives learn what to do to get their corn at a future date.

Seagrove also made it clear that this meeting was not a treaty. Attendees could expect no provisions at the first meeting, and future presents of provisions depended on the Indians’ adequate usage of American-style farm tools. “I have to desire that no greater number than what I have mentioned may attend at our meeting” wrote Seagrove,

“as a croud of people only prevent business being done.”19 Seagrove would not bring provisions to the gathering, and so, he implied, hungry mouths did not need to appear. He maintained the same policy the following year, when he informed McGillivray that he had received “a very considerable Supply of Goods and also a Number of Ploughs & other implements of husbandry,” but that he would wait to give them out to the Creeks

18 [James Seagrove] to the Kings & Chiefs of the Cussetas & Cowettas with all other Chiefs of the Creek Nation, St. Mary’s in Georgia, 6 October 1791, 221, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 19 [James Seagrove] to the Kings & Chiefs of the Cussetas & Cowettas with all other Chiefs of the Creek Nation, St. Mary’s in Georgia, 6 October 1791, reel 1, 221, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR.

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“until I see and consult you.”20 The Americans picked McGillivray as a likely disseminator of their Plan of Civilization, not knowing that the end of his tenure drew near.

At least until the mid-1790s, however, the fragile position of the United States lent Southern Indians the ability to use food to maintain power. Indians negotiated for more food and goods at treaties and key meetings with Indian commissioners; they complained about domesticated animals encroaching on their lands; and when these tactics failed, they engaged in victual warfare by stealing edible goods from white inhabitants.21 This flexibility meant that formerly British-allied Natives could begin to seek terms with the Americans; they could enjoy the benefits of food diplomacy, but could also fall back on victual warfare when necessary.

A few events occasioned Indians’ apparent inclination to treat with the

Americans. Clearly, food scarcities made it necessary to seek out alternate sources of sustenance. At the same time, factors beyond foodways also contributed to this shift. In

1788, Old Tassel, a leader of the Cherokees who pushed for neutrality during the

Revolution, was murdered. His death led to a brief Cherokee reunion—which, in turn, led to the Chickamaugas’ peaceful attendance at the 1791 Treaty of Holston. Dragging

Canoe’s death in 1792 also dampened Chickamauga resistance.22

20 [James Seagrove to Alexander McGillivray], St. Mary’s, 8 October 1792, , reel 1, 226-7, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 21 On violence in Georgia and Tennessee specifically see Kathryn E. Holland Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 57, no. 4 (November 1991), 621. 22 Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 96.

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In the 1790s Indians frequently managed to increase the amount of food supplies they received from American commissioners. No one, “who is not an Eyewitness to the enormous eating of Indians can have an Idea of it,” wrote James Seagrove in his preparations for a treaty. Although “the quantity of provisions & liquor may seem great,” he expressed his intent to supply such edible presents in full.23 When he invited the

Creeks to Georgia in 1791, he tried to limit them to essentially military rations: “a pound of Beef [per] Man each day, but found it would not do.” The Indians “got out of all tempter with that mode, and threatened to leave me, if I would not give them their belly’s full.”24 Natives could still ask for and receive food on their terms—in this case, by the bellyful.25

Natives also played off of Americans’ hopes that Indians would become husbandmen. In January of 1792 a group of Chickamauga Cherokees “surprized” Henry

Knox “with a vizit.”26 They reminded him of the terms of the 1791 Treaty of Holston, and said they had come to claim “the annual allowance of Goods.” The Cherokees wanted more than goods however; they also requested “some ploughs and othe[r]

23 Extract of a letter from James Seagrove to [Henry Knox], Rock Landing on the Oconee, 27 July 1792, 204, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 24 Extract of a letter from James Seagrove to [Henry Knox], Rock Landing on the Oconee, 27 July 1792, 204, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 25 Such measurements recall the Natives who, in James Merrell’s depiction of the eighteenth century, demanded that traders allocate rum by the mouthful. James H. Merrell, “‘The Customes of Our Countrey’: Indians and Colonists in Early America,” in Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 133. 26 The Bloody Fellow, King Fisher, the Northward, the Disturber, the Prince, and George Miller are the men listed in the records.

300 implements of husbandry, as mentioned in the treaty.”27 The Chickamaugas’ visit certainly must have startled Knox, given their previous British loyalties—but Dragging

Canoe’s death had changed the face of affairs. By asking for ploughs, the Indians indicated that they might be willing to blend Cherokee ways of life together with

American ones. Or at least, they succeeded in convincing Knox as much, because he sent them home with the articles they sought.

Indians further encouraged U.S. officials to believe that they would adopt the Plan of Civilization by indicating that they punished other Natives who practiced victual warfare against American inhabitants. On the day in 1794 when those four Indians showed up starving at Fort Woffort and begged for food, they informed the soldiers about a new Indian rule that dictated “that every Indian that stole a Horse from the White

People should be immediately kill’d and the Horse sent back.” Two of the Indians who stole horses “had already died by the Tomahawk, and a third had to fly to the Shawanees for shelter.”28 In order to receive food supplies, Indians demonstrated that they disciplined their own for stealing animals. At the same time, however, the Cherokees obviously used the stolen animals as leverage: by stealing them, they equipped themselves with additional bargaining tools when necessity forced them to request comestibles.

When Natives found cause for complaint they asked U.S. commissioners to intervene, much as they turned to British officials before the Revolution. Domesticated

27 [Henry Knox] to William Blount, 31 January 1792, 2-3, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 28 Joseph Blackwell to George Mathews, Woffort Fort, 7 June 1794, 15, Cherokee Indian Letters, Talks and Treaties, 1786-1838, GDAH.

301 animals continued to provide a key sticking point. Americans’ hogs and cattle had wandered onto Indians’ lands since the colonial period, but they became especially aggravating when land contests flared. In 1795, for example, Seagrove wrote that the

Creeks “complain loudly that a number of our people are daily crossing the Oconee and driving their stocks of cattle & hoggs on the Indian Lands, under pretence of hunting their stocks.” Their actions “constantly disturb[ed] their young people, who are peaceable in their hunting grounds.”29 Though the nonbelligerent nature of young warriors in the

Creek nation remained dubious, given Creek chiefs’ previous remonstrations about being unable to control their young men, domesticated animals did indeed cause problems; they wandered onto Creek and Cherokee lands, destroyed their crops, and ate the grass meant for Natives’ cattle and horses.

Indians clearly recognized the value of such animals because they continued to commit victual warfare themselves; they purloined animals to use them, and to infuriate

American land-grabbers. In June 1792 Seagrove reported that Indians on the southwest frontier of Georgia stole inhabitants’ “horses and Cattle.” Seagrove put salve on the situation by locating the stolen animals, “and restoring them to the Owners.” He forbade the Indians from stealing again, but also advised the Georgians “not to use harsh measures on such occasions lest they should involve their Country in a war.”30 Yet various Indian factions continued to steal animals and to engage in violence. In April

1793 approximately 25 Indians appeared near the Altamaha River “and drove off all the

29 George Mathews to Jared Irwin, 28 November 1795, Governor’s Letter Book of George Walton, Governor, August 20, 1795-January 17, 1796, and James Jackson, Governor, January 24 1798-January 3, 1799, GDAH. 30 James Seagrove to [Henry Knox], St. Mary’s, 14 June 1792, 160, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR.

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Horses Cattle & Hogs.” In addition, they “plundered some houses & took some

Negroes,” all while “thretening the Inhabitants.”31 In this instance Indians not only took animals for their own uses: they also robbed houses for the goods and provisions contained therein. Perhaps they also stole the hogs, cattle, horses, and slaves to use as bargaining tools in future exchanges. Even as he returned stolen property to Americans,

James Seagrove indicated his fear that American inhabitants would turn an already fraught situation into an irreversible outbreak of bloodshed. “A Stop must be put to the practice” of thieving, “or peace cannot be preserved,” he worried.32

The peaceful declarations that formerly British-allied Indians made proved untrustworthy. In the fall of 1792—the second year in a row that drought and crop failure riddled the South—reports of Indian war reached South Carolina and Georgia. In

September Governor William Blount of Georgia wrote, “that the Five lower towns of the

Cherokees have declared War against the United States.” He estimated their number at

300.33 By October that number reportedly swelled to “three to five hundred warriors,” augmented “by a number of individuals of the upper Creeks.” Together, “their principal object appears to be the Settlements on Cumberland river.” The Cherokees, led by John

Watts, or Young Tassel, new leader of the Chickamaugas, had indeed declared war against the United States, along with “one hundred Banditti Creeks.” No “assembly of

31 John Houstoun to [Edward Telfair], Savannah, 18 March 1793, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, Part 1, GDAH. 32 James Seagrove to [Henry Knox], St. Mary’s, 14 June 1792, 160, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 33 William Blount to [Henry Knox], 11 September 1792, 311, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR.

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Chiefs, or of any particular towns” officially approved of their attack plans.34 The

Indians’ decisions to attack indicated their growing discontent with the new United

States, their confidence that they could rise against them, and—given the appearance of the Shawnees—their wishes to join the burgeoning Western Confederacy.

By attacking Georgia the Chickamaugas declared their alliance with the Western

Confederacy. William Blount attributed these Cherokees’ actions to “their intercourse with the Creeks and Shawanese since the defeat of [American] General [Arthur] St.

Clair” in 1791, the machinations of William Augustus Bowles, and “perhaps to the death of the Dragging Canoe,” former leader of the Chickamaugas.35 Yet Cherokee and Creek ties to the Western Confederacy stretched even further. Chickamauga Cherokees went to

Detroit in 1783 to break bread in Shawnee villages before requesting assistance from the

British. When the Shawnees sent the Chickamaugas a war hatchet in 1784, the Cherokees responded positively.36 They went to the pan-Indian meeting of the United Indian Nations in 1786.37 The Chickamaugas were also present at the pan-Indian September 1792 meeting at the Glaize. In November 1792 Cherokees, Creeks, and Shawnees struck

Buchanan’s Station in Georgia. John Watts and the Chickamaugas attacked—and

34 [Henry Knox] to [Charles Pinckney], 27 October 1792, 104-5, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. Later, Knox “had the pleasure to receive a letter” from the Bloody Fellow and the Glass (also Chickamaugas), informing him that “with the assistance of John Watts and other Head Men,” they “prevailed with the party that were collected for War to disperse and go peaceably to their hunting.” This report was false. Henry Knox to Anthony Wayne, War Department, 12 October 1792, f. 52, vol. XXII, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 35 Governor Blount to [Henry Knox], Knoxville, 20 March 1792, 247, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 36 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 93. 37 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 95; Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 235-36.

304 received serious wounds. The Indians met defeat.38 The Cherokees’ defeat at Buchanan’s

Station, the Western Confederacy’s loss at Fallen Timbers, and the disaster the

Chickamaugas encountered when they met the Americans in September 1794 quenched unified Native resistance.39 The friction that drought and starving conditions occasioned also contributed to these major upheavals.

After the overthrow of the Western Confederacy, the Americans sought to make peace with all remaining hostile tribes. American general Anthony Wayne enjoyed success with the Cherokees in August 1795 after sending them a message that he had

“signed and exchanged, Articles of a permanent peace” with the Western Confederacy.

He convinced a portion of them to “quit this side of the Ohio forever,” where his troops were gathered, and “return to their own Country.”40 Among the Creeks, by contrast, disagreements between federal and state commissioners continued to muddy efforts to make peace. The 1790 Treaty of New York supposedly established the federal government as the sole entity capable of signing treaties with Indians.41 This idea may have been true in theory, but the Georgians had not yet received the message.

***

After the Battle of Fallen Timbers, Southern Indian commissioners clashed with federal Indian agents over the best ways to practice diplomacy with Natives. Nowhere did this conflict between the state and the federal become more evident than at the 1796

38 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 110. 39 Dowd, A Spirited Resistance, 103, 112. 40 Anthony Wayne to the Cherokees, now settled on the Head Waters of Sciota, 3 August 1795, f. 314, Indian Treaties, 1778-1795, Anthony Wayne Papers, HSP. 41 Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 32.

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Treaty of Colerain, between U.S. commissioners, Georgia commissioners, and Creek

Indians, each group of which possessed independent goals and motivations. This clash naturally played out through the language of food diplomacy. By the end of the treaty it became clear that Georgians’ metaphorical food diplomacy could not succeed against the diplomacy offered by the U.S. government.

In an effort to broker peace in the midst of the Georgians’ unscrupulous dealings in the Yazoo Land Fraud, in the spring of 1796 the United States and Georgia acted together to call the Creeks to a treaty at Colerain, on the St. Marys River.42 In April

James Seagrove, by now the Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the Creek nation, sent a talk to the Upper Creeks, Lower Creeks, and Seminoles that requested their attendance.

He used the most recent iteration of restrictive U.S. food diplomacy to offer the promise of subsistence. “Plenty of every thing that is good will be provided,” he wrote, but only for “The principal men of every Town.” Seagrove made it clear that only the most important men from each village could expect provisions. He employed his knowledge of

Creek foodways to justify this decision: the season was “a time of the year when you seldom go a hunting,” so the men could “leave your Women and young people to make your Corn &c. whilst you are securing Peace and Happiness.”43 Seagrove anticipated

Indians’ excuses for not coming to the treaty and preempted them, and he tried to limit attendance. Yet by instructing the women to stay home and plant, Seagrove implicitly

42 For more on the Yazoo Sale, see Joel W. Martin, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees’ Struggle for a New World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 91; Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, 28, 46. 43 A talk from James Seagrove to the Creek Chiefs, submitted to Governor Irwin, folder, “Ca. 1796,” box 1807, Governor – Executive Dept. – Governor’s Subject Files – 1781-1802, GDAH. This talk is also reproduced in A talk from James Seagrove to the Kings, Chiefs, Headmen & Warriors of the Upper and Lower Creeks, Simanolias, and all other Tribes living in the Creek Land, [9 April 1796], 472, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, 1705-1839, Part 2, Transcripts, GDAH.

306 acknowledged the Americans’ failure to convert women to weavers and men to husbandmen. He dictated terms for treating, but possessed less clout than he admitted.

Despite the fact that officials planned the treaty as a joint effort between the U.S. and Georgia, the Georgia commissioners—James Hendricks, James Jackson, and James

Simms—in typical fashion, began making plans to outdo the United States commissioners, and to undermine their diplomacy. George Clymer, Benjamin Hawkins, and Andrew Pickens, who joined Seagrove, made up the group speaking on behalf of the

U.S. government.

The Georgia commissioners made immediate plans to implement their own diplomacy. They kept a journal from the time they began preparing for the treaty to its unfortunate conclusion, and they sent periodic reports to the governor, Jared Irwin. When they began to make ready, they asked Irwin, “Whether the Goods necessary for the

Treaty should be immediately procured,” thus acknowledging the need for trade goods as well as food gifts.44 They demonstrated their willingness to extend their resources to the fullest to gain an upper hand over the United States. In contrast with Seagrove’s invitation to the chiefs and headmen only, the commissioners expected 7,000 Indians to attend the treaty.45 This information did not seem to bother them, even though Georgia bore the responsibility for half the costs of treaty provisions.46 They informed Irwin that the contractor “came for more provisions in consequence of the increased number of

44 James Hendricks, James Jackson, and James Simms to Jared Irwin, Louisville, 24 April 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, MS 280, GHS. 45 James Hendricks to Jared Irwin, Savannah, 18 May 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. 46 James McHenry to Governor Jared Irwin, War Office, 3 March 1796, Pickens Papers, PC 39, HL.

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Indians.”47 They even examined “various accounts of the quantity of Beef an Indian would devour.” After learning “that from five to seven pounds were daily given them,” they figured that each Indian probably ate “three common Rations” and “wasted or jerked” the remainder to bring home. The state commissioners wanted to accommodate all of these nuances in Creek eating habits; no provisions seemed too costly to put

Natives in good humor—though luckily for Southern budgets, the Indians’ numbers would prove closer to 430 than to 7,000.48 Still, such attendance demonstrates that at the start of the treaty, Creeks ignored U.S. commissioners’ instructions to leave their women and children at home.

Georgia’s commissioners began to clash with the United States commissioners when the U.S. commissioners indicated that they would limit the Georgians’ access to the

Creeks at the treaty. On May 31 James Hendricks sent an infuriated letter to the U.S. commissioners, referring to the orders that Hawkins and Clymer posted on the garrison gates the previous day. Hawkins, Clymer, and Pickens stipulated that no man could speak to the Creeks without a permit issued by one of them. This particular point irked the

Georgians, who were quick to argue that “the ground the Treaty is to be held on, is within the limits and under the actual jurisdiction of the State of Georgia.”49 Hawkins replied by using Georgia’s military guard as an example. Although the guard was “authorized by the

47 James Hendricks to Jared Irwin, Savannah, 18 May 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. 48 In the middle of June the Georgia commissioners recorded “Twenty two Kings, seventy five principal Chiefs, and 150 Warriors present,” spread out among 20 different towns, but a return by James Seagrove reveals that the Georgia commissioners did not include the 126 young men, 31 women, and 29 children also present. 7 June 1796; 17 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS; James Seagrove, A Return of Creek Indians at Colerain, 14 June 1796, EA 517, Papers of William Eaton, 1792-1829, EA 1-555, FAC 385-, HL. 49 James Hendricks to the Commissioners of the United States, Coleraine, 31 May 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, 280, GHS.

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Governor of Georgia,” his authority, “however competent...must be superacted when here.”50 And so the two entities began to dance over the question of whether state or federal power would triumph at the treaty.

The U.S. commissioners tried to prevent any instances of Georgian trade or food diplomacy. One regulation stipulated that “No Citizen is to be permitted to sell, or furnish by gift, any spiritous Liquors to the Indians, or to have any Commercial Traffic with them.”51 Forbidding the sale of alcohol made sense, because almost everyone knew that

Indians complained of lands taken unfairly from them after unscrupulous traders plied them with alcohol. Telling the Georgians that no citizen could trade with the Indians, however, effectively gave the U.S. commissioners a trade monopoly with the Creeks. By these actions, they circumscribed the Georgia commissioners’ opportunities to dole out trade goods and provisions, as well as their abilities to meet privately with the Indians.

The American officials may have implemented such rules as a way to show the Creeks that they remained more powerful than state agents.

Although the Georgians arrived at Colerain well-prepared to feed the Creeks, they came to the treaty with the goal of asking for serious concessions from the Indians— which is perhaps why the U.S. commissioners tried to limit their power. Before the treaty began the Georgia commissioners repeatedly asked Governor Irwin for accurate lists of the slaves, cattle, hogs, and horses taken from all the counties in Georgia, before and after the Treaty of New York. They intended to ask the Creeks to return everything. They

50 Benjamin Hawkins, George Clymer, and Andrew Pickens to the Commissioners of the State of Georgia, Coleraine, 1 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. 51 Benjamin Hawkins and George Clymer to [James Hendricks, James Jackson, and James Simms], 26 May 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS.

309 hoped that their extensive inventory would forestall Creeks’ claims that they were unsure about the location of a particular person or domesticated animal.52 In asking to review and correct the Georgians’ speeches to the Creeks before they delivered them—speeches that chastised the Indians for not returning “the prisoners and property, such as Negroes,

Horses, Cattle &c”—the U.S. commissioners anticipated the substance of these demands.53

In the draft of their talk, the Georgians hinted that a land shortage would result in starvation throughout their state, and tried to earn the Creeks’ sympathy before demanding a land cession from them. “We have not land enough, to raise corn for all our people,” the commissioners baldly stated. “The Nation which has fewest people & most land,” they reasoned, “ought to part with a little of it, to the other nation at a reasonable price.” In other words, the Georgians were running out of land for farming, whereas the

Creeks in their estimation still possessed far more than they needed to support their hunting. The Georgians suggested that in this situation, the Creeks should offer land to

Georgia as a matter of politeness, and because they could sympathize with issues of dearth.

Then, the Georgia commissioners sought to appeal to previous forms of food diplomacy. “No Red man would refuse a white man something to eat, if he came hungry to his Cabin,” they argued, “and yet a refusal of this land, will be like a denial of bread to

52 See, for example, James Hendricks, James Jackson, and James Simms to Jared Irwin, Louisville, 24 April 1796; James Hendricks to Jared Irwin, Savannah, 18 May 1796; James Hendricks to Jared Irwin, Savannah, 24 May 1796, all in Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. 53 18 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS.

310 many hungry families, who want to raise corn on it, to feed themselves.”54 In their minds, this reasoning justified their demands that the Creeks return the “Eighty nine

Negroes...Eight Hundred and twenty five Horses, Eleven Hundred fifty five head of

Cattle, [and] four hundred & ninety Hogs” meticulously counted before the treaty began.55 Hendricks, Jackson, and Simms concluded by reminding the Creeks of the goods they had brought with them, which would “be of more value to you, than the profits of many years hunts, on the lands we wish to get from you.”56

This speech blended American and Native ideas about food diplomacy in curious and revealing ways. The Georgia commissioners, like Indians during and after the

Revolution, complained that shrinking lands would interfere with their abilities to grow grain; they remembered the times when Indians had offered food to Americans; and they voiced their desires to feed themselves in the future. At the same time, the talk also contained components of American food diplomacy in that it relied on figurative language (“like a denial of bread”); it sought to convert Indians from their hunting state; and it demanded that the Creeks return the spoils that they had won through acts of victual warfare. Given the ineffectiveness of metaphorical food diplomacy during the previous decade, the odds were stacked against the Georgians’ chances of success.

The United States commissioners calculatingly approved the Georgians’ talk. The only portion Benjamin Hawkins rejected outright was Georgia’s definition of slaves,

54 18 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. For an earlier example of the British using a similar metaphor in 1765, see Martin, Sacred Revolt, 64-65. 55 18 June 1796, 18 June 1796, 73, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, MS 280, GHS. 56 18 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, MS 280, GHS.

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“which he said & the other Commissioners acceded to, did not extend to all negroes there but only to such as were taken off Prisoners of war by force of Arms.”57 Other than this objection, though, Hawkins and the other U.S. commissioners told the Georgians “we might deliver the Talk, as it did not hinder them, from making their own exceptions to it.”58 Little did the Georgians know the extensiveness of their potential protests.

On June 18, 1796 the Creeks gathered in the square appointed by the U.S. commissioners to hear what the Georgians would say. Unfortunately for the Georgians, the Creeks were already disinclined to listen: much later, the state commissioners learned that James Seagrove had already undermined their authority. Up until that point in time all talks occurred inside of the garrison, at a square erected for that purpose. Seagrove, however, staged a private meeting with the Creeks at his residence at Muscogee, “where the Commissioners of Georgia, owing to the regulations before protested against, had no access.”59 Seagrove thus ensured his ability to set the Creeks against the Georgians’ talks before they delivered it.

The state commissioners unwittingly gave their speech as planned. Later, they related that during their oration, “a number of females were brought to the square” and joined by the wives of George Clymer and James Seagrove. Although the commissioners could do little but observe that “not one of them were present, when the President’s

Invitation was delivered, the day before,” it was clear that something nefarious was going

57 Hawkins leaned on what was essentially the American definition of slaves in 1783: slaves who ran away to the Creek nation of their own free will would remain free from captivity. See chapter 7 for this battle over definitions been George Washington and Sir Guy Carleton. 58 18 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. 59 28 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS.

312 on.60 Benjamin Hawkins described a square, or tcoko-thlako (meaning “big house”) in

1799 as an expression that “included all the chiefs and warriors of the town,” so he was probably well-apprised of the fact that allowing women in the square would send a clear message that the United States did not sanction the Georgians’ talk. The Creeks and U.S. officials would have known that women could not enter the square ground while men were still deliberating, and thus their presence indicated the end of negotiations.61 The presence of women, therefore, was designed to further embarrass the Georgians’ without their knowledge. The Georgians went ahead and gave their talk as planned, and then retired to await the Creeks’ response.

Four days later Hawkins invited the Georgian commissioners to visit him in the evening, where he and the other U.S. commissioners “would shew us what the Indians had done.” Although Hendricks, Jackson, and Simms objected by claiming their right to hear directly from the Creeks, Hawkins informed them, “no other answer might be eafected but thro the Commissers. of the United States.” Once they arrived the U.S. commissioners produced a talk purporting to be the response from the Creeks. The

Indians renounced the treaties of Augusta, Galphinton, and Shoulderbone, stating that a few men—incapable representatives for the whole Nation—had signed away land under threat from Georgians in arms. They cited their return of some slaves, and said they would return others. Most importantly, they argued that at the Treaty of New York,

Alexander McGillivray “was assured by the President of the United States and his

60 18 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. 61 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in in H. Thomas Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810 (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2003), 53s; Ethridge, Creek Country, (“big house”) 102, (for women in the square ground) 104.

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Congress that no more demands should be made for Indians lands.”62 Although for most of his life McGillivray had sided with the British or Spanish, in death he became a symbol of Creeks’ alliance with the U.S. government. The Creeks spoke through the

American commissioners to say that they remained unwilling to give the Georgians the land cession they requested.

Then, the Creeks took the Georgians’ food diplomacy and threw it back at them.

They claimed that “both sides” stole and maimed hogs and cattle, and that it was unfair for the Georgians to single the Creeks out by asking that they return their war spoils. The

Georgians did not deserve the right to complain about the fact that the Creeks adopted widely-recognized forms of victual warfare. The Indians went on to detail their exact reasons for keeping ahold of their land: “the very streams of water are found valuable for

Mills to grind the wheat & Corn that is made on those lands”; dead pine trees yielded tar; and the goods the Georgians gave them on previous occasions had turned “rotten & gone to nothing.”63 The Creeks did not want to cede their land because it remained valuable for farming—and here perhaps, the hand of the U.S. commissioners becomes apparent. The

Americans had already conceded that Creek women would remain farmers while men hunted, but it seems that they could not help themselves from pushing Natives to implement the Plan of Civilization more widely. Or, perhaps, this line did indeed come from the Indians, who merely sought to play into Americans’ ideas about husbandry.

Perhaps most significantly, the Creeks’ statement that the Georgians gave them rotten,

62 [James Hendricks, James Jackson, and James Simms] to Jared Irwin, 22 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. 63 [James Hendricks, James Jackson, and James Simms] to Jared Irwin, 22 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS.

314 useless goods symbolized their lack of faith in the state commissioners’ promise to give them goods or provisions in the future.

Hendricks, Jackson, and Simms decided that their only recourse was to refuse the talk. They resolved to send a letter to Hawkins, complaining that the talk had “not been given face to face in the square,” and asking “when an answer may be expected” from the

Creeks in person.64 The Creeks received the Georgians on the following day. The

Georgian commissioners told the Creeks that it was not their fault that the goods were rotten, especially because the Creeks “received the Goods & sold us the land for them.” If the Creeks discovered problems with the goods, they argued, the Georgians deserved no blame because the Indians neglected to say so at the time they received them. The state representatives considered that contract binding, and pressed once more for a cession of land: “We told you of the goods we brought...they amount to 20,000 Dollars at least...This will more than pay you for the loss of skins and meat” the Indians garnered

“from that land.” They concluded, “it will do you good and make us all friends.”65 Both sides engaged in food diplomacy in ways that tried to further their interests. The Creeks sought to maintain land—ostensibly for farming. The Georgians acknowledged that a cession would deprive the Indians of game meat, but offered no sustainable alternative.

After the talk the Creeks remained silent, and on the following day, Hendricks,

Jackson, and Simms felt compelled to once again demand a response. A man called the

Bird Tail King replied, “we do not know what the people of Georgia wish to Learn, do

64 23 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. 65 24 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS.

315 they think we have not given a determined answer?”66 In offering such a cold response at a time when treaty attendees rarely failed to observe the customs of courtesy—from smoking the calumet to orating at some length—the Indians indicated that the Georgians had breached an invisible line of etiquette. The Creeks did not wish to compromise, and the U.S. commissioners had proved themselves uninterested in lending aid to Georgia’s cause. In predictable fashion Hendricks, Jackson, and Simms issued a formal letter of protest against the U.S. commissioners and Seagrove. They complained about “the said pretended answer or talk of the Indians,” which had clearly been “penned in their Camps by certain agents or Interpreters, under the Command of the Superintendant.”67 In the fight between American commissioners and Georgian ones, the U.S. agents had emerged triumphant. A month later, President George Washington even reflected, “A favorable result could not have been predicted from the speech of the Georgia Commissioners.”68

The failed treaty was at an end, but the treaty was only a failure from Georgia’s perspective, and, as it turned out, the federal government gained significant concessions from the Indians. Congress had asserted its authority over the Southern states, and won.

In mid-September James Seagrove managed to clarify that Indians should restrain themselves from hunting on Americans’ lands, thus hopefully forestalling future violence.69 Most significantly (from the government’s perspective), was that by

66 25 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. 67 28 June 1796, Georgia Commission to Attend a Treaty with the Creek Indians journal, 1796, GHS. 68 George Washington to [James McHenry], 22 July 1796, reel 2, James McHenry papers, LOC. 69 James Seagrove to the Cussetah Chiefs, St. Marys, 15 September 1796, in folder: September 15, 1796. Copy of James Seagrove’s Answer to a message from the Cussetah Chiefs, Box 1807, Governor – Executive Dept. – Governor’s Subject Files – 1781-1802, GDAH.

316

December the Creeks appeared ready to implement the Plan of Civilization.70 That year witnessed great uncertainty, but the U.S. commissioners achieved some major compromises. And yet, the year closed with a prophetic remark from Benjamin Hawkins.

He described how one white man, a trader named Richard Bailey, had married an Otalla wife, and lived among the Creeks. Hawkins said, “The Indians of the town where he lives are more orderly than any others in their neighbourhood,” and “when he is at dinner they never enter the dining room.”71 This practice, according to Hawkins, was a good one:

Indians and whites were not meant to eat together. This reluctance to sit down and share a meal boded poorly for future food diplomacy and food reform.

***

After winning their battle over the Western Confederacy, undermining state officials’ power, and mollifying the Creeks at Colerain, the United States could negotiate from a position of newfound strength. American Indian agents began to push forward with the Plan of Civilization. In 1796 George Washington sent a talk to the Cherokees to acquaint them with the Plan. His message also made it clear that American agents would expect Native women to cease farming, and to become spinners and weavers.72 The

United States would also pursue its own goals of acquiring yet more Indian territory, which they succeeded in doing at the treaties of Colerain in 1796, which confirmed the

70 See, for example, Benjamin Hawkins to [James McHenry], 25 December 1796, Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 47. 71 Benjamin Hawkins to [James McHenry], 25 December 1796, Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 47. 72 Perdue, Cherokee Women, 111.

317

Treaty of New York, at the 1802 Treaty of Fort Wilkinson, and at the Treaty of

Washington in 1805.73

As in the North, and especially in the Ohio Valley, Indians resisted the Plan when

American officials sought to dictate what and how Indians should eat. Indians also, however, borrowed the bits and pieces of American husbandry that suited them.74 The

Southern iteration of the Plan differed from the North’s in two key ways. U.S. agents among the Creeks and Cherokees encouraged slaveholding. Keeping recent droughts and crop failures in mind, they also focused more on ensuring Natives’ food security.

Americans wanted to ensure that Indians grew enough food and raised enough meat to thrive, not just survive at subsistence levels.

The decade and a half between the Treaty of Colerain and the War of 1812 witnessed the implementation of new forms of culinary imperialism under the mantle of the American Plan of Civilization, effected and superintended by American agent

Benjamin Hawkins. In his A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, first published in 1848 by the Georgia Historical Society, Hawkins described his methods.75 Other scholars have correctly asserted that Hawkins occupied a unique and ambivalent position from his post in Indian country: the Creeks knew that he was an elite white American, but they also knew that he would understand the intricacies of Creek

73 Ethridge, Creek Country, 13. 74 For background on how the Creeks dealt with the “plan of civilization” see Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 623, 627; for a comparative example of how Cherokees incorporated British architectural (rather than agricultural) ideas into Native ideas about entertaining, see Jennifer Elliott, “Ga- ne-tli-yv-s-di (Change) in the Cherokee Nation: The Vann and Ridge Houses in Northwest Georgia,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, vol. 18, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 43- 63. 75 “On the publication of this work see American National Biography Online, search under “Hawkins, Benjamin,” http://anb.org.

318 country better than other officials because of his commitment to living among the

Indians.76 In the late-1790s Hawkins proved much more effective at communicating with

Southern Native Americans than previous state commissioners. His successes, however, did not negate the fact that, just like other Indian commissioners, Hawkins felt obligated to walk the line between a firm hand in gift-giving, a willingness to yield to Indian requests, and an ability to maintain the peace between white inhabitants and Native

Americans. And, like prior Indian agents, Hawkins also needed to contend with the various factions among Southern tribes. One of his primary goals was to encourage the

Southern Indians, especially the Creeks, to pursue American-style husbandry, replete with the proper trappings of domesticated animals and plows.

Much like his Northern counterpart Samuel Kirkland, Benjamin Hawkins chose to live among the Indians—with the Lower Creeks—where he kept a farm to set an example for the Indians, and to dole out provisions when he deemed it suitable.77 In his memoirs, he described his “garden well cultivated and planted, with a great variety of vegetables, fruits and vines, and an orchard of peach trees.” Hawkins eschewed an apple orchard, possibly to avoid the question of whether or not to make alcoholic cider. He also planned

“to fence two hundred acres of land fit for cultivation, and to introduce a regular husbandry to serve as a model and stimulus, for the neighboring towns who crowd the public shops here, at all seasons, when the hunters are not in the woods.” Hawkins deliberately set up his farm in a location where the Creeks seemed most likely to seek

76 Ethridge, Creek Country, 5. 77 The differences between Kirkland and Hawkins should not be ignored. Kirkland concerned himself mainly with disseminating Christianity, whereas Hawkins did not. Kirkland's Oneidas had remained allied to the Americans for most of the Revolution, whereas Creek loyalties regularly proved difficult to pin down.

319 trade goods and gifts of food in lieu of growing provisions for themselves.78 He hoped that his farm’s bounty would convince idling Indians of the benefits of farming.

Hawkins also admitted, however, that his plan for implementing the use of domesticated animals would work best when the hunters were not hunting; he knew this conversion process would take time, and he acknowledged that he would need to choose his moves carefully.79 Hawkins (in the third person) stated, “The agent entertains doubts, already, of succeeding here in establishing a regular husbandry.” If his plan did not succeed, Hawkins decided that he would move his farm away from the town, “and aid the villages where success seems to be infallible.”80 Previous experience had taught him not to hope for immediate victory in altering Indian foodways, so he envisioned a plan that taught husbandry by example, and a second plan in case the first failed. His method also borrowed from its Northern equivalent, which provided for the presence of American

Indian agents in Native villages as a stopgap against young men relapsing back into hunting habits.

Hawkins related his varying levels of success in the thirty-seven Creek towns he charted.81 He bestowed the most praise on Natives who used plows, raised cattle, and

78 In this regard Hawkins was an exception. When Creeks allotted garden plots to other white men, the Indians limited the amount of food those men could grow. Natives expected the men to purchase most of their produce from Indian farmers. Ethridge, Creek Country, 143. 79 Hawkins’s effort was one among many. After Little Turtle and the Potawatomi chief Five Medals visited Washington, D.C. in December 1801 and January 1802, Americans conceived of a plan to build another model farm at Fort Wayne, in present-day Indiana. Daniel K. Richter, “‘Believing That Many of the Red People Suffer Much for the Want of Food’: Hunting, Agriculture, and a Quaker Construction of Indianness in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 19, no. 4 (Winter, 1999), 604. 80 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 56s. 81 “There are thirty-seven towns in the Creek nation; twelve on the waters of Chat-to-ho-che, and twenty- five on the waters of Coo-sau and Tal-la-poo-sa.” Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 24s.

320 kept slaves. The Bird Tail King, the man who snubbed the Georgians in 1796, resided at

Hitchetee on a plantation “well fenced, and cultivated with the plough.” According to

Hawkins, the Bird Tail King became convinced of “the advantages of the plough over the slow and laborious hand hoe” after a visit to New York.”82 Hawkins “paid him a visit” in the spring of 1799, bringing “a plough completely fixed, and spent a day with him and showed him how to use it.”83 Not only did Hawkins demonstrate his willingness to live among the Indians and serve as a visual example of how to farm; he also traveled to various villages and made sure that they used American instruments in ways that he approved.

Hawkins reported positive results. He seemed happy to see that the Bird Tail

King’s family had “more than doubled their crop of corn and potatoes.” They “begin to know how to turn their corn to account, by giving it to their hogs,” he wrote.84 Hawkins concerned himself mainly with the Creeks, but he also reported that some of the

Cherokees “old and young appear to be happy” about the growth of their farms,

“vegetables to be had in plenty...bacon, colewarts, and turnips, at several houses,” and an increase in “their stock of hogs and cattle.”85 Proper instruction in using ploughs bred an increase in crops, which, in turn, meant better-fed domesticated animals. Hawkins

82 This observation is rather curious, because as an Indian man the Bird Tail King may not have worked with hand hoes before, given that women generally used them. Perdue, Cherokee Women, 127. 83 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 60s. 84 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 60s. 85 Benjamin Hawkins, A Viatory or Journal of Distances and Observations, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 3j.

321 promoted a system of foodways that protected against crop failure and encouraged animals to thrive.

Slaveholding also became integral to Hawkins’s evaluation of Indian husbandry.

In a town he called “Took-au-bat-chee,” he bestowed his token phrase of choice to describe the farm of Alexander Cornells, an interpreter of mixed-race descent: it appeared

“well fenced and cultivated with the plough,” but it was also his “nine negroes under good government” that allowed him to suggest that Cornells’s wife possessed “the neatness and economy of a white woman.” In his interpretation of agriculture, farms with slaves automatically seemed superior. The Indian wife of Alexander Cornells seemed more like a white woman because she was neat and economical—that is, her slaves likely performed the fieldwork and food preparations, while she took up her role as a converted non-farmer.

At the same time that he praised Indian slaveholders, his descriptions also indicated that Creek slaveholding deviated from slavery in the white American South. He depicted some villages on the Flint River, where “Several of these Indians have negroes, taken during the revolutionary war,” and said that these slaves “generally call themselves

‘King’s gifts.’” Hawkins emphasized that on these Indian farms, “there is more industry and better farms.”86 He also related how a black Creek named Co-no-fix-ico owned “one hundred cattle, and makes butter and cheese.”87 Some blacks in the Creek nation were not slaves, and were also implementing the agricultural and dairying methods that Hawkins

86 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 66s. Emphasis in the original. 87 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 48s.

322 so esteemed.88 These descriptions of slavery indicate that Creek slaves contributed to

Indian foodways in a manner similar to pre-Revolutionary food preparations for white masters, but they also demonstrate that former slaves acquired property, and produced food to use and sell privately.

At the same time that Hawkins negotiated between a policy of firmness and flexibility, Southern Indians’ concepts of food diplomacy also continued to evolve.

Cherokee and Creek women played a key role in these transformations as they became more instrumental in requesting food.89 Whereas in previous decades Native women spoke at treaties only when peace appeared doubtful—one thinks of Shawnee women who came to Fort Finney in 1786 and of the Seneca women meeting Timothy Pickering

88 This observation is in keeping with the work of historians such as James Brooks, who argues that in the Southwest borderlands there was a more nuanced hierarchy of Indian-slave relations than those of white- slave relations. While his work deals with Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas, I would argue that some iteration of his argument applies to Creeks. James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), esp. 34, 37. For more on differences between slaves in Creek country and the American South, see Ethridge, Creek Country, 116; Martin, Sacred Revolt, 73; Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 622. 89 I am disagreeing here with aspects of Theda Perdue’s work on Cherokee women, and Claudio Saunt’s work on the Creeks. Perdue writes that “the story of most Cherokee women is not cultural transformation...but remarkable cultural persistence.” She argues that although “the deerskin trade did make Cherokee women less central to the new commercial economy...Hunting and foreign affairs...had always been the domain of men, and even though European contact accentuated the activities of men, trade and warfare did not significantly alter the world of women.” Even the Plan of Civilization, she writes, “failed to transform the relations between men and women in most Cherokee households.” I agree with Perdue in that I also believe that in many respects the Plan proved unsuccessful, but I do not separate changes in hunting from changes in food diplomacy, and so see women as continuously involved in foreign affairs. Furthermore, even if historians agree that gender relations remained unchanged within Cherokee households, the fact remains that in the 1790s and 1800s Native women ventured beyond the physical and metaphorical constraints of the home to ask U.S. officials to practice food diplomacy. Claudio Saunt has also suggested that before the war, Creek women became less involved in the deerskin trade because men no longer needed women to prepare skins for market. When we add food diplomacy back into our analysis of gender relations, however, women become more visible. On the changing roles of Indian women after the Revolution, see Claudio Saunt, “‘Domestick...Quiet being broke’: Gender Conflict among Creek Indians in the Eighteenth Century,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 151-174; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 9-10.

323 in 1790—now they appeared to request sustenance from American officials.90 The

Cherokees who arrived unannounced at Henry Knox’s door came with a woman named

Jean Dougherty.91 The Creek women who came to the Treaty of Colerain supported the efforts of the U.S. commissioners, and undermined the Georgians’ efforts with their presence. Creek and Cherokee women came to Hawkins to ask for corn and salt, and it was Creek women who at one point crept onto Hawkins’s fields and stole eighty heads of cabbage.92 And as the Americans began to encourage Indians to take up cattle ranching, women enthusiastically joined in, using surplus meat to feed guests, and profits to retain independence from their husbands.93 Even as American officials tried to circumscribe women’s roles within households, within spitting distance of looms and spinning wheels,

Indian women used new developments in foodways to venture outside of their homes.94

Hawkins increased his credibility with Southern Native women by making it easier for them to farm; he also employed new food diplomacy to convince the Indians that he sought to curtail further instances of white encroachment.95 At a 1797 meeting with the Cherokees, when Indians applied to him “to indulge them with a little whiskey,”

“He answered no, not one drop, till the business they convened on was completely

90 On Native women’s traditional, non-verbal place at treaties, see Jane T. Merritt, “Metaphor, Meaning, and Misunderstanding: Language and Power on the Pennsylvania Frontier,” in Cayton and Teute, Contact Points, 77. 91 [Henry Knox] to William Blount, 31 January 1792, 2-3, reel 1, Correspondence of the War Department Relating to Indian Affairs, Military Pensions, and Fortifications, 1791-1799, DLAR. 92 For women requesting salt, see Benjamin Hawkins to Edward Price, Fort Wilkinson, 6 January 1798, folder 10, 1795-1799, Hawkins Family Papers, SHC; Perdue, Cherokee Women, 116. For women stealing cabbages, see Ethridge, Creek Country, 182. 93 Ethridge, Creek Country, 161-62. 94 The idea behind getting Creek women to spin rested on American officials’ hopes that this ability would render women independent of their husbands, thus forcing Native men to farm to reestablish their wives’ dependence on them. This strategy was markedly different from the Northern plan, which sought to convert men to the plan of civilization first, and women second. Saunt, “‘Domestick...Quiet being broke,’” 166. 95 Perdue, Cherokee Women, ch. 5, esp. 115-18.

324 adjusted.” “This was not usual,” replied the Cherokees, who “heretofore were indulged and expected a continuance.” Hawkins refused to practice this old form of diplomacy on the grounds that he came “to remedy the past,” not “to continue abuses.” After some reflection “the Chiefs agreed that this decision was just and they expected some good from it.” Hawkins sought to break with previous food diplomacy and to wait to supply alcohol until official negotiations ended. Immediately after this instance of give-and-take,

Hawkins offered to meet the Indians “at their own council fire,” because “They were on their own lands...And might determine every thing, as they liked.” He indicated that once the Indians agreed not to become drunk, he would allow them to dictate the other terms of the treaty.96 He also implicitly suggested that Indians who refused alcohol retained a better chance of remaining sober, and subsequently of maintaining control of their lands.

He related his success in introducing some degree of centralization into the Indian marketplace. Whereas before his residency “there was no market for provisions,” and

“The wants of the traders were few,” by 1799 he had established “a regular market,” and instituted a system of “weights and measures.”97 Hawkins also obliged Indians who asked him to fix food prices in their favor; he established set prices for bacon, beef, butter, corn, cheese, eggs, fowl, peas, and pork.98 Native women who increasingly competed with the garden produce sold by male slaves appreciated the fact that Hawkins made it easier for

96 [Benjamin Hawkins and Andrew Pickens], 31 March 1797, Journal of the proceedings of the Commissioners Appointed to Ascertain the Boundary Lines Agreeable to Treaties Between the Indian Nations and the United States: 1797, F603101, reel GR150, SCDAH. In this collection, the date for this quote is labeled 31 March. It also appears in the Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, labeled 13 April. See also [Unlabeled Journal], 24 April 1797, Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 159. 97 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 60s. 98 Saunt, “‘Domestick...Quiet being broke,’” 174.

325 them to sell their vegetables.99 In 1807, Hawkins would even prohibit white traders living in town from trading livestock, because their prices interfered with Indians’ profits.100

Hawkins did not acknowledge that his methods for centralizing the marketplace eerily resembled British and American attempts to fix and control food prices during the

Revolution.

Although Hawkins’s methods offered Natives room to compromise, it remained clear that he imagined a less flexible system of diplomacy. In addition to decreasing alcohol consumption and controlling the sale of foodstuffs, Hawkins succeeded in confining Indians’ eating to military-style rations. He described how the Creeks, who used to be “the most numerous, proud, haughty and ill behaved Indians in the agency

South of Ohio,” changed their ways when he limited them to 1,000 rations a year. These he apportioned “only to use on public business and at the request of the agent.” Although

“This regulation was disliked at first,” by 1801 a Creek chief “going to the frontiers will come 20 or 30 miles to me to know if I have any commands which he can execute to get an order for provisions.” Hawkins differentiated, however, between his ration and a military ration—not in substance, but in the manner in which he distributed the food.

“The military should move in their own sphere, and co-operate only with the Agency for

Indian Affairs, when required thereto by an agent,” he argued.101 Hawkins’s point was that only a commissioner familiar with the food diplomacy necessary in Indian affairs would enjoy successful communications with the Creeks and other Southern tribes.

99 Braund, “The Creek Indians, Blacks, and Slavery,” 608-09. 100 Ethridge, Creek Country, 163. 101 Benjamin Hawkins to Henry Dearborn, Chickasaw Bluffs, 28 October 1801, Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 393-94.

326

The official U.S. policy encouraged husbandry, but Hawkins realistically realized that changes in Indian foodways would occur slowly. Not all Indian towns farmed effectively, kept slaves, or raised animals by the standards of the American government.

In describing one of four villages below “Coo-sau-dee,” Hawkins lamented the fact that the Indians owned “a few hogs and horses, but no cattle.” He noted that they used to possess “the largest and best breed of hogs in the nation, but have lost them by carelessness or inattention.”102 Despite the efforts of Hawkins and the other commissioners, not all Indians eagerly embraced the practice of raising livestock.

Hawkins described the Cussetas, by then the largest village of the Lower Creeks, who

“associate, more than any other Indians, with their white neighbors.” Some Lower Creeks such as the Fat King had tended to support the Americans. Men like Alexander

McGillivray hailed from Upper Creek towns. In spite of the Lower Creeks’ history of

American-allied behavior, these Indians, according to Hawkins, “know not the season for planting, or if they do, they never avail themselves of what they know, as they always plant a month too late.” These Creeks became “fond of visiting” the whites nearby, and their young Indians “are more rude, more inclined to be tricky, and more difficult to govern, than those who do not associate with them.”103 Thus by the late-1790s, even those Indians who had in the past enjoyed peaceful relationships with the United States also proved reluctant to adopt the Plan of Civilization in its entirety. They continued to

102 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 36s. 103 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 59s.

327 seek food from white inhabitants, and to engage in violence.104 Creeks who lived near whites seemed less likely to farm well because their proximity to inhabitants’ stores allowed them easier access to food without having to grow it themselves. Such nearness, according to Hawkins, bred rudeness, unruliness, and discontent.

Creeks’ actions also indicated their unwillingness to abide by Hawkins’s more strict food diplomacy. In 1797 Hawkins observed, the Creeks “view with surprise their great beloved friend and father the agent...offering them cotton and flax seed, ploughs, spinning wheels, cards and looms,” instead of “presents from the United States, Great

Britain or Spain.”105 Some Indians continued to seek older versions of diplomacy. While

Hawkins visited the upper towns of the Creek nation, he received word that “a number of beggars had set out from Cusseta and Coweta, to Colerain,” where they hoped to receive presents. Hawkins “saw some of them on their way home, and...rebuked them for crowding down to our posts without any business, and without an invitation, at the season when they should be hunting.” He approved of another official’s refusal to give them the presents they requested. He also observed, however, that on their return from Colerain, some of the Creeks “stole hogs, beef and horses.”106 Although Hawkins tried to remain firm in his decision not to give gifts of provisions, Indians often took matters into their own hands by appropriating animals. The fact that they willingly took domesticated

104 The inabilities of older chiefs to control younger Indians may also have signaled the generational fracture between accommodationist Creeks and the burgeoning Redstick movement, as scholars such as Claudio Saunt have described. 105 Benjamin Hawkins to James McHenry, Coweta, 6 January 1797, Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 57. 106 Benjamin Hawkins to Edward Price, Flint River, 10 February 1797, Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 77.

328 animals may have indicated their eagerness to adopt aspects of husbandry, but their victual warfare demonstrated their continuing power to do so by Native terms.

In the late-1790s and 1800s, Creeks and Cherokees adopted farming and domesticated animals in ways that suited their foodways and customs, thus resisting the complete implementation of the Plan of Civilization. One Creek chief, Toolk-au-bat-che

Haujo, owned 500 beef cattle, but “although apparently very indigent, he never sells any.” Instead, the chief “gives continued proofs of unbounded hospitality; he seldom kills less than two large beeves a fortnight, for his friends and acquaintances.” Toolk-au-bat- che performed these actions despite the fact that “The town is on the decline...badly fenced...[and] the land is much exhausted with continued culture.”107 Although the land of the town suffered from depletion, this Indian refused to use cattle to make money, as

Hawkins and other commissioners encouraged him to do. Indeed, the poor condition of the soil made farming impossible, and until the mid-nineteenth century even Anglo-

American farmers eschewed plows because they were so poorly constructed.108 Rather than move, Indians improvised. Toolk-au-bat-chee slaughtered domesticated animals in ways that British officials had done since the Revolution: to obtain and maintain the loyalty of Indians in his town.

Southern Indians also continued to use victual warfare for practical and symbolic purposes. In 1799 Georgia Governor James Jackson received word that Indians stole a

107 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 30s. 108 The loamy soils of Creek Country—with the exception of the Black Prairie—were not very good. Recent studies have demonstrated that intercropping corn and beans does not replenish the soil as ecologists have believed. The nitrogen in legumes travels from roots to leaves as beans mature, and only if Indians returned bean leaves to the soil after a harvest would they have maintained nitrogen levels. Ethridge, Creek Country, 140, 144, 156.

329 hog, killed it, “and Barbecued a part of it and left the rest on the fire and that night stole two Horses out of the settlement.”109 This decision may have seemed curious to observers, who perhaps wondered why the Indians left behind edible meat. The fact that they stole horses meant they could have carried the remainder of the animal off with them. Given previous instances in which Indians and non-Natives used animals to send symbolic messages, however, it seems likely that the decision to leave the hog served as a taunt, a way for these Indians to demonstrate that they could kill, eat, and waste

Georgians’ domesticated animals when they wanted, and steal them when that suited them, too.

Regularly-occurring incidents of violence demonstrate that shrinking space between whites and Indians led to battles that people fought using victual warfare. In

1798 a man named Owen J. Bowen told Benjamin Hawkins that “4 armed Indians painted in a war like manner came” to his home, “and behaved very rascally.” After

Bowen gave them some tobacco, they “demanded corn and he gave a peck,” to which the

Indians “demanded more”—a request Bowen refused. One of the Indians drew a knife,

“stabed at him,” and commanded him “to fill their sacks which he did.” After also acquiring a considerable amount of leather, the Indians left.110 In response to Bowen’s deposition, Hawkins asked whether Bowen could “understand their language?” Bowen said he could comprehend “Some words.” Hawkins likely tried to determine whether

Bowen could actually speak with the Indians, or whether the threatened violence resulted

109 David Blackshear to James Jackson, Big Creek, 16 June 1799, 560, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, 1705-1839, Part 2, GDAH. 110 Owen J. Bowen, deposition to Benjamin Hawkins, Jackson County, 26 January 1798, 509, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, 1705-1839, Part 2, GDAH.

330 from some breakdown in communication. He also asked why Bowen “suppose[d] they were Cherokees?”111 Here, Hawkins’s experience as a U.S. Indian commissioner became evident: he attempted to make sure that he spoke to the appropriate tribe when he sought to adjudicate the incident. Bowen said that he recognized some of the Cherokee language, enough to guess that the Indians were Cherokees.

Although this event played out through the medium of victual warfare, Hawkins’s reaction, as well as the actions of a nearby Cherokee headman, prove revealing because they demonstrate that knowledge of food diplomacy had trickled down from U.S. commissioners and Indian headmen to middling white inhabitants and their Indian counterparts. Bowen also revealed that on the evening after the first group of Indians left his house, he received a visit from another Cherokee who ate supper with him. Bowen informed that Indian “of the treatment” he received from the other Cherokees. Bowen then made sure that this Indian left “with some provisions in his hand.” By offering him food, Bowen ensured that the man left his house content. The next morning, Bowen’s gift of provisions paid off: the Cherokee from the previous night “and the head of his camp came to his house to know if he was offended or not.”112 The headman took care to prevent Bowen from retaliating. Indeed, Bowen’s willingness to make his complaint to

Hawkins, rather than to act out against the Cherokees on his own, displayed the growing power of U.S. commissioners, as well as the fact that white inhabitants were becoming capable of using food diplomacy in lieu of violence. In addition, the Cherokee to whom

111 Owen J. Bowen, deposition to Benjamin Hawkins, Jackson County, 26 January 1798, 510, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, 1705-1839, Part 2, GDAH. 112 Owen J. Bowen, deposition to Benjamin Hawkins, Jackson County, 26 January 1798, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, 1705-1839, Part 2, 509, Transcripts, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Morrow, GA.

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Bowen freely gave food knew enough about American-Indian diplomacy to get his headman involved to fix the situation.

Southern Indians increasingly deployed food diplomacy to ask for concessions from non-Native inhabitants. This food diplomacy was not the food diplomacy of the

Creeks in 1796, who used it to refuse to sell their lands; in the 1800s, Indians employed food diplomacy to seek the removal of whites from their territory. In 1802 several

American men met Cherokees named Dreadful Warter, or Amahuskasata, Hatchett, and the Badgers Son along the Soque River, in present-day Habersham County, Georgia.113

Dreadful Warter wanted “the new setlers to go off,” but agreed, that “each family may leave One person on each place to take Care of their Crops untill Christmass.” Then, he wished “they may go off With their Crops when the Old Setlers go.” He promised, “the same will be done with the red people” living on whites’ land.114 Dreadful Warter demonstrated his knowledge of whites’ growing seasons, and his concession that one person could remain to finish the harvest suggested that he did not intend that the

American inhabitants should starve. He also insisted, however, upon their removal after the New Year.

By January 1803, the whites were still there. On January 7th the whites used old food diplomacy to appeal to the Cherokees, requesting permission for the Americans to stay a bit longer. They said that if the Cherokees forced the inhabitants to leave, “their women and Children...should be compelled to live by Begging from House to House, or

113 The group included James Blair, Robert Walton, Thomas Crews, and Peter Warters. Warters may have been the husband of Sally Warters, a Cherokee woman who interpreted for Hawkins. Perdue, Cherokee Women, 117. 114 Reply of the Indians to the Talk delivered this 27th day of June 1802 at Jack Words upon Soquee, Cherokee Indian Letters, Talks and Treaties, 1786-1838, 31, GDAH.

332 perish in the woods.” They also mentioned their pleasure at seeing that “a number of your

Cornfields are cultivated with ploughs, which saves you a great deal hard work.” The

Georgians praised Cherokee efforts at agriculture while implying that the Indians’ demands regarding white farms would make them incapable of producing their own food.

They asked for an extension “for one year longer.” After reflection, the Cherokees responded that there were not enough men present “to give a full Talk,” but told the whites “that there will be a general meeting of all the Chiefs in forty nights at this place.”115 On February 22, a Cherokee man named Sour Mush informed the whites that they could remain another year, until Christmas, but warned, “Should those people suffer on accounts of livinge so longe on our lands you must not blame us with it.”116 Here, then, was yet another doubtful victory for the Georgians: their leaders used the same food diplomacy as they had with the Creeks at Colerain to request that they be allowed to remain on Cherokee lands. The Cherokees listened to their request and allowed them to stay, but they also warned the Americans that their continuing presence might lead to future violence.117

***

Despite the rise of U.S. Indian commissioners’ power and influence, efforts to encourage Indians to implement the Plan of Civilization, and firmer rules regarding food diplomacy, violence persisted on the frontiers. Indians continued to show their discontent

115 [Thomas P. Carnes, R. Easly, B. Harris, talk to the Cherokee Indians, 7 January 1803], Cherokee Indian Letters, Talks and Treaties, 1786-1838, 49-51, GDAH. 116 Sour mush talk to [unknown], Oostenaliee Council, 22 February 1803, Cherokee Indian Letters, Talks and Treaties, 1786-1838, 62, GDAH. 117 Eventually Hawkins ordered a military detachment to force the Americans to depart, but they returned when the soldiers left. The U.S. bought the land in 1804, but Cherokees and Americans still argued over ownership as late as 1812. Ethridge, Creek Country, 225.

333 by stealing animals and criticizing American inhabitants. At the same meeting where

Benjamin Hawkins refused to allow the Creeks liquor, the Indians revealed that they used special names to refer to non-Natives who sought their land. The Creeks knew Governor

Blount of Georgia as Fusse Mico, or the Dirt King. The Cherokees called him the Dirt

Captain, and “in both nations it arose from their opinion of his insatiable avidity to acquire Indian lands.” The Creeks also had names to describe white Americans more generally, too. They were “Ecunnauaupopohau,” which translated to “Always asking for land,” or “Ecunnaunuxulgee: People greedily grasping after the lands of the red people against the voice of the United States.”118 These phrases revealed the Indians’ ongoing aversion to the ways that Americans metaphorically consumed land, but they also showed the persisting tensions between state governors, Natives, and the United States.

Whereas state commissioners unsuccessfully relied upon metaphorical language—such as eating out of the same dish—to try to practice food diplomacy, turn- of-the-century food diplomacy broke down to the point that Natives and Americans engaged in literal battles at the table. In the late 1790s and early 1800s the closer proximity of whites to Indians meant that the two groups increasingly met over meals that ended in violence. This change foreshadowed the failure and end of food diplomacy during the 1810s.

Some incidents that followed on the heels of mutual food consumption seemed innocuous enough. The Creeks of Attaugee observed a “singular custom.” Hawkins

118 Richard Thomas, Translations of Creek expressions used in the foregoing [translated by Timothy Barnard, Cusseta, 24 November 1797], Letters of Benjamin Hawkins, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 250.

334 described how after “a white person has eaten of any dish and left it, the remains are thrown away and every thing used by the guest immediately washed.”119 This practice of purification betrayed Creeks’ distaste for sharing food with whites, but it also demonstrated their disposition to continue to feed Americans in the neighborhood.120

Other moments also evidenced the tension between mutual dislike and a reluctance to shed blood. Such was the case in 1804, when three Creeks came to the house of a

Georgian man. The Indians stayed for a few hours, “eat his Dinner,” and left. That night,

“his mare was Stolen,” along with one neighbor’s colt, and another’s bay mare. The three men followed the Indians, and upon finding them, one of the Indians ran, “and the other two they made Lay Down their guns and made them give up the horse and they set the other two at Liberty.”121 In this instance the Creeks came to a white man’s house, shared

(or possibly stole) his food, and made off with his domesticated animals. The men recovered the animals by threatening violence, but without actually needing to attack.

At other times, however, when whites and Indians sat down to eat together, these interactions became sites of overt conflict. In the early 1800s, the act of eating out of the same dish occasionally resulted in violence at the table. These occurrences took place in whites’ houses and Indians’ houses alike. In September 1795, for example, a group of five Indians appeared at the house of one Benjamin Harrison. The depositions that white inhabitants later delivered all varied a little, but the deponents told a story of Indians

119 Benjamin Hawkins, A Sketch of the Creek Country in the Years 1798 and 1799, in Foster II, The Collected Works of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796-1810, 37s. 120 Anthropologist Robbie Ethridge interprets this moment as one that reinforced Creek ideas about purity and impurity. Although her interpretation may be correct, it does not preclude symbolic implications about food exchange. Ethridge, Creek Country, 87; see also Martin, Sacred Revolt, 134. 121 Sampson Renfrow, deposition to Joshua Browning, 22 August 1804, 62, Indian Letters, 1782-1839, Transcripts, GDAH.

335 carrying guns and weapons, and demanding rum and cookware from Harrison. The

Indians cursed at one man, “and ordered him to give them a kittle to boil their grain in.”

One of the Indians displayed a knife, and said, “he had skilpd people an Buffelow with that knife.” Harrison ordered them to leave, but when they departed they stole his corn and threatened “a negro by the name of Roney” with an unidentified weapon.122 The

Indians’ threats, demands, and thievery indicate that by this time U.S. Indian agents did not sufficiently address Natives’ complaints, or provide them with enough sustenance to support themselves. Their demands for food may have started as a diplomatic request, but when the Americans denied them, Indians turned to violence.

In an 1807 incident, people came to shots and blows. In Camden County,

Georgia, a woman named Appy Howard told James Seagrove that two Indians “said to belong to the Creek Nation” came to her house at eight in the morning. They asked for something to eat, she fed them, and after eating they “went away seemingly well pleased.” They returned at dinner (lunch) time, when Howard again invited them in. This time, however, Howard’s neighbor, Samuel Greene, joined the Indians. Howard said that at some point when she was out of the house fetching more “victuals out of a pot,” she was frightened “by the firing of two guns from the house by the said Indians; and on turning round saw the said Greene shot down and laying on the Ground and the blood gushing from his head.”123

122 Daniel Currie, Benjamin Harrison, and James Vessells, separate depositions to Francis Spann, Montgomery County, Georgia, 17 September 1795, 443-44, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, 1705- 1839, Part 2, GDAH. 123 Appy Howard, deposition to James Seagrove, Camden County, Georgia, 3 June 1807, 719, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, 1705-1839, Part 2, GDAH.

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Having been outside, Howard possessed no way to know who instigated the argument, or whether Greene fired first. There is also no way to ascertain whether

Howard really did go outside before the first report of shots. According to Howard, the fact that the Indians approached her “with a gun clubbed as if to knock her down, & the other Indian rushing with a knife in his hand toward the murdered Mr. Greene, as if to scalp him,” became evidence enough for her to believe the Indians acted first, and that they intended to do her further harm.124 Howard fled the house, and could offer no other information for Seagrove.

In another instance, this time in Jackson County, whites spoke out against James

Vann, a part-Cherokee, part-Scottish resident. Leonard Rice told a justice of the peace that he and a few others passed by James Vann’s house one day, and Vann invited them inside. Almost immediately, Vann started acting strangely: “Vann seemed determined the whole company should stay alnight & ordered his negroes to take the Horses of all the company which was done, in an orbitary way.” Vann was a slaveholder—a virtue that a man such as Benjamin Hawkins would have approved—but he had to almost force the company into staying the night. Leonard Rice related that, “after every thing was secured...Vann took occation to be offended without aney offence Being offered.” He threw a cup of hot coffee into the face of a man named Noleng, or Noleing.125 After doing so, another deponent stated, “Vann then ordered the whole to go down stairs altho they had not finished their supper & then sd Vann beat the same person by striking him &

124 Appy Howard, deposition to James Seagrove, Camden County, Georgia, 3 June 1807, 719, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, 1705-1839, Part 2, GDAH. 125 Leonard Rice, deposition to B. Harris, J.I.C., and Isaac Boring, Justice of the Peace, Jackson County, 12 May 1808, 89, Cherokee Indian Letters, Talks and Treaties, 1786-1838, GDAH.

337 throwing him on the floor & then Kicked or stamped on him.”126 Rice also added that sometime during the commotion, Vann shot through the floor with “a gun or pistol,” wounding him in the right shoulder.127

In this instance Vann evidenced every characteristic of a rude host: he forced the company to stay the night; he took offence for no apparent reason; he doused a man with burning coffee; he prevented his guests from finishing their supper, and he shot a man.

Though the last act obviously stands out from the rest, the deponents clearly felt obligated to describe the ways in which Vann’s table manners deviated from the norm.

These incidents were as inexplicable as they were unpredictable. What is significant is that at the same time that American officials were trying to control Indians’ foodways, white and Indians encountered violence when they sat down to share meals. Despite the fact that by this time American inhabitants and Southern Indians all knew how to use food diplomacy, so too did they know how to deploy victual warfare. By the early 1800s, victual warfare carried the day.

***

In August, 1812—one month after the beginning of the War of 1812— unidentified Indians “Murdered a young man...Burnt Several Cabins & destroyed their

Crops,” and began “Collecting their Cattle...to drive to the Nation.”128 Only a year before,

Tecumseh had appeared in Creek towns to rally the Indians to war against the Americans.

126 Sheldon Tompson, deposition to J. Meigs, 8 February 1808, 90, Cherokee Indian Letters, Talks and Treaties, 1786-1838, GDAH. 127 Leonard Rice, deposition to B. Harris, J.I.C., and Isaac Boring, Justice of the Peace, Jackson County, 12 May 1808, and Leonard Rice to Buckner Harris, 13 May 1808, 88-89, both in Cherokee Indian Letters, Talks and Treaties, 1786-1838, GDAH. 128 M. Hardin to David B. Mitchell, Travelars Hotel, 20 August 1812, 760, Creek Indian Letters Talks and Treaties, 1705-1839, Part 2, GDAH.

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During the eight years before Tecumseh’s arrival, a severe drought reigned in Creek country, ushering in a period called the “Hungry Years.” Those Indians whom Hawkins had convinced to farm suffered from famine because they sold their surplus produce, rather than depositing it for communal crop storage.129 Hawkins provided corn, bread, watermelons, and pumpkins to the Indians in need, but his own crops failed in 1811 and put an end to those efforts.130 The Indians’ victual warfare in the form of crop destruction and the thefts of domesticated animals sent a message of imminent war, just as the victual of the American Revolution portended hunger, violence, and uncertain shifts in power.

The Redstick War coincided with the failure of food diplomacy.

This collapse occurred after years of uncertain relations between Americans and

Southern Indians. After the Western Confederacy War ended at the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, Creeks’ and Georgians’ mutual complaints about each other and an upsurge of violence in the South resulted in a meeting at the Treaty of Colerain. The Creeks’ response to the Georgia commissioners’ metaphorical and ineffective food diplomacy demonstrated that the federal government’s power had increased sufficiently enough to shape Natives’ decisions. On the banks of the St. Marys the U.S. government offered a more benevolent diplomatic alternative to the land-hungry Georgians—a position they began to alter almost immediately.

As federal Indian agents set about practicing food diplomacy, Native women encouraged officials such as Benjamin Hawkins to believe that the Plan of Civilization would succeed. This maneuvering allowed Creek and Cherokee women to request

129 Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads, 87. 130 Ethridge, Creek Country, 155.

339 additional gifts of grain, salt, and animals from the Americans; it enabled them to obtain fixed prices; and it provided for the establishment of permanent marketplaces where they could sell the edible products of their labor.

As Creeks and Cherokees experienced this transfer of power from the state to the federal in the 1790s and 1800s, they also witnessed changes in food diplomacy. In the

1790s the American government attempted to implement a more coercive system. Indian agents forced Cherokees and Creeks to come to officials for food, tried to limit their consumption, and expected Natives to make good progress planting crops and decreasing their tendency to hunt. Crop failures and American expansion prevented the total success of this new, less compromising diplomacy. Native men continued to hunt and acquire cattle in predominantly Indian ways, and women overwhelmingly refused to sit at looms and spinning wheels. Indians persistently consumed large amounts of provisions, and paid only cursory lip service to American-style husbandry. They also resorted to violence when officials failed to meet their needs, which convinced the American government that they needed U.S. commissioners with greater powers, as well as men committed to reforming Indian foodways on the ground. Yet officials who sought to further control the movement of Indian foodstuffs could only watch when food shortages resulted in a final violent showdown between Americans and Redstick Creeks in the 1810s.

This tendency to use food to broker peace, as well as to wage war—wrought on the battlefields of upstate New York, the swamps of Florida, and a field in the Ohio

Valley where trees lay scattered by tornadoes—remained a part of American culture after the war. But it also departed with the people who lived through the Revolution and then

340 fled in its aftermath. They were the black Loyalists. And they were bound for Nova

Scotia and Sierra Leone.

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Chapter 7: “One days alowance of frish Beef for a Christmas diner”: Race and Food Laws in Nova Scotia

Sometime before the end of the American Revolution, black Loyalist David

George “borrowed money from some of the Black people to buy hogs,” and sold pork to the British to broker safe passage to Charleston.1 Throughout the course of the war, food became an essential commodity that former slaves used to attain greater degrees of mobility, and easier access to information. As the tides of war shifted, however, and things began to go decidedly less well for His Majesty’s troops, black Loyalists struggled to follow the British as they retreated. During the siege of Yorktown, Lord Cornwallis ordered the horses killed to save on forage, and unceremoniously ousted the runaway slaves in the hospital at Gloucester to save on rations. Food became so dear after the

British surrendered that dogs ate the amputated limbs left behind.2 When the former slaves heard of a “dreadful rumour” from New York stating “that all slaves, in number

2000, were to be delivered up to their masters,” South Carolina-born Boston King could not have eaten even had he wanted to: “we lost our appetite for food, and sleep departed from our eyes.”3 Yet people like David George, who had used food to ensure their safe escape from one colony to another, also managed to take their leave of the new United

States, and to go to present-day Canada.

1 “An Account of the Life of Mr. DAVID GEORGE, from Sierra Leone in Africa; given by himself in a Conversation with Brother RIPPON of London, and Brother PEARCE of Birmingham,” (London, 1793- 1797), in Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 336. 2 Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 51, 53. 3 “Memoirs of the Life of BOSTON KING, a Black Preacher. Written by Himself, during his Residence at Kingswood-School,” (London, 1798), in Carretta, Unchained Voices, 356.

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The foodways that black Loyalists encountered in Nova Scotia proved different from their wartime iterations. Whereas during the war former slaves used their proximity to foodstuffs to travel from place to place and to obtain intelligence, those opportunities did not exist to the same extent in Nova Scotia. Rather, blacks’ experiences with food increasingly resembled the problems of Native Americans in the United States: the

Loyalists learned how more powerful groups of people used food as a tool of social and political control.

Although other historians have argued that the absence of land became the impetus for black Loyalist migration from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, I contend that the lack of land became a problem only when other means of obtaining food disappeared. In addition to failures in provisioning and land allotments, black Loyalists reckoned with environmental changes that wrought drought on their crops, frost on their limbs, and starvation on their bodies. But the rise of food laws became the final nail in the coffin of black Loyalist colonization in Nova Scotia.

The black Loyalists briefly enjoyed an unprecedented amount of freedom in the various markets that came into being in Nova Scotia’s urban centers, but by the end of the eighteenth century white Loyalists had enacted increasingly restrictive food laws that curtailed blacks’ power in the marketplace. Although food laws obviously existed in the

American colonies before the Revolution, in Nova Scotia such laws restricted black foodways specifically. In other words, though the laws’ writers may not have envisioned such legislation as a set of laws about race, these new regulations effectively targeted one group of people. Because of the way land allotment issues unfolded, food laws

343 overwhelmingly infringed upon black Loyalists’ abilities to feed themselves. Once these laws came into effect, many of these people turned their attention to Sierra Leone.

Another group of arrivals in Nova Scotia, the Jamaica Maroons, would also face changes in their foodways. They came to British North America after a third of the black

Loyalists departed for Africa, and would then follow them to Sierra Leone. Their experiences with food seemed strikingly similar. The Maroons also suffered from provisions shortages, received insufficient lands, and hated the cold weather. By refusing to grow food and threatening white colonists with victual warfare, the Maroons eventually secured their passage out of the province. The similarities between the

Maroons’ and black Loyalists’ experiences with food would set the stage for their arrival on the west coast of Africa.

***

First, the Loyalists needed to get out of the United States. When General

Washington met with Sir Guy Carleton in May 1783 to talk about the return of American property, the two men disagreed on key definitional issues with respect to what constituted an American slave. In 1779, British Commander-in-Chief Sir Henry Clinton had issued his Philipsburg Proclamation, which effectually offered freedom to slaves of

Americans who rose against the British.4 Clinton offered protection to slaves “such as fled within the British Lines from their Rebel Masters,” and as slaves viewed the proclamation as “an actual emancipation,” a fair number of them “flocked in.”5 In 1782,

4 Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 31-2; James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783-1870 (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1976), 2. 5 [Anonymous], “Negroes,” [N.D.], f. 86, CO 5/8, part I, TNA.

344 when Carleton and Washington met and agreed to the Provisional Articles of British surrender, the seventh of those articles stated that the British would withdraw all troops

“without causing any destruction, or carrying away any Negroes.” In 1783, however,

Carleton modified his stance and argued that black slaves who had run away to British lines and sought freedom under proclamations such as Clinton’s and Dunmore’s (of

1775) had earned their freedom by running. By his reasoning the terms of the seventh article did not apply to them. Despite Washington’s protestations that the provisional article forbade the carrying away of any blacks, it was in part too late for such quibbling on definitional matters; Carleton had already allowed some blacks to leave the country.6

Others would follow en masse.

At the end of the Revolution, over 60,000 Loyalists departed the American colonies, taking 15,000 slaves with them. About 8,000 went to Jamaica, and at least another 3,600 sailed to the Bahamas. The over 30,000 Loyalists who established themselves in British North America took 2,000 slaves with them. Another group of

3,000 black Loyalists moved there as freedmen. In the last half of April 1783, Carleton’s commissioners in New York counted 328 men, 230 women, and 48 children headed to

Nova Scotia as free men and women. Something must have occurred en route, because when the first two vessels docked in Nova Scotia in June, another 165 free blacks were registered. From April to November, 81 ships continuously transported Loyalists from

6 Some British records insist that “such Negroes as were taken after the day of Treaty, or that came within the Lines, were given up” to the Americans, and not allowed to depart for Canada. [Anonymous], [Untitled], [N.D.], f. 84, CO 5/8, part I; [Anonymous], “Negroes,” [N.D.], ff. 86-87, CO 5/8, part I, TNA.; Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 31-32; James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 81; Henry Wiencek, An American God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 256-58.

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New York to the Northern British provinces; Boston King and his wife, Violet, arrived in

August, via the ship L’Abondance. By November, 2,714 blacks had gone to Nova Scotia, with another 286 slated to depart. Of these, 1,336 were men, 914 were women, and 750 were children. Two-thirds hailed from Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and North

Carolina. The rest came from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.7

British administrators devoted a significant amount of time to making food preparations that would ensure incoming colonists’ abilities to thrive in Nova Scotia.

Surveyors went on ahead to assess the land, and to make sure that sufficient supplemental foodways existed should farming efforts fail. These early efforts underscore the extent to which planners tied preparations for land allotments to questions about food security. In a

January 1783 meeting, the Port Roseway Associates—the name the Loyalists in New

York gave to themselves—learned that they had “chosen the best Situation in the province for Trade, Fishery, and Farming.” The surveyor general “thinks the Lands back of Port Roseway, Jordan River, and towards the An[n]apolis to the good, though he says we must expect some indifferent land in every part of the Province.” They would find that “Strawberry’s are in great perfection,” as well as “Currants, Raspberrys, Cherrys,

Gooseberrys, Plumbs, Apples, & Pears and almost every other New England fruit but peaches at Port Roseway.” They could grow “Oats, Barley, Rye, and the best of Flax,”

7 “Recapitulation of the number of Negroes who have availed themselves of the Late Commanders in Chiefs Proclamations by comming in within the British Lines in North America...,” photostat 1047, f. 257, box 43, British Headquarters Papers, NYPL; Maya Jasanoff, “The Other Side of the Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 65, no. 2 (April 2008), 208, 220; Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 33, Phyllis R. Blakely, “Boston King: A Black Loyalist,” in Phyllis R. Blakeley and John N. Grant, eds., Eleven Exiles: Accounts of Loyalists of the American Revolution (Toronto and Charlottetown: Dundurn Press Limited, 1982), 273; Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), 69.

346 and during the previous year inhabitants had raised “Siberian Wheat in perfection.”8 In this early evaluation, most of the lands would lend themselves to farming, and fruit trees and fish would provide adequate additional food. The double use of the word

“perfection” conveyed optimism about the colony’s prospects.9

The British government also made preparations to supply the Loyalists with supplemental provisions for their first months in Nova Scotia. The Port Roseway

Associates obtained provisions for whites and free blacks alike.10 All people over the age of ten would draw an allowance of six months’ full provisions, while children would get six months’ half allowance.11 Accordingly, on March 8, 1783, members of the Port

Roseway Associates in New York passed a motion that proposed, “that each member do immediately give...a correct list of their names and families, with the age of every person in the family, describing their sexes, and that the same may be attended to with respect to

8 Joseph Pynchon, letter to Gentlemen, Halifax, 23 January, 1783, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Port Roseway Associates, 1782, 61-64, Shelburne historical records collection, microfilm reel H-984, LAC. This microfilm reel sometimes contains page numbers, and sometimes those numbers have been left out. I have attempted to cite them when they were legible and seemed consistent with the overall numbering style. Some numbering, such as that in the Court Records, is not consistent at all. 9 It also suggested that, even as late as the eighteenth century, British colonizers still evinced troubling (and false) assumptions that new lands were Edenic bastions of paradisiacal abundance. 10 In a report marked “important,” the Associates also tackled the matter of provisions for slaves, whom they referred to as “servants.” These slaves would receive food as long as they remained part of the “Associators who should take passage” in Port Roseway vessels; whites bringing slaves on their own ships would not collect provisions. It is possible that officials imposed this rule in order to keep track of the number of people entering the province, and to prevent whites who sailed separately from claiming more compensation than they were entitled to. Tracking the distribution of provisions for slaves is a complicated matter because, as Robin Winks, James W. St. G. Walker, and others have pointed out, slaves were frequently referred to by white Loyalists as “servants,” a term that made them indistinguishable from the white servants who also accompanied colonists on their journey out of the thirteen states. See Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 37-38; Walker, The Black Loyalists, 40; Jasanoff, “The Other Side of the Revolution,” 220n21. 11 Report, 20 March, 1783, 89, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Port Roseway Associates, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC.

347 their Servants.”12 The Associates made the best effort they could to count the number of people embarking, to provide food enough for all of them, and to effect this process quickly.

Despite these extensive preparations, Loyalists expressed reservations about their chances to prosper in Nova Scotia. Their complaints about future quantities of provisions betray the Loyalists’ sense of powerlessness, and their trepidation upon embarking on a forced exodus. These men and women could not control the directions of their lives (the

Port Roseway Associates’ claim that they had “chosen” their landing spot notwithstanding); they felt as if they needed to migrate out of the United States because they could not imagine reconciling with victorious Americans. And so, they resorted to using foodways to try to regain a sense of control.

Loyalists voiced their discontent when they learned that the Nova Scotian government had already refused them a portion of the provisions they anticipated receiving. By the start of 1783 Governor John Parr decreed from Halifax that although men and boys over thirteen years of age would get six months of full provisions, half provisions would suffice for women, and children would receive one fourth of the full amount.13 Toward the end of March, Rhode Island-born Captain Joseph Durfee, one of the key leaders of the Port Roseway Associated Loyalists, reported that after hearing about these arrangements, some Loyalists “were much affect’d and discouraged.” He referred to a group of Loyalists who left New York for Nova Scotia between the fall of

12 8 March 1783, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Port Roseway Associates, 81-83, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC. 13 Parr was sworn in at Halifax on October 9, 1782. Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 71; Mary Archibald, “Joseph Durfee: Shelburne Pioneer,” in Blakeley and Grant, eds., Eleven Exiles, 13.

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1782 and spring of 1783, and observed that the new group of colonists had “indulged the

Idea...they were to have the same allowance, as those Loyalists, who went to Nova

Scotia, last fall.” He noted that some of them “were so much dismayed that I believed many of the number would not go.”14 The Port Roseway Associates apparently expected more extensive provisioning because those who preceded them had received such generous supplies.

Yet British officials knew that Loyalists’ threats to remain in the United States carried little real weight; Guy Carleton realized that the Loyalists would eventually feel compelled to leave. His response to Durfee, Durfee reported, was “to say that Six Months

Provision were ordered, [and] that all Males and Females upwards of ten years of Age would draw full allowance, which was never done before.” Carleton reminded them that the Loyalists who relocated the preceding fall had been “obliged to live the whole winter on their Provision, and our Associates would (if they arrive there early) have equal benefit.” He reassured them that the Government would not “set a number of people down there, ‘And say, We will do nothing more for you; You may starve. There is no doubt but if they are in want they will be supplied.’” Carleton offered reassurance, and he also restored women to full provisions, and pushed the age line back to those who were older than ten, rather than thirteen. Carleton then switched from his amicable tone to one that more adequately conveyed his annoyance with the Loyalists’ wavering. He

14 In the records, the Port Roseway Associated Loyalists call themselves the Port Roseway Associates. Durfee was elected president at ten out of the twenty-four meetings the Association held in New York City. Captain Durfee’s Report, New York, 26 March 1783, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Port Roseway Associates, 94, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC; Archibald, “Joseph Durfee: Shelburne Pioneer,” in Blakeley and Grant, eds., Eleven Exiles, 91, 101.

349 concluded, “that Government did not Chuse to make a bargain with the Association, and if any were dissatisfied they had better Not Go, if they could do better for themselves.”15

Carleton’s response to this new wave of Loyalist refugees indicated that by this time, restrictive American food diplomacy actually shared many similarities with British diplomacy. This observation makes a lot of sense; whereas British food diplomacy with

Natives continued to offer Indians concessions and additional foodstuffs because British officials relied upon Natives to form a buffer zone between the U.S. and Canada, the

Loyalists could offer British officials very little. Carleton suggested that the government was acting generously. He maintained that those who arrived in Nova Scotia and found themselves strapped for provisions could always apply to the Government for further assistance, and ended with a statement that urged colonists to cease their complaining and embark for Nova Scotia, or else remain in the U.S. and fend for themselves. British generosity only extended so far, and illuminated the relative weakness that Loyalists must have felt.

And so, they departed. One group of Loyalists arrived on May 4, 1783, and established themselves about 130 miles southwest of Halifax, in Port Roseway, which they renamed Shelburne. By midyear, thousands more Loyalists, including 1,500 free blacks, had arrived. A group of Black Pioneers were charged with the clearing and construction of Shelburne; a free-born Barbadian mulatto, Colonel Stephen Blucke, took command of this company.16

15 Captain Durfee’s Report, New York, 26 March 1783, Minutes of the Proceedings of the Port Roseway Associates, 94, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC. 16 Ellen Gibson Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1980), 66. Wilson notes that Stephen Blucke is referred to as a colonel in the records, but she

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Free blacks lived amongst themselves, as well as in predominantly white communities. Former slaves comprised the majority of the population at Birchtown,

Brindley Town, and Little Tracadie.17 One historian, citing a 1784 muster at Birchtown, notes that Birchtown officially housed 1,521 free blacks, but he estimates that the black population in all of Shelburne County was more likely at least double that number. Free blacks also lived in other Loyalist communities, such as in Shelburne, or Preston (which was approximately 11 miles northeast of Halifax).18

Black migration to Nova Scotia comprised only a small portion of the Loyalist diaspora, but the relocation of former slaves is significant because of the ways in which food shortages affected their lives during the last decades of the eighteenth and first decades of the nineteenth centuries. The former Black Pioneers, at least, came with the skills necessary to provide food for themselves and their families when they moved in to

Birchtown. Robert Roberts was twenty-four when he arrived in Birchtown; his wife,

Jenny, was twenty-three. Roberts was listed as a farmer in the Shelburne muster book.

So, too, was David George, the Baptist minister from Georgia, with whom this chapter began. Other farmers included Richard Laurence and Charles Wilkinson of Captain

was unable to find records of his wartime service. He was commissioned a lieutenant colonel of the black militia in Shelburne on 7 September 1784. Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 85, 87. 17 Birchtown is on the Shelburne harbor, four and a half miles away from Shelburne itself; Brindley Town is now current-day Jordantown, and is about 100 miles away on the opposite, northwestern side of the peninsula; Little Tracadie is the farthest away from Shelburne, over 200 miles on the northeast portion of Nova Scotia. 18 Historians disagree about Shelburne population numbers: some place counts at 8,600, other at 10,000, and others at 16,000. They agree that by 1784 Shelburne would rank as the fourth largest English-speaking city within North America, and the biggest in British North America. Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 36-38; Walker, The Black Loyalists, 22, 28; Neil MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil: The Loyalist Experience in Nova Scotia 1783-1791 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986), 50; John N. Grant, “...those in General called Loyalists,” Archibald, “Joseph Durfee: Shelburne Pioneer,” and Blakely, “Boston King: A Black Loyalist,” in Blakeley and Grant, eds., Eleven Exiles, 15, 108, 276.

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Nicholson’s Company; Anthony Cooper, Henry Darling, Thomas Freeman, Pompey

Donaldson, Jacob Williams, and Richard Jarrat of Captain Scott Murray’s Company; and

Anthony Davis, William Fortune, and Peter Daniel of Captain Jacob With’s Company.19

Many of the occupations listed next to the names of incoming Loyalists suggested that other men, in addition to the farmers, would find it easy to gather or prepare food.

Anthony Post, aged thirty, was a miller; Thomas Kane, thirty-one, was a fisherman;

Marsh Jones, forty, was a gardener; Isaac Taylor, forty-three, was a butcher; John Charles

Glass, forty, was a cook; and men named Fortune Rivers and Norfolk Virginia were a cook and a baker, respectively.20 In addition, historians might speculate about the ways in which the wives of these men (for many of the men migrated with women and children) aided or took charge of food preparation outside of their homes. John Thomas, for example, was a baker, but he died either en route or upon arrival. Perhaps his wife,

Elizabeth took over his work in order to feed their daughter, Christiana, who was nine years old.21

For a very brief period of time after their arrival, the black Loyalists enjoyed an extraordinary degree of freedom where foodways were concerned. Whereas whites held power in other arenas, free blacks in the marketplace experienced an unusual degree of

19 Muster Book of Free Black Settlement at Birchtown, 132-33 (Roberts), 173-74 (George), 136-37 (Laurence), 138-39 (Wilkinson), 144-45 (Cooper), 148-49 (Freeman and Donaldson), 150-51 (Williams), 156-57 (Jarrat), 164-65 (Davis), 168-69 (Fortune), and 170-71 (Daniel), Shelburne historical records collection, LAC. 20 Muster Book of Free Black Settlement at Birchtown, 128-29 (Post), 132-33 (Kane), 148-49 (Jones), 156- 57 (Taylor), 158-59 (Glass), 162-63 (Rivers), 136-37 (Virginia), Shelburne historical records collection, LAC. 21 Muster Book of Free Black Settlement at Birchtown, 130-37, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC.

352 control over local markets.22 In comparison to slaves in the American South, and especially the Lowcountry, who sold the produce their masters allowed them to grow in order to painstakingly save to buy their freedom, these men and women could grow, sell, and charge what they wanted because in the beginning years of colonization they acted as more than mere bit players in the Nova Scotian economy. Of the free blacks who went to the northern British colonies, the majority went to Nova Scotia, and most of them were free men who optimistically conceived of themselves as Loyalists entitled to the same privileges as their white counterparts. And indeed, the white inhabitants of Shelburne needed labor, and were willing to pay for it. Blacks who had to wait for their land allotments fished and brought goods to market—frequently earning a decent profit.23

During the early 1780s, Nova Scotia did not possess a central marketplace.

Rather, any number of locations, either in the center of more urban areas or the roads into them, served as venues where former slaves chose to buy and sell their produce. By way of contrast with Creek Indians, who asked American Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins to give them a single marketplace, black Loyalists benefitted from this lack of centralization because little competition existed, and they could earn greater profits. There were

“Several markets in Halifax,” and the “Butchers and Fishmongers” who “for want of a public market” could “use shops and stands in different places about the Town.” These men “hawk[ed] their meat and poultry though the Streets.” Free blacks could set up

22 My reading of the following sources has been influenced by Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), especially 178-79, 219; Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, NC: the University of North Carolina Press, 2003), ch. 2, esp. 46-49. 23 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 35, 38.

353 makeshift shops for their produce, or they could carry it on their backs and sell it out where they wished. Blacks in Preston, for example, sold seasonally-caught fish—dogfish, eel, flounder, haddock, herring, salmon, shad, skate, and sturgeon—to whites in various local markets.24

Over time black Loyalists became an influential buying force: when a large number of them left the Preston-Dartmouth region for Sierra Leone in 1792, their imminent departure caused the price of potatoes to drop from three dollars and one shilling to two and a half dollars per bushel. Remembering the black Loyalists after they left, Sir John Wentworth, Lieutenant-Governor of Nova Scotia, reflected that they

“contributed very materially to...supplying this Market with Vegetables and Poultry.”

Even as late as 1797, some of those who remained in British North America enjoyed the fact that their produce garnered a “great profit” in Halifax.25

For the most part, however, the profits and mobility that black Loyalists enjoyed via their participation in the market economy did not last, and delays in land allotments ensured that blacks suffered to a greater degree than their white counterparts. In

Shelburne, whites who had formerly served as soldiers competed with free landless blacks for work. In July of 1784 an angry mob attacked Birchtown, destroying almost twenty houses belonging to blacks in retaliation for the loss of jobs, and the ceding to

24 For the types of fish available in Shelburne, see Stephen Kimber, Loyalists and Layabouts: The Rapid Rise and Faster Fall of Shelburne, Nova Scotia: 1783-1792 (Canada: Doubleday Canada, 2008), 163. 25 For the price of potatoes, see Walker, The Black Loyalists, 43, 46; for other quotes see John Wentworth to the Duke of Portland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 24 May 1800, f. 203, CO 217/73; John Wentworth to the Duke of Portland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 5 May 1799, f. 31, CO 217/70; Alexander Howe to W.D. Quarrell, Maroon Hall, 9 August 1797, f. 173, CO 217/68, TNA.

354 black colonists of what whites saw as better lands.26 For the most part, however, blacks received lands of significantly lesser qualities than those given to whites—when they received them at all.

Various historians have addressed these land issues, but they bear repeating here because complaints about land led directly into subsequent problems related to foodways.

Problems with land allotment began as early as September 1783, when surveyor

Benjamin Marston discovered that another surveyor had encroached on lands reserved for the black Loyalists by reserving those lots for whites.27 Only 184 out of the 649

Birchtown blacks obtained land, and these lots averaged 34 acres, compared to white allotments, which averaged 74. By 1785 in Annapolis County, 76 free blacks had received land grants of one acre each, all in Digby, whereas whites each received between one hundred and four hundred acres. Here, as well as in Annapolis, blacks spent months waiting for lands that took a long time to be given out. In Clements in 1789, 148 out of 184 acres went to blacks. Each was supposed to receive 50 acres, but the transactions on these grants were rarely confirmed—meaning that once again, these blacks did not get the land promised to them. At Tracadie, Preston, and Hammond’s

Plains, the land was notably barren. Although one historian has noted that by 1788 most of the refugees in all of Nova Scotia had received their lands, these lots averaged forty acres—a significantly smaller allotment than those given to whites.28

26 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 38-9; Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 175. 27 Blakely, “Boston King: A Black Loyalist,” in Blakeley and Grant, eds., Eleven Exiles, 273-74. 28 Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 34-47; Walker, The Black Loyalists, 18; Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 35-39; MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil, 50;

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The connection between land dearth, spikes in hunger, and the refugees’ former slave statuses became readily apparent. When John Clarkson, anti-slavery advocate and future governor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, arrived in Halifax, he observed that because the refugees “never had Lands,” they had been “obliged to live upon White-mens property...and for cultivating it they receive half the produce so that they are in Short in a state of Slavery.”29 To Clarkson this situation may have seemed even worse than that of slaves forced to labor for white masters, because in those instances slaves received food—even if the food consisted of what slaveholders deemed the bare minimum. As historian Dylan Penningroth has observed, southern slaveholders restricted slaves’ free time but not their access to land. In Nova Scotia, black Loyalists possessed no economy of land.30 Non-landholding blacks could claim no control over the amount of food they received, and whether or not they would find work from day to day. Of course, Clarkson remained predominantly concerned with the black Loyalists’ near-slave state writ large, rather than their food shortages specifically. Still, his observations about food illustrate the relative powerlessness of black Loyalists during this time.

Furthermore, although some blacks called themselves farmers in the muster rolls, most of their farming experience consisted of slave fieldwork. Even if they had received land, they would not have known how to farm it: they had become accustomed to Hudson

River land in New York that readily yielded good produce, or the Chesapeake Bay, with

Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 148; Blakely, “Boston King: A Black Loyalist,” in Blakeley and Grant, eds., Eleven Exiles, 276. 29 These quotes are taken from John Clarkson’s notebook that he kept upon arrival in Halifax, which is mostly undated and unnumbered. “Remarks Halifax,” f. 8, Add. MS 41262B, BL; see also John Clarkson to William Dawes, Freetown, 5 October 1792, “Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson, R.N. (governor, 1792),” Sierra Leone Studies ([Freetown, Sierra Leone]), no.VIII (March 1927), 34. 30 Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, 47.

356 its warm climate. Nova Scotia, by contrast, was cold, the soil was rocky and thin, and men toiled the lands they managed to acquire—usually those 1 to 40 measly acres—on their own.31

Tensions between blacks and whites became evident through a number of noticeable food inequalities. An anonymous writer of a 1787 depiction of Shelburne observed, that “Never were known greater mixtures of privy & meanness than many of the families here exhibit.” Some people, most likely whites, “seem passionately fond of all kinds of delicious food & drink.” These people reminded the writer of what St. Paul said “in the Characters of the Cretians ‘Whose God is their Belly & who glory in their shame.”32 Not all whites enjoyed such gustatory excess, but at least in Halifax, white

Loyalists received provisions of codfish, molasses, and hard biscuit, with a very occasional supply of meat; blacks, by contrast, subsisted on meal and molasses. In

Shelburne, all Loyalists were hypothetically entitled to pork and flour, but free black servants who left the white families with whom they had migrated lost their rights to government-issued rations. Often, white employers continued to draw those provisions in their absence. Furthermore, distributors doled out provisions in Shelburne, meaning that blacks living in Birchtown faced a three-mile walk through the woods between them and their weekly subsistence—at least during the winter, when the harbor froze over and the

31 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 35-36; MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil, 50; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 148; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 103; for a primary source that describes blacks’ lack of qualifications as farmers, see T[heophilius] Chamberlain to Lawrence Hartshorne, Preston, 26 December 1791, f. 25, Add. MS 41262A, BL. 32 [James Fraser], “A Sketch of Shelburnian Manners, Anno 1787,” 213, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC. The authorship of this piece is uncertain, but is usually ascribed to Scotsman James Fraser, district judge of New Brunswick in 1788. See Thomas Thorner and Thor Frohn-Nielsen, eds., A Few Acres of Snow: Documents in Pre-Confederation Canadian History, 3rd Edition (North York, Ontario: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 81.

357 ferry could not run. By December 1784 blacks in Digby would have received 12,098 pounds of flour and 9,352 pounds of pork—these 80 rations were the only rations they would ever receive in Nova Scotia.33 Despite the preparations of the Port Roseway

Associates, the skills of black Loyalists, and blacks’ momentary influence in Nova

Scotian marketplaces, the process of obtaining food proved a monumental task.

When the government failed to allocate land, the fact that British officials lagged behind in doling out provisions caused further problems. When the first company arrived in 1782-83, provisions were absent.34 When John Clarkson conducted interviews with various blacks in the months before their final departure to Africa, he linked land and food absences: “Jacob Coffee, served in the army last war, never recd either Lands or

Provisions”; “Saml. Jones served in the army last War, never recd either Lands or

Provisions.”35 During the American Revolution blacks’ mobility within the British army meant that when foodstuffs became scarce, they could move somewhere new to procure it. In Nova Scotia, by contrast, they lost that ability. Blacks who received no lands felt forced into remaining in the province because they depended on whites with land to give them the labor that allowed them to earn their bread—also, because they could not to return to the United States, where they faced potential re-enslavement. Their relationship with food, however, also began to resemble that of their former slave lives. Yet as long as they could sell additional produce to get by, they stayed in the province.

33 Walker, The Black Loyalists, 44-45, Blakely, “Boston King: A Black Loyalist,” in Blakeley and Grant, eds., Eleven Exiles, 274-76; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 81, 87, 104; Mary Louise Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown: Black Loyalists After the American Revolution (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1999), 62. 34 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 35-36; MacKinnon, This Unfriendly Soil, 50. 35 John Clarkson, “Remarks Halifax,” f. 1, Add Ms. 41262B, BL.

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The rise of food laws became the final hitch that prevented the successful relocation of black Loyalists in Nova Scotia. Obviously, the use of food laws to control other people in the North American British colonies was a practice with precedents at least as early as the founding of Jamestown.36 In the Mississippi Valley of the current century, colonial officials had wavered between allowing slaves to openly market their goods and produce, and requiring them to carry written permits from their owners.37 In

1784, New Orleans officials had established a fixed marketplace, where they required sellers to do business in rented stalls. Slaves, of course, found it difficult to obtain stall permits and licenses to hawk food.38 Yet former slaves could also look back to days of unrestricted food sales in the American South, and to their recent undertakings in Nova

Scotia.

What little clout free blacks had enjoyed in those markets, these new laws rescinded beginning in the mid-1780s—very shortly after their arrival. At the start of

1784 the Shelburne Court set about passing food-related laws. A Court of Sessions was established, and Joseph Durfee assumed the Judgeship over the Court of Common

Pleas.39 In February 1785, the Shelburne court ordered that bread sold by bakers “shall be a six-penny loaf, to Weigh one pound, thirteen ounces...And that all such Bread shall be made of good, sound inspected Wheaten flour.” In June of the same year, the court made further stipulations that people who sold bread needed to shape it into “single, or double

36 Rachel Herrmann, “The ‘tragicall historie’: Cannibalism and Abundance in Colonial Jamestown,” the William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 68, no. 1 (January 2011): 47-74. 37 Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 197. 38 Usner, Indians, Settlers, & Slaves, 215. 39 Archibald, “Joseph Durfee: Shelburne Pioneer,” in Blakeley and Grant, eds., Eleven Exiles, 109.

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Loaves,” the pricing of which would “from time to time be regulated.”40 Bread laws ensured that free black bakers such as Norfolk Virginia (and possibly, Elizabeth

Thomas), would find it difficult to conform to government-decreed weight standards.

These sorts of regulations prevented people who practiced baking as a side occupation or those who baked with cornmeal--a slave staple—or rye flour, from bringing their produce to market.

The courts also modified the meaning of the marketplace itself, making it difficult for blacks to sell their foods as freely as before. In May 1785, the court forbade meat, fish, vegetables, “or other articles of provisions” from being sold “in any street, lane, or on the strand, or shore of this town, other than in the market, or places established by order of Sessions,” such as “Markets in King street, and at the Cove.” Obviously, not everyone adhered to these laws, as evidenced by the fact that even as late as 1800, members of the Shelburne Grand Jury observed, “That the want of some place as a

Market for the reception of a Number of small articles of the Provision kind, brought by the Country People” was “the Cause of a Number of Inconveniencies, & indeed,

Impositions, by being, in many Instances bought up, and sold again at a shameful advance.”41 The court complained that “country people”—blacks who lived further away because of unequal land distribution—were taking advantage of the lack of a central marketplace to sell goods for astronomical profits. People still managed to sell provisions in odd places and at high prices, but the passing of such regulations still limited blacks’

40 As stated above, the court records suffer from spotty reel numbering. I have provided a date and volume number—several volumes fit inside of one reel. Court Records, 17 February 1785, 7 July 1785, 12 May 1785, vol. 6, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC. 41 Court Records, 18 March 1800, volume 6, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC.

360 participation in the market economy. For the most part, free blacks could no longer sell their goods where they wished, which meant that the selling of produce in one concentrated place made those goods subject to price control.

Another set of rules and regulations passed on April 10, 1786 limited fishing activities—one of the main ways in which blacks without lands supplemented their diet and income. Boston King later observed that upon first arriving in Nova Scotia, white colonists were too focused on “building large houses, and striving to excel one another in this piece of vanity.” Only “when their money was almost expended” did whites begin

“to build small fishing vessels”; they realized that they, too, would need to pursue additional food sources.42

Fishing laws benefitted colonists with better lands, the majority of whom were white. Laws prohibited fishing nets and seines from reaching more than a third of the way into a river; fishing was banned from Saturday to Monday; and erecting a dam on the river was not allowed “under any pretence whatever” as a means to “obstruct the Passage of the Fish.” These rules tended to give preference to white fishermen: people who owned advantageous land by the river (usually, not blacks), got the first choice of net placement.43 If a black Loyalist had to work on a white man’s farm during the week, he could not fish on the weekend; and if he was lucky enough to live on the river but far away, the law prevented him from damming it to trap fish. These regulations meant that blacks encountered fewer means to feed themselves, and that whites could more easily

42 “Memoirs of the Life of BOSTON KING,” 360. 43 David George was one of the few black Loyalists who was awarded land by the water, but he was the first to say that he used it for Baptisms. “An Account of the Life of Mr. DAVID GEORGE,” 337; Court Records, 10 April 1786, vol. 6, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC.

361 gain control of the fish trade. Although there is no evidence that whites enacted such laws with the intention to circumscribe the foodways of black Loyalists, the laws nevertheless threatened blacks’ food security specifically.

***

As in so many other locations in the Revolutionary Atlantic, environmental disasters struck at the worst possible moment. During the late 1780s very cold weather led to a short planting season, which in turn resulted in a sparse crop. A bad agricultural year should have compelled British officials to issue more food provisions, but Nova

Scotian food supplies mimicked food issues in the American South: no excess foodstuffs existed. Instead, the British government stopped issuing provisions. Divisions between whites and free blacks widened as food conditions worsened.

By the late-1780s, Shelburne was turning into a ghost town, and food was increasingly scarce. In 1785 a slave was hanged in Halifax for the crime of stealing a bag of potatoes.44 Most white Loyalists possessed the means to leave, so many moved closer to Liverpool, Tusket, and Yarmouth. Some freed blacks followed them there, but those without the funds to do so stayed behind. 1787 was a particularly bad year. The country

“was visited with a dreadful famine.” Some people “killed and eat their dogs and cats.”

Others “fell down dead in the streets, thro’ hunger.”45 The cold winters did not help the

44 Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 104. 45 “Memoirs of the Life of BOSTON KING,” 360.

362 situation: some of the Nova Scotians spent them living in shoddy shelters that were really holes in the ground with flimsy roofs.46

White colonists Samuel Campbell, Alexander Robertson, and Robert Ross sent an undated memorial to Governor Parr describing the state of the province. They noted that officials still had not distributed land, and “future subsistence by Agriculture has been denied.” They complained, “It is now above six weeks since the Salt Provisions provided for the use of the Loyalists have been expended, and now there remains no provisions of any kind in his Majesties Stores.” They speculated that the absence of land combined with the lack of provisions meant that “the horrors of Famine must ensue.” Their fears about starvation seemed even more reasonable when they explained that “the period approches when it is apprehended the Royal bounty”—government-supplied provisions—“will cease.”47 And indeed it did. 1787 was also the year when the government stopped issuing rations, despite Carleton’s earlier reassurance that the British would not allow colonists to starve.48 In light of these circumstances, it is not difficult to understand why the Nova Scotians encountered trouble farming; those who received lands contended with poor soil and unpredictable weather, while the rest possessed no assurance that the government would provide supplemental provisions should their other foodways fail.

46 Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 83; Laird Niven and Stephen A. Davis, “Birchtown: The History and Material Culture of an Expatriate African American Community,” in John W. Pulis, ed., Moving On: Black Loyalists in the Afro-Atlantic World (New York: Garland, 1999), 59-84, esp. 72. 47 Memorial of Robert Ross, Samuel Campbell, and Alexander Robertson, to Governor Parr, N.D., 307, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC. 48 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 39.

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White colonists evinced little sympathy for the blacks who stayed behind. Early in

1789 the overseers of the poor sent a petition to the magistrates of Shelburne. They noted,

“there are a great number of Black people, both in this Town & in Birchtown, who are in the most distressing Circumstances.” Because “the number of white People, whom we have constantly to supply, are very considerable,” they explained, “it is not in our power to afford the Blacks that assistance” they required. The petitioners pleaded with the magistrates to “free this Infant Settlement from a Burden which it is by no Means in a

Capacity to bear.”49 The overseers clearly demonstrated their hope that Shelburne magistrates would lean on the British government to begin the process of relocating blacks. Between 1789 and 1791, Nova Scotia earned the nickname “Nova Scarcity,” and former slaves began to reconsider whether they wanted to call such a place their home.50

The combination of land issues, scanty or nonexistent provisions, and restrictive food laws made Nova Scotia an unpleasant place to live—deadly even, in some cases.

In November of 1790, Thomas Peters set out to obtain new lives for the free blacks of Nova Scotia. Peters, a Yoruba man who had labored on a sugarcane plantation in French Louisiana, had run away from slavery in North Carolina, joined the Revolution on the British side, and earned a position as private in the Black Pioneers. He arrived in

Nova Scotia in 1783, and in 1790, when he was 53, he sailed to England to petition for the blacks’ removal from the colony to a more advantageous place. Peters heard about the

49 A petition from the Overseers of the poor to the magistrates of Shelburne for the relief of Negroes, 3 February 1789, 209, Shelburne historical records collection, LAC. 50 Although Nova Scotia earned this nickname in the late-1780s, Americans were calling it by that name on the eve of Loyalist departure from the colonies. For this early nickname, see Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 71; for other uses of the term see Walker, The Black Loyalists, 52; John N. Grant, “John Howe, Senior: Printer, Publisher, Postmaster, Spy,” in Blakeley and Grant, Eleven Exiles, 25.

364 plan for a colony in Sierra Leone after another unnamed black man, who was waiting on a party of people eating dinner, overheard them talking about the scheme; he passed the news on to others.51

When Peters arrived in London General Sir Henry Clinton procured a meeting for him with abolitionists Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce, and John and Thomas

Clarkson.52 Peters confirmed that these men were indeed envisioning a new colony “on the River Sierra Leona,” and viewed this plan as the means by which the black Loyalists could remove from Nova Scotia. In a bold petition to them, he argued that Sierra Leone would be “an Asylum much better suited to their Constitutions than Nova Scotia and

New Brunswick,” and suggested that he and the blacks be allowed to remove there.53 On

August 19, 1791 John Clarkson sailed on the Ark from Gravesend to Halifax, arrived on

October 7, and began making preparations for departure to Africa under the auspices of the newly-formed Sierra Leone Company.54

The various groups of black Loyalists reacted to the idea in different ways. By

1791 Shelburne was divided between four free black factions, led by Colonel Stephen

Blucke, Methodist preacher Boston King, Methodist preacher Moses Wilkinson, and

David George, whose Baptist congregation became privy to his habit of very loud

51 Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 178. 52 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 32; Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 54, 93-4, 97; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 282; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 23; Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 63; Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown, 61. 53 Petition of Thomas Peters, 1791, enclosed in John Clarkson to William Wilberforce, [c. after August 18, 1815], ff. 155-56, Add. MS 41263, BL; [Memorial of Thomas Peters,] enclosed in [Unknown] to Governor Parr, Whitehall, 6 August 1791, f. 80, CO 217/72, TNA. 54 See chapter 8.

365 sermonizing.55 In Halifax Clarkson met David George and Stephen Blucke. George expressed enthusiastic interest in the Sierra Leone project, whereas Blucke denounced it as a foolish death mission. Perhaps he thought that the scarcity of Nova Scotia was preferable to the unknown conditions in Sierra Leone. Stephen Skinner, Blucke’s former militia commander, bribed others who said they would stay with two years of free food rations.56 By staying in British North America, they cost the British government less, and thus earned a reward of extra food.

Others remained more open-minded, and Clarkson did what he could to promote the new colonization scheme. After witnessing the starving conditions in Nova Scotia, he even made promises on behalf of the Sierra Leone Company that he was unauthorized to offer.57 Little by little, prospective colonists and their families trickled in from various points to Halifax; by the beginning of December over a thousand blacks had gathered to wait for officials to sort out provisions and shipping matters.

At the very end of December Clarkson received a petition from Thomas Peters and a man named David Edmonds on behalf of the blacks bound for Africa. Anticipating that this year would be “the larst Christmas day that we ever shall see” in America, they

55 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 35-40, 60, 78. 56 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 34; Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 66. 57 Contrary to the Company’s plans for Sierra Leone (which Clarkson probably did not know about), Clarkson promised the black Loyalists in Birchtown that they would owe no quit rents on their lands in Sierra Leone. This promise made migration much more enticing to them. A quit rent was a single monetary payment collected annually. It traditionally allowed English peasants to avoid paying their landlord in labor or produce. Usually, it was low, but in the American colonies colonial administrators had much difficulty in successfully collecting it. In Nova Scotia, no quit rents had been collected since 1772. The black Loyalists would avoid paying it in Nova Scotia, and in Sierra Leone, the Sierra Leone Company would refuse to honor Clarkson’s promise. Gibson, The Loyal Blacks, 73-74.

366 asked him “to grant us one days alowance of frish Beef for a Christmas diner.”58 The black Loyalists knew that the Nova Scotian government had failed them, and so they felt justified in asking for an unprecedented allowance of Christmas beef. This was their last request for food aid in Nova Scotia; they set sail for Sierra Leone in January, 1792.

The black Loyalists received inadequate and unequal land allotments when they got them at all, and environmental conditions disastrously coincided with the government’s decision to stop issuing rations of provisions. Yet until the Nova Scotian courts began to pass food laws that effectively targeted the foodways of these former slaves, the black Loyalists remained in the province. It remains a question whether they stayed by choice, or whether they might have departed sooner if Thomas Peters had petitioned earlier. When Clarkson made his offer of migration, however, a third of the population decided to take their chances in Sierra Leone.

Their choice was a legacy of the War for Independence. During their service for the British, former slaves and free blacks had learned how to move to obtain sustenance, and how to leverage their access to foodstuffs as a way to retain power. Their tenure in

Nova Scotia also gifted them a bequest: it showed them how restrictive food laws could control the lives of other people. Just as their Revolutionary lessons followed the

Loyalists to Nova Scotia, so too would this second set of ideas travel with them to Africa.

***

58 Sometimes Edmonds is written as “Edmons” in the archives. Thomas Peters and David Edmons, In behalf of the Black People of at Halifax bound to Sierra Leone, Halifax, 23 December 1791, f. 24, Add. MS 41262A, the British Library, London, UK; the same document is microfilmed in Clarkson Papers, microfilm reel A-1981, Volume I, f. 24, LAC.

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Although some blacks chose to continue living in Nova Scotia, others were forced there. In 1796, a group of exiled Jamaican Maroons arrived. The Maroons had lived peaceably in Jamaica from the date of their last rebellion, in 1738, until the Second

Maroon War of 1795. These blacks, who were sons and daughters of slaves who either escaped from the Spanish before British conquest of Jamaica in 1655, or else fled from

British slavery in the colonies, had lived successfully in Jamaica until the late war.59 Like the black Loyalists who preceded them, the Maroons would spend less than half a decade in Nova Scotia before going to Sierra Leone. The Maroons’ experience in Nova Scotia was strikingly similar to their black Loyalist predecessors: they suffered when the British government in Jamaica and Nova Scotia failed to make adequate plans for provisions, and they struggled in a climate much more hostile than any that they had previously known. Unlike the Loyalists, however, the Maroons would explicitly refuse to farm, even when they managed to obtain land.60 The ways in which the Maroons dealt with food would set the stage for their lives in Africa. Despite the fact that they suffered from some of the same issues, the Maroons negotiated from a position of relatively greater strength.

59 Robert Charles Dallas, The history of the Maroons, from their origin to the establishment of their chief tribe at Sierra Leone: including the expedition to Cuba, for the purpose of procuring Spanish chasseurs and the state of the island of Jamaica for the last ten years: with a succinct history of the island previous to that period (London: Printed by A. Strahan, Printers-Street, for T.N. Longman and O. Rees, Paternoster- Row, 1803), vol. I, 25-31, 58, Rare Books, HL. On the first Maroon War see Maria Alessandra Bollettino, “Slavery, War, and Britain’s Atlantic Empire: Black Soldiers, Sailors, and Rebels in the Seven Years’ War,” (Ph.D. diss., the University of Texas at Austin, 2009), 12-13. 60 Eleanor Gibson Wilson has argued that British officials treated the Maroons differently in comparison to the black Loyalists. She points out that the Maroons received clothes and household utensils, and that they could call upon doctors, teachers, and a chaplain for medical, intellectual, and religious matters. They were allowed to be tried by their own supervisors from Jamaica, rather than Nova Scotian officials. However, the similarities of the two groups’ experiences with food and hunger are also difficult to ignore. Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 106-07.

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Before they left Jamaica, the Maroons used food diplomacy extensively to communicate with white Jamaican colonists. When the Maroons and colonists concluded a peace at Trelawney Town in March of 1738, the Maroons received lands and “liberty to plant the said lands with coffee, cocoa, ginger, tobacco, and cotton, and to breed cattle, hogs, goats, or any other stock, and dispose of the produce or increase of the said commodities to the inhabitants of this island,” so long as they applied to local magistrates for licenses to “bring the said commodities to market.” When the Windward Town

Maroons made peace the following year, they agreed to similar articles of peace. The

British also agreed that the Maroons should “have liberty to hunt where they shall think fit, except within three miles of any settlement, crawl, or pen.”61 Like the black Loyalists, the Maroons’ foodways provided them with enough of a surplus to bring their commodities to sell in white markets. Women grew cassava, cocoa, coffee, corn, plantains, and yams on their lands, and various fruits and vegetables in their gardens, including avocadoes and pineapples. They bred cattle, fowls, and hogs, and the men hunted ringtail pigeons, land crab, wild boar, and wild hogs, the last of which they jerked.62 Peace between Maroons and white Jamaicans offered the Maroons free reign in the marketplace, food security, and the ability to use food to maintain their autonomy. In exchange, white Jamaicans enjoyed peace of mind, and promises from the Maroons to return runaway slaves.

The roots of the Second Maroon War began in St. Domingue and the rebellion there. White colonists in Jamaica feared a similar resurrection, and tensions subsequently

61 Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. I, 60-61, 76. 62 Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. I, 86, 91, 106-07.

369 flared. Yet the war also contained instances of victual warfare related to land quality and wandering domesticated animals. When a corps of men went to receive the rebellious

Maroons’ grievances, they learned, “That the land originally granted them for their subsistence was worn out, and being not sufficient for their support, they required an additional quantity.”63 Furthermore, although most historians cite the flogging of two

Maroons as the catalyst for the War’s commencement, a lesser-known fact is that these

Maroons “had been convicted” of “killing tame hogs” according to “the evidence of two white people.”64 Small wonder they stole others’ domesticated animals—if, indeed, the white witnesses told the truth.

Food remained a primary concern for the duration of the war. The victual warfare wrought on Maroon towns after white Jamaicans “laid waste” to their “provision- grounds” testifies to whites’ abilities to effect a surrender; the Maroons’ destruction of coffee stores and sugar plantations demonstrates a similar attempt to attack whites’ property; and the fact that the Maroons’ women and children succumbed to an outbreak of measles, were “unable to procure a sufficient quantity of provisions,” and “were almost famished” provides a partial explanation for why the Maroons lost.65

By now these incidents should sound familiar, though it may come as a surprise that these events occurred in Jamaica, rather than upstate New York, the Ohio Valley, or

Georgia. Such similarities testify to the fact that in the Revolutionary Atlantic people

63 It should be noted that previous to the War, the Jamaica Assembly had “surveyed and examined” the Maroons’ lands, and “judged it to be adequate to their support, notwithstanding their increase.” This conclusion, however, rather than suggesting that the Maroons’ lands were still fertile, might also be read as evidence that they had voiced complaints about the land previous to the outbreak of violence. Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. I, 151, 163. 64 Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. I, 144. 65 Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. I, 179, 244-5, vol. II, 138.

370 used food to communicate in predictable violent and peaceful ways. One striking similarity ties these places together: in the years following the American Revolution, it became clear that only some groups of people remained capable of using food to retain power.

After receiving a promise that the Jamaican government would allow them to remain in the colony, the Maroons capitulated. This promise was broken when the

Jamaican Assembly shipped them to Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1796. Although colonial administrators considered a variety of places to send the Maroons, by June Lieutenant-

Governor of Nova Scotia John Wentworth became aware that Governor of Jamaica

Alexander Lindsay, 6th earl of Balcarres, planned to send those “eight or nine hundred”

Maroons to Nova Scotia.66 Wentworth expressed confidence that they would do well there.

Almost immediately after the end of the Second Maroon War, British leaders in

Jamaica and Nova Scotia began to think about the food preparations necessary to ensure a smooth transfer from the Caribbean. Some confusion prevailed, however, over who would bear the cost for the Maroons’ subsistence. At the beginning of June Balcarres wrote to Wentworth to bemoan “the very great scarcity of provisions that now unfortunately prevails here.” In mid-June William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3d Duke of

66 For the Maroons numbers see [Duke of] Portland to John Wentworth, Whitehall, 13 June 1796, f. 113, CO 217/67, TNA. Among the alternatives, the British considered Quebec, in Upper Canada. Once the Maroons got to Nova Scotia and were clearly unhappy there, Wentworth thought about sending them to Georgia, but conceded that the Americans would be displeased. Someone else suggested Madagascar, and they also considered the Banana Islands. Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 79-81, Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. II, 138, vol. II, 202; John Wentworth to the Duke of Portland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 30 May 1790, f. 63, CO 217/70; John Schoolbred to John King, African Office, 12 July 1796, f. 143, CO 267/10, TNA.

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Portland, wrote Wentworth a letter, and expressed his hopes that Wentworth would “omit nothing in your power...which can tend to the accomodation of the Maroons, by supplying them with Provisions, and every other necessary.” Wentworth might have worried about needing to feed the new arrivals out of the colony’s scarce supplies in

Nova Scotia. Luckily Portland wrote later that year, to inform him of “the express intention of the Legislature of Jamaica to continue the Provision for the Maroons, until they shall be enabled to subsist themselves.”67 At least for the moment, the Jamaica

Assembly assumed that responsibility.

After the Maroons arrived, Wentworth allowed his rather rosy optimism to run wild as he wrote about their health and living conditions. It is unclear what shaped

Wentworth’s predictions. Perhaps he felt pleased that Jamaica would provide provisions, or maybe he drew on previous accounts of the Maroons’ heartiness and adaptability. He speculated that if the Maroons “[were] well fed, warmly cloathed, and comfortably lodged,” they would thrive, especially because he had “always found Negroes directly from the hottest coasts of Africa have grown Strong and lusty in the winter.” He imagined that the cold weather that had bothered the earlier group of black Loyalists in

Nova Scotia would pose few problems for the Maroons, and happily reported, “The

People express great delight in the Country, and the prospect of being Settled in it...They declare to me daily, that they are Sure all their Sorrows and misfortunes are at an end.”

Wentworth was so intent on proving that the Maroons could do well, that he sent to

67 Governor Balcarres to John Wentworth, Jamaica, 3 June 1796; [Duke of] Portland to John Wentworth, Whitehall, 13 June 1796; Duke of Portland to John Wentworth, Whitehall, 1 November 1796, ff. 123, 113, 155, CO 217/67, TNA.

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Jamaica for half a ton of yams after hearing that it was “their favorite food.”68

Wentworth’s assessments would prove premature.

Like the black Loyalists, the Maroons suffered from a dearth of provisions. From

1796-97, the price of flour rose enough that it “threatened Halifax not merely with a scarcity, but famine.” A plea for food went out to London, and London responded with a supply of potatoes, which the weather “[froze] and destroyed.” To make matters worse, the Jamaica Assembly had received Wentworth’s earlier positive summaries of the

Maroons’ situation, and decreed that “all farther support should be limited to the 22d of

July, 1798.” They assumed from Wentworth’s information that after that point the

Maroons “might then supply their own wants with the greatest facility.”69 Dismayed,

Wentworth told Portland that the sum “will be very insufficient for the purpose.”70 Food supplies ran short, and future assistance from Jamaica, piddling as it was, would cease by the end of the next year.

The weather in Nova Scotia had not improved since the black Loyalists had fled

Nova Scarcity’s icy shores. It was very, very cold. The winter season of 1796-97 ran

“unusually long...near three months longer than has been known Since the Settlement of

Halifax in the year 1749.”71 By June of 1797 a captain of the Maroons reported that the climate remained “so wet and cold that the labour of planting our potatoes at Maroon

Hall is thrown away.” All of the things they planted lay “rotting in the ground.” He had

68 John Wentworth to the Duke of Portland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 13 August 1796, ff. 133-4, CO 217/67; Alexander Howe to W.D. Quarrell, Maroon Hall, 9 August 1797, ff. 172-3, CO 217/68, TNA. 69 Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. II, 233-4, 231. 70 John Wentworth to the Duke of Portland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 7 May 1797, f. 115, CO 217/68, TNA. 71 John Wentworth to the Duke of Portland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 7 May 1797, f. 116, CO 217/68, TNA; see also Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. II, 232; Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 80.

373 heard it said, “this is altogether the worst year ever known here.”72 The long winter foiled the Maroons’ initial attempts to provision themselves. Once again, the winter in Nova

Scotia conspired to ensure that the province’s inhospitable weather would exacerbate the absence of government-provided provisions.

Government officials evinced mixed reactions to the Maroons’ unhappiness.

Some men invoked generous food diplomacy, and tried to convince the Maroons that circumstances would improve. John Wentworth seemed pleased when he “convinced them of the wisdom of trying another year,” a suggestion he said the Maroons

“unanimously approved.” In addition to the provisions the government had originally planned to dole out, “an extension of this indulgence in particular cases with all farming and gardening utensils,” would now “naturally be Supposed requisite.”73 He hoped that assistance in the form of farm implements would placate the Maroons. One wonders, however, why officials did not provide farm and garden utensils at the outset, if they wanted the Maroons to become farmers immediately upon arrival.

Other Britons were less sympathetic. One man doubted that Nova Scotia’s climate was “less Tolerable to the Maroons than to any other Blacks,” meaning that some of the original Nova Scotians had stayed in the province and coped, and that slaves in climates such as New England’s also managed. These men conflated Jamaicans with other

Africans, and could not understand how men raised in a warm climate might find a frigid

72 Andrew Smith to Charles Samuels, Maroon Hall near Halifax, 3 June 1797, f. 27, CO 217/68, TNA. Maroon Hall was the former residence of Loyalist Francis Green. After he sold it, it was expanded and turned into an administrative home for the Maroons. Phyllis R. Blakeley, “Francis Green: For Honour and the King,” in Blakeley and Grant, Eleven Exiles, 85. 73 John Wentworth to the Duke of Portland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2 June 1797; Alexander Howe to W.D. Quarrell, Maroon Hall, 9 August 1797, ff. 126, 169, CO 217/68, TNA.

374 one intolerable. Others assumed that the Maroons were simply lying, and that their letters and petitions were written “under fictitious names...signed with Maroon Marks witnessed by Apprentice boys, and others with names signed at large, of Maroons who Cannot write, and not witnessed at all.”74 These authorities seemed even less likely to accommodate the Maroons with extra provisions or farming instruments.

When generous forms of food diplomacy failed, officials fell back on newer, less compromising versions. The new Superintendent of the Maroons, Theophilius

Chamberlain, implemented what one contemporary called “the wise plan of withholding all allowance of provisions from those who would not work.” This method never really had a chance of success, as the following winter of 1797-98 was as equally bad as the previous one, and the government once more felt compelled to distribute provisions. Still, this continual shifting back and forth between giving extra food and refusing to distribute it did little to convince the Maroons of British power.

Ultimately the government decided to take a hard line against the Maroons’ complaints, and as their food diplomacy became more restrictive, the Maroons’ behavior shifted from compliance to discussions of victual warfare. In 1799, John Fraser, surgeon to the Maroons, discounted accounts of Maroon hunger. He cited their “considerable quantity of fish...which had been carefully stored up,” as well as their “Stock of

Poultry.”75 Yet the Maroons began to exhibit behavior indicating their discontent. These activities ranged from verbal complaints to physical action, and most involved foodways

74 Alexander Howe to W.D. Quarrell, Maroon Hall, 9 August 1797, f. 170, CO 217/68; T[heophilius] Chamberlain to John Wentworth, Preston, 20 June 1797, f. 130, CO 217/69, TNA. 75 Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. II, 276; John Fraser to John Wentworth, Dartmouth, 31 May 1799, f. 70, CO 217/70, TNA.

375 in one form or another. Some people wrote or signed petitions that protested the lack of provisions. According to a writer who penned a history of the Maroons in 1803, other

Maroons became “extremely angry with a few [of the other Maroons] who planted potatoes,” because it probably indicated a willingness to farm even in the face of absent governmental assistance. Some complained, “that the Weather is too Cold in

Midsummer,” or “that he has a Pain in his Stomach.” According to officials, when the

Maroons did not want to work, they transformed recent objections about the weather into claims of indigestion. For the Maroons, life in Nova Scotia was figuratively difficult to digest. The Maroons unfavorably compared bad food in Nova Scotia to the produce of the West Indies, which “was talked of with them, as nothing short of a Paradise, the aboundance and delicacy of its fruits, ennumerated and dwelt upon, till their Mouths were all watering.”76 Jamaica was a paradise lost, and they had fallen far indeed to the hellish depths of scarcity.

Verbal opposition soon translated into physical resistance, followed by threats of victual warfare. In 1799 the Maroons refused to work in their fields, and “pretty generally declared that they would never settle to making any improvements in Nova Scotia.”

When that group of Maroons planted potatoes, other Maroons “even proceeded to acts of violence against them.”77 When whites spoke of stopping their provisions, “it was laugh’d at.” Someone voiced the opinion that they “would brake open the Stores, kill the

Cattle, and take any thing they could lay hands on, rather than be starved into

76 Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. II, 238-39; John Wentworth to the Duke of Portland, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 30 May 1799, f. 50, CO 217/70; T[heophilius] Chamberlain to John Wentworth, Preston, 20 June 1797, f. 137, CO 217/69, TNA. 77 Dallas, The history of the Maroons, vol. II, 238-39, 276.

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Compliance...this Segacious thought, like the others, was taken up by the Maroons, and they have appear’d at times, very nearly prepared, to put it in practice.”78 Fellow

Maroons could not plant for fear of physical reprisal; Maroons treated threats about provisions stoppages by replying with threats of violence; and whites may have begun to fear a repeat of the Second Maroon War. Officials may even have known that complaints about food had also preceded the events in Jamaica half a decade before.

Whether one believes that the Maroons succeeded in convincing the government that Nova Scotia was not for them, or whether white Loyalists began to worry too much about a repeat Maroon uprising, in 1799 the Maroons managed to effect their passage out of the province. Around the beginning of the year, captains of the Maroons John Jarret,

Andrew Smith, James Barrel, James Laurence, Thomas Johnston, and Charles Shaw wrote a petition on behalf of the other Maroons. First, they said, “the soil of Nova Scotia will never answer to transplant Maroons in.” After arguing that the Maroons would never

“thrive where the Pine apple does not,” the Maroons succeeded in securing passage to

Sierra Leone.79

***

The experiences of the original black Loyalists and the Jamaican Maroons highlight a number of instances in which foodways mattered to increasingly transnational actors during the last two decades of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, the black

Loyalists and Maroons used food to profit, to voice threats, and to migrate. When

78 T[heophilius] Chamberlain to John Wentworth, Preston, 20 June 1797, f. 140, CO 217/69, TNA. 79 Petition of Captains John Jarret, Andrew Smith, James Barrel, James Laurence, Thomas Johnston, and Charles Shaw, in behalf of themselves and the whole of the Maroons now at Preston [enclosed in Mr. Thornton’s of 4 January 1799 to (?)], f. 213, CO 217/ 70, TNA.

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Thomas Peters and David Edmonds requested beef for a Christmas dinner in light of absent provisions in Nova Scotia, they were using food diplomacy. When another group of black Loyalists chose to remain behind, they felt justified in asking Governor John

Parr for funds for “a Cow & two Sheep,” because the expense “is by no means adequate to the vast expence of transporting so many of our fellow Subjects to Africa.”80 By demonstrating that they posed less of an expense and inconvenience to government, they also used their knowledge of foodways. Most obviously, when black Loyalists participated extensively in the marketplace, they leaned on the skills they acquired during their service in the Revolution.

On the other hand, life in Nova Scotia also gave rise to awareness regarding food inequalities and victual warfare. The shift of power from white to black was short-lived, and food conditions—and consequently, race relations—deteriorated rapidly in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Black Loyalists suffered from the imposition of food laws that controlled the ingredients, weight, and price of bread, their access to fish, and their abilities to hawk food where they wished. The Maroons dealt with an unexpectedly harsh climate, scarce provisions, and unfamiliar foods. The brief period of black ascendancy in the marketplace was at an end. Hereafter, whites and blacks would live together in Nova Scotia, but race relations had solidified.

The process of colonization in Nova Scotia sent the black Loyalists and Maroons across the ocean to Sierra Leone with collective ideas about the new, less compromising iteration of British food diplomacy, and the type of victual warfare that people practiced

80 [Various inhabitants of Birch Town, Shelburne] to John Parr, 1 November 1791, f. 86, CO 217/72, TNA.

378 by institutionalizing it through colonial laws. The acquisition of these new dialects of communication was important because food diplomacy and victual warfare changed again in Africa. It was food that whites would use to communicate with the black

Loyalists in Sierra Leone; that would form the basis of white interactions with indigenous

Africans; that would drive black Loyalist-Temne hostilities; that would spark a rebellion among the black Loyalists; that the Maroons would use to barter for their assistance in quelling the Sierra Leone rebellion; and that would eventually allow the Maroons and black Loyalists to blend together into a syncretic culture in West Africa.

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Chapter 8: “So inconsistent with those equitable principles by which we professed to be governed”: Nova Scotian, Maroon, and Temne Foodways in Sierra Leone

On October 26, 1793 two black Loyalists named Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson sent a letter to John Clarkson and the Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company in

London. Anderson and Perkins were colonists, and they were petitioning on behalf of the other unhappy Loyalists in Freetown, Sierra Leone. “In Nova Scotia we were very poor but at the time we left that Country we were just getting into a comfortable way of living,” they remembered. They could carry produce “to a great many Stores” in exchange for “double as much for it in many things as we can here.” Perkins and

Anderson fondly recalled the profits they garnered during the short period of time when they enjoyed unrestricted freedom in Nova Scotia’s marketplaces. The two men looked doubtfully on their prospects in Africa. The colony in Sierra Leone was doing poorly, and although they had delayed their epistle “in hopes” that they “would have our land and be able to make a Crop to support us” before the advent of “the Rainy Season,” the

Company had not yet allotted land, and “Health and life” were “very uncertain.”1

The above lines will be familiar to scholars have written on the history of the colony at Freetown, but the story of food has yet to be fully told. Once the black

Loyalists arrived in Sierra Leone, their previous experiences with restrictive food laws, land allotment issues, environmental scarcity, and failures in provisioning shaped their lives in Africa. The Loyalists had enjoyed a brief epoch of freedom in Nova Scotia’s

1 Emphasis is present in the original document, though it is unclear whether the black Loyalists or John Clarkson was responsible. Cato Pirkins and Isaac Anderson to the Hble the Chairmain & Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company London [sent to John Clarkson 30 October 1793], 13 October 1793, ff. 98-99, Add. MS 41263, BL.

380 markets, but they left the province once new laws had the effect of circumscribing black foodways specifically. The colonists arrived in Sierra Leone imbued with a sense of how food laws could be used to exercise power, and saw themselves as British subjects entitled to enforce that power.

Whereas in Nova Scotia white Loyalists’ food laws restricted blacks’ activities in the marketplace, in Sierra Leone black Loyalists enacted strikingly similar food laws to regulate the trading activities of local indigenous Africans, particularly the Koya Temne.

Although the Loyalists professed themselves British subjects, they remained willing to do so only for as long as Briton’s representatives—in this case, the Sierra Leone Company and Council—allowed them relative freedom in writing and enforcing colonial law. In

Africa, black Loyalists reinstated the food laws that whites imposed on them in Nova

Scotia in order to dominate the Temne.

The battle over foodways in Freetown points to larger issues regarding governance and self-rule. Food is not more important than other factors—such as religion—in understanding these conflicts, but because foodways appear more frequently in day-to-day colonial records, they allow historians to delve into the causes of these confrontations. Examining food demonstrates that over time, the Loyalists sought to shift their economy from that of a conventional moral economy to an economy with greater degrees of protectionism.2 They failed because the Sierra Leone Council stopped them— a factor which caused the colonists’ rebellion.

2 “Protectionism” is admittedly anachronistic in this context; “Protectionist” does not appear in the OED until 1834, and “Protectionism” makes its appearance in 1846. Yet historians have traditionally used the term “Mercantilism” to describe such economic policies even though “Mercantilism” appears only in 1838, and “Mercantilist” in 1854. Though it is true that Adam Smith referred to the idea of mercantilism in 1776,

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Historians have described the 1800 rebellion in Sierra Leone as the climax of conflict between white members of the Sierra Leone Council and black Loyalists. Battles over food also played a major role in fomenting this episode.3 After the black Loyalists began using food-related laws and regulations to differentiate themselves from the neighboring African population, tense food diplomacy turned into victual warfare. In

Sierra Leone, simple alimentary necessity trumped the need to find racial similitude, and the use of food to control the marketplace was much more important than forging any

he called it the “mercantile System.” I think that the distinction between mercantilism and protectionism is important because the latter is associated with more modern meanings, and part of the point I am trying to make is that the Nova Scotians were beginning to envision a more modern economic system. Oxford English Dictionary Online, search under “Protectionist, n. and adj.,” “Protectionism, n.,” “Mercantilism, n.,” “Mercantilist, n. and adj.,” “Mercantile, adj. and n.,” esp. Special Uses, http://oed.com/. For a recent piece that grapples with the definitional issues of mercantilism, see Steve Pincus’s recent piece in the William and Mary Quarterly. He argues that “scholars agree about the fundamental underlying concept of mercantilism: the limits to growth. Mercantilists believed that they lived in a world of scarcity—because property and value were defined exclusively with reference to land—in which economic life was necessarily one of vicious competition.” He does map a shift from early eighteenth century Tory beliefs that Britain’s political economy should be based on land to Whig claims that trade and industry would make Britain great, but concludes that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons could come to “no mercantilist consensus.” I am not sure that this definition works in Sierra Leone, because although colonists certainly thought about scarcity in terms of land, they also conceived of scarcity issues as they related to food. Furthermore, the laws they enacted sought to change food sales as much as they tried to alter land ownership. In her response to Pincus, Margaret Ellen Newell offers perhaps the most useful definition of mercantilism: “a loose group of politices that aimed to increase the nation’s exports and to replace imports with the produce of domestic industry.” Here again, I am not sure that “mercantilism” is an appropriate term because the Nova Scotians were not necessarily trying to increase their exports into Temne territory, nor were they seeking to stop Temne goods from reaching Freetown; they were simply trying to regulate the prices of such edible goods. Steve Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 69, no. 1 (January 2012): 3-34, esp. 9-12, 26 (quote, 12, 28); Margaret Ellen Newell, “Putting the ‘Political’ Back in Political Economy (This is Not Your Parents’ Mercantilism),” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 69, no. 1 (January 2012): 57-62, (quote, 59). 3 Here I am disagreeing with Ellen Gibson Wilson, among others, who writes that “from the reestablishment of the colony [following the French attack in 1794] to 1801 relationships with the African neighbors were amicable.” Ellen Gibson Wilson, The Loyal Blacks (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976), 378. For a description of the rebellion see Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 81-87; Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 191-202; James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 25-28; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 383-401; Mary Louise Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown: Black Loyalists After the American Revolution (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1999), 189-96.

382 sort of African identity. Only after the white councilmen in Sierra Leone began to preference Temne food sovereignty over black Loyalists’ price fixing did the Loyalists revolt, because this change infringed on what the Loyalists’ saw as their political rights.

Their rebellion ended definitively when a number of newly-arrived Jamaican Maroons came to the Company’s aid. Again in this instance, food diplomacy mattered crucially to how British officials obtained the Maroons’ assistance. Finally, after a brief period of animosity between the Maroons and Loyalists, the two groups bonded over the foodways that brought them together against the Temne.

Given the extent to which food issues continued to matter to Britons, black

Loyalists, and Maroons in Nova Scotia, it seemed natural to ask whether—and how— food diplomacy and victual warfare carried over and functioned in Sierra Leone.4 The short answer is that at the turn of the century, food diplomacy and victual warfare became more than simple methods of communication; they became nearly inseparable from the intellectual and political issues that occupied the people who crossed the Atlantic.

4 In one sense, this chapter derived from questions that lingered in my mind after reading works describing how West Africans did or did not find commonality with African American slaves after they survived the Middle Passage to America. I wanted to know how that process may have worked for free blacks crossing back over the Atlantic. See, for example, Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African- American Culture: An Anthropological perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992 [1976]); Francis Ntloedibe, “A Question of Origins: The Social and Cultural Roots of African American Cultures,” The Journal of African American History, vol. 91, no. 4 (Autumn, 2006): 401-412, esp. 407-8; Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 203, 233; Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 49; John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 182-4; Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 53, no. 2 (Apr., 1996): 251-288, esp. 254-5. For the call for Atlantic historians to delve more deeply into the experiences of people in Africa, see Trevor Burnard, “The British Atlantic,” in Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 122; Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review, vol. 111, no. 3 (June 2006), 754.

383

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Before 1807 there were three main waves of migration to Sierra Leone. The first group was comprised of poor blacks from London in 1787; the second were the black

Loyalists from Nova Scotia in 1792; and the last were the Jamaican Maroons—who had also lived briefly in Nova Scotia—in 1800. The second and third groups are the primary focus of this chapter because these men and women would find themselves overwhelmingly disappointed by the absence of food and British officials’ inabilities to remedy the situation by exercising adequate food diplomacy.

Yet the first group of colonists also struggled to feed themselves. A small group comprised of 411 of London’s black poor departed the metropole in the wake of the very harsh winters of 1784-85 and 1785-86, when bakers in London used private funding to bake quarter loaves of bread for hungry blacks.5 Olaudah Equiano, who lived in London at the time and worked as a government commissary, reported “the flagrant abuses committed by the agent,” Joseph Irwin, who was in charge of making provisions arrangements for the emigrants.6 Such corruption boded poorly for a successful move.

The first colonists sailed from England to the Province of Freedom in the spring of 1787, and obtained land from a local leader named Chief Tombo—whom the English came to know as King Tom. They died in huge numbers from disease brought on by the seasonal

5 Mary Beth Norton, “The Fate of Some Black Loyalists of the American Revolution,” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 58, no. 4 (Oct., 1973): 407; Ellen Gibson Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1980), 53; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 87, 103. 6 After denouncing Irwin. Equiano was subsequently fired. “THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO, OR GUSTAVUS VASSA, THE AFRICAN. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF,” (London, 1794 [1789]), in Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 283-84; Norton, “The Fate of Some Black Loyalists of the American Revolution,” 415; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 149.

384 rains.7 In 1789 they sealed their fate by goading a passing ship into burning the town of another leader named King Jimmy. Jimmy gave the colonists three days to vacate, and torched the town to cinders, thus scattering the colonists.8 The first colonists’ experiences demonstrate just how unsuccessfully colonization projects could become, but more importantly, they emphasized the fact that in Sierra Leone, Britons would also experience an overwhelming sense of powerlessness.

Perhaps inevitably, the British tried again. On May 30, 1791, abolitionist Henry

Thornton ensured the passage of a bill that created a joint stock company to take over governance of Sierra Leone; the bill was given royal backing on June 6th of that year.

Thomas Clarkson and his younger brother John, Granville Sharp, Henry Thornton, and

William Wilberforce helped to form the Sierra Leone Company and to supervise what they hoped would be a more organized and cost-effective era of colonization by black

Loyalists. By August 5, John Clarkson had volunteered to go to Nova Scotia and shepherd the Loyalists to Africa.9

A group of over 1,190 people finally embarked from Nova Scotia on January 16,

1792. They arrived at the original Granville Town in February and March, and renamed it

Free Town (which, over time, became Freetown).10 There, they built their town in the shadow of mountains that appeared “to rise gradually from the sea to a stupendous

7 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 34-47; James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783-1870 (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1976), 20. 8 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 25; Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 53; Anna Maria Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone During the Years 1791-1792-1793, ed. Christopher Fyfe (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 4. 9 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 61-63; Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 55-56. 10 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 36; Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 98.

385 height, richly wooded and beautifully ornamented.”11 Of the approximately 1,300 colonists who arrived in Sierra Leone, less than one fourth hailed from West or Central

African communities.12

Clarkson tried to make sure that the Loyalists transitioned easily into their new lives: he bought and inspected provisions before embarkation, and daily issued bread, butter, potatoes, cornmeal, rice porridge, meat, and fish. The last two items would have seemed especially significant to blacks who had lost their fishing rights, and who had gone without meat while white Loyalists enjoyed it. Despite these preparations, however, the expedition did not go smoothly. Six people died before leaving Nova Scotia, probably from typhoid fever, and another 65 expired from further contagion once the ships were underway. Clarkson was among those who fell dangerously ill, suffering from fainting spells and memory loss. Several ships landed before Clarkson’s, at the end of February;

Clarkson arrived on March 6, 1792, weak, but recovering. By the beginning of March, the colonists had come to the western side of St. George’s Bay.13

Governance of Sierra Leone quickly became a problem. Alexander Falconbridge, a Bristol surgeon and fervent defender of abolition who had helped the first colonists recover following the destruction of Granville Town, was vexed that the Sierra Leone

Company chose John Clarkson as superintendent, rather than him (Falconbridge was

11 Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 16. 12 James Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” in Suzanna Schwarz, Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson, eds., Rebuilding Civil Society in Sierra Leone, Past and Present (forthcoming 2012), 4. I am grateful to Jim for sharing a version of this piece before its publication. My citations of page numbers come from the draft document. 13 Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 70, 76; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971), 64, 72-74; Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 98.

386 confined to the role of chief commercial agent).14 Falconbridge’s wife, Anna Maria, remarked that “never were characters worse adapted to manage any purpose of magnitude than some whom they have nominated.”15 Though she did not criticize her husband at the time, his death—probably from alcoholism—and her swift remarriage to another of the colonists points to Falconbridge’s inadequacies.16

Other council members proved little better. Upon landing Clarkson discovered that Governor Henry Dalrymple had defected in order to found a rival colony at Bulama, so he reluctantly took charge. However, Clarkson possessed no further power over fellow council members Dr. John Bell (physician), James Cocks (surveyor), Richard Pepys

(works engineer), Charles Taylor (doctor), John Wakerell (storekeeper), and James Watt

(plantation manager). Bell drank heavily and died in mid-March; Cocks possessed little practical experience; Pepys was a poor planner and unwilling to accept advice; and

Taylor proved fairly uninterested in tending to the sick.17 Their quarrels hurt the colony’s prospective food security.

At the time the black Loyalists arrived, Sierra Leone possessed no large kingdoms or towns; the power of indigenous African leaders was rather local. The Temne lived inland, at the mouth of the Scarcies River, and on the Bullum Shore, having migrated

14 Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 81-2. Falconbridge arrived in Sierra Leone with his wife, Anna Maria, who remained in the colony after his death. She stayed until 1793, and eventually married John Clarkson’s friend and correspondent, Isaac Du Bois. Anna Maria Falconbridge composed a narrative—written first as letters, with the intent to publish them—that informs portions of this chapter. Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 1, 4. 15 Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 74. 16 On Falconbridge’s drinking, see Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 95. 17 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 74; Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 85; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 191-92.

387 from the Futa Jallon sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.18 At that moment, a regent the British referred to as King Naimbana sat high in the hierarchy upstream from the colony, at Robana.19 The Sierra Leone Company purchased land from him when they arrived in 1792. King Jimmy, who burned Granville Town (the first colonists’ village), paid tribute to Naimbana, as did other nearby families. These polities remained in flux. In

February, 1793 Naimbana died, and in July of that year his son, Henry Granville

Naimbana, also met his end. Bai Farama took Naimbana’s place, but it took a year for the power transfer to take effect.20

When they arrived in Freetown the British were deeply food insecure for a number of reasons. First, the British did not enjoy any significant amount of power, and the Temne did not trust them. The Councilmen allowed themselves extra food and liquor when the rest of the colonists ate reduced rations, and sold ship’s stores to Africans instead of distributing them.21 At one point Temne leaders even accused the British of poisoning Henry Granville Naimbana with a cup of chamomile tea.22 Second, the British

18 Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 98; Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 1-6; Kenneth C. Wylie, The Political Kingdoms of the Temne: Temne Government in Sierra Leone, 1825-1910 (New York: Africana Publishing Company, 1977), xiii, 3. 19 As Christopher Fyfe has noted, the word “King” is a misnomer for these rulers. Naimbana became king in form only after his death in 1793. Britons used the term because it fit conveniently into their concept of rule, but Temne regents’ rule did not extend as far politically or geographically in comparison. Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, n19p19. 20 For primary sources describing the various African groups surrounding Freetown, see 10 and 17 March 1792, ff. 9, 13, Add. MS 41264, BL; 3 October 1792, “Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson, R.N. (governor, 1792),” Sierra Leone Studies, no. VIII (March 1927), 71; 18 July 1793, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (1), ff. 71-72, Macaulay Papers, HL. For secondary works, see Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 10, 54; Wylie, The Political Kingdoms of the Temne, xv; Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown, 75. 21 Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 86. 22 For British weakness, see Trevor Burnard, “The British Atlantic,” in Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 122; Philip D. Morgan, “Africa and the Atlantic, C. 1450 to C. 1820,” in Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 225. For the tea incident, see Rachel Herrmann, “Death By Chamomile?: The Alimentary End of Henry Granville Naimbana,” The Appendix: A New Journal of Narrative and Experimental History, vol. 1, no. 1 (December 2012).

388 proved woefully inept at learning and observing African forms of food diplomacy, and were thus less than adept at obtaining food from indigenous Africans. Third, environmental factors conspired to make food production difficult. Finally, the colony’s proximity to the coast left them exposed to attacks from the sea.

As was the case in Nova Scotia and North America, environmental concerns aggravated provisioning problems in Sierra Leone. The rainy season began in May or

June, visited daily downpours on the colony until August, and decreased by September or

October. The name “Sierra Leone” came from the Portuguese Serra Lyoa—meaning

“lion mountain”—so named to denote the sound of thunder during the seasonal rains.23

During this time growing food proved impossible, and cattle died unless adequately sheltered.24 One historian has called that summer of 1792 “One of the wettest rainy seasons in West African history.”25 People also complained about frequent “tornadoes.”26

In addition, colonists worried about the aggressive animals surrounding the colony. It was not uncommon for leopards to carry off goats, but small insects also posed huge

23 Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown, 114. 24 It is also possible that cattle did not thrive because of the tsetse fly, though one article asserts that horses did not become significantly prone to disease from the fly until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. See, for example, D. C. Dorward and A. I. Payne, “Deforestation, the Decline of the Horse, and the Spread of the Tsetse Fly and Trypanosomiasis (nagana) in Nineteenth Century Sierra Leone,” The Journal of African History, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1975): 239-56, esp. 242-44. 25 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 20; Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 95 (quote). 26 These tornadoes seem different than the ones we would encounter today. The morning after one tornado, John Clarkson observed, “This has cleared the air fine and clear to-day.” 8 September 1792, “Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson,” 45. In the sixteenth century a tornado was simply a word used by navigators to identity “violent thunderstorms of the tropical Atlantic, with torrential rain, and often with sudden and violent gusts of wind.” When applied to Africa, it could also mean “a rotatory storm in which the wind revolves violently under a moving arch of clouds.” There is nothing to indicate that these tornadoes were accompanied by the funnel shape and extreme destruction in places such as Tornado Alley in the United States. On the other hand, Anna Maria Falconbridge did observe that tornadoes were “accompanied with violent winds and heavy rains.” More distressing, in her mind, was the following “abominable stench from the earth, and disagreeable hissings and noises from frogs, crickets, and many other insects which the rains draw out.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, search under “tornado, n.,” esp. def. 1, 2a, http://oed.com/; Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 42.

389 problems. Zachary Macaulay wrote about awakening at two in the morning to find that

“an army of black Ants...had Spread over the whole room, blackening the walls, the floor

& the bed Curtains.”27 These pests wreaked havoc on poorly-constructed structures for storing food, and two of the black Loyalists burned their house down after a failed attempt to eradicate them.28 In another instance, ants “force[d] twelve or fourteen families from their houses,” once again necessitating the “use of fire and boiling water.”29

The English colony also faced attacks from other European powers that trespassed on Sierra Leone’s coast. Such was the case in September 1794, when an attack by the

French (a result of the Napoleonic Wars) threatened English food security.30 After engaging in general plundering, the French wrought destruction on British crops and livestock. Although Governor Zachary Macaulay lamented the destruction of his library—“Books were tossed about & defaced with the utmost wantonness”—he was more worried about the absence of comestibles in the colony. He related that he saw “a parcel of Frenchmen emptying a case of Port Wine into their stomachs,” before killing over 150 of his fowls, and 1200 of the town’s hogs. After the French stole their food stores and then contemptuously offered the English “a share of their fricasseed Fowls & boiled Pork,” Macaulay described his dismay upon hearing “A Chorus of Boys usher in the meal with the Marseilles Hymn,” and conclude it “in the same way.”31 As a parting

27 18 August 1796, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (13), Macaulay Papers, HL. 28 Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown, 115. 29 Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 88-89. 30 Zachary Macaulay and James Watt to the Chairman and Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, Freetown, 15 November 1794, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (7), f. 1, Macaulay Papers, HL; Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 59; Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 110. 31 28 and 29 September, 11 October 1794, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (3), Macaulay Papers, HL.

390 gift, the French ejected almost 120 English prisoners from their ship, and saddled the colony with the responsibility of feeding them. Only after begging the French commodore for extra provisions did Macaulay receive them, but “The Beef was nearly exhausted at the first Serving.”32 The English position on the coast was at times precarious.

***

Given all of these barriers to maintaining a steady food supply it is not surprising that the black Loyalists acclimated slowly. The colony did indeed begin to grow, however, and just as food factored into British-Temne interactions, so too did it figure prominently in British communications with the black Loyalists as they reinvented themselves as Nova Scotians.33 In large part, the early failures of the Sierra Leone

Company seemed doubly insulting because they so closely mirrored the problems the

Loyalists faced in Nova Scotia. Black colonists were quick to point out that because of the floundering of the Sierra Leone Company and Council, the old wounds caused by land allotment issues and poor food rations continued to fester. Still, while John Clarkson remained in the colony, the Nova Scotians managed to subsist. The black Loyalists’ complaints about the Company’s failures to manage land allotments became truly pressing only after he left the colony.

32 13 October 1794, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (4) (quote); Zachary Macaulay and James Watt to the Chairman and Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, Freetown, 15 November 1794, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (7), Macaulay Papers, HL; Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 61; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 319. 33 Before they left Nova Scotia, Henry Thornton acted on a suggestion from William Wilberforce and advised John Clarkson, “it may have a good effect if all Blacks instead of being called Blacks or Negroes, were by universal consent amongst You called Africans, as a more respectable way of speaking of them.” This moniker did not stick. Henry Thornton to John Clarkson, London, 30 December 1791, f. 40, Add. MS 41262A, BL; Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 39.

391

Like the Port Roseway Associates, the Sierra Leone Company attempted to make careful arrangements for future colonization. Early in 1792 Thomas Clarkson sent a letter to John, providing him with the words he was to utter once he had gathered the council together. John was supposed to point out that although “There was no mention made originally of feeding them,” the Nova Scotians would happily receive “full Provisions for three, and half Provisions for three other Months.”34 Thomas probably hoped to highlight the fact that the Company deigned to give provisions at all, although he doubtless remained cognizant that three months of full provisions and three months of half provisions paled in comparison to the six months of full provisions allotted to the

Loyalists en route from New York to Nova Scotia in 1783.

Thomas suggested that John should urge the council to “hasten to inform” the blacks “of this unexampled Instance of Generosity” so that the Nova Scotians could offer thanks—or possibly, so that the Sierra Leone Council could forestall colonists’ complaints. The elder Clarkson made it clear that officials needed to make the black

Loyalists aware of this information. He provided a template for a resolution the council could pass, to gather the Loyalists “in distinct Bodies on ___day of ___(notice being given) for the purpose of proclaiming among them the generous offer of the Directors in respect to the Provisions to be given them.”35 Historians can read such preparations as evidence of the Sierra Leone Company’s rosy view of the Company’s prospects in

Africa, as well as their simultaneous fears about future failures.

34 Thomas Clarkson to John Clarkson, 2 January 1792, f. 68, Add. MS. 41262A, BL. 35 Thomas Clarkson to John Clarkson, 2 January 1792, f. 68, Add. MS. 41262A, BL.

392

Although some of Thomas Clarkson’s directions seemed overly optimistic at best, he did take care to issue a few more cautious points that he hoped would guarantee the colony’s food security. Thomas suggested that John needed to get resolutions passed for overseeing “the Cultivation of a sufficient Quantity of Land for Provisions for the people,” and “Also for procuring Cattle before the Rainy Season set in.”36 Thomas

Clarkson betrayed a continuing concern about the actual prospects for the colony, as well as an understanding of the ways in which colonists could realistically obtain foodstuffs.

Like the American Plan of Civilization, the unstated British plan of colonization involved the sort of husbandry that mixed farming with raising cattle. Clarkson also recognized that the Company needed to encourage the Nova Scotians to supply themselves.

Just as British commissioners in New York recorded the occupations of black

Loyalists embarking for British North America, John Clarkson detailed the professions of blacks headed to Sierra Leone. Among the men who boarded at Halifax were bakers, butchers, cooks, fishermen, gardeners, and potash makers. Clarkson noted, “These men were also capable of cultivating the land and of general husbandry.” His observation that the women “could spin, weave, and were good laundresses” betrayed his belief that the men would take primary responsibility for agriculture.37

Unfortunately, food conditions in Africa proved less than reliable. Transport ships had provided several thousand pounds of beef, bread, pork, and rice, but by March provisions ran short, and colonists began eating half-rations by April 7. Although half

36 Thomas Clarkson to John Clarkson, 2 January 1792, f. 68, Add. MS 41262A, BL. 37 Rev. E. G. Ingham, Sierra Leone After a Hundred Years (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1968 [London: Seeley and Co. Limited, 1894]), 45-46.

393 rations were doled out according to plan, few people anticipated the total absence of bread in the colony by the end of April.38 Council members tried to seek food from other sources, but their contentious relations with neighboring Africans made success unlikely.

In May Clarkson received a letter from a man named John, who wrote, “I and my family are quite starving. We have had not a bit of bread for near three weeks, only half a pound of meat a day...I and my wife are dying by inches, really, for want of proper support.”

The fact that he had eaten no bread for three weeks suggests that bread began to run out even before the end of April. Clarkson wrote with dismay about people “dying for want of food, from the confusion and irregularity in distributing provisions.”39

Even if they could procure food for the colony, others pointed out that they possessed no place to put it. All of the landing places posed problems for ships, “in consequence of the shore being bound with iron rocks, and an ugly surge most commonly breaking on them.”40 Rum and wine purchased from the Banana Islands were “left on the rocks...exposed to sun rain thieves, leekage & ready to fall into pieces.”41 When

American ships provided casks of molasses, beef, and pork, the casks washed away in the tide before they could be brought ashore.42 The Sierra Leone Company sent their ship, the

Providence, out for sheep and goats, but the animals died en route.43 The storehouse they belatedly built was a failure.44 Clarkson complained that “different articles and provisions” were “stowed one above another,” meaning that one leaking vessel ruined

38 Walker, The Black Loyalists, 146. 39 Ingham, Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, 74, 76. 40 Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 76. 41 11 May 1792, f. 38, Add. MS 12131, BL. 42 12 January 1793, f. 5, Add. MS 41263, BL. 43 11 May 1792, f. 38, Add. MS 12131, BL. 44 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 75.

394 others. The “damaged cheese and biscuits, with other articles in a state of putrefaction” created “such a stench about the storehouse” that these conditions, combined with the slurry of spoiled food “allowed to lie and soak into the ground” outside, made Clarkson worried for the storehouse employees. “When I am obliged to appoint a person to attend there,” he wrote, “I feel...that for a certainty I am sending him to his grave.”45

Necessity dictated that Clarkson conceive of a system of functional food diplomacy between the Nova Scotians and the white colonists. In keeping with recent trends, Clarkson’s food diplomacy aimed to decrease people’s reliance on government- allotted provisions. As a true man of empire, Clarkson felt intense sympathy for the black

Loyalists, but also an inherent superiority over them which made him unwilling to trust them to govern themselves. He wrote that because the Loyalists had “their provisions found them,” a great deal of “vice and every species of wickedness and discontent... [was] spreading in the colony.”46 He sought to exercise his rule through the careful doling out of food stores. He disagreed with the Sierra Leone Company’s plans for provisioning. He knew that the Company had planned to allot three months of full provisions and three months of half provisions, but he “had never promised the Nova Scotians any allowance of provisions”— he probably neglected to call the colonists together to inform them of the Company’s benevolence, as per Thomas Clarkson’s suggestion.47

Clarkson worked out a system of labor-for-food, instead. In May he resolved that everyone in the colony would work two days “as a kind of payment for the provisions

45 Ingham, Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, 91-92; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 247. 46 Ingham, Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, 65. 47 19 November 1792, “Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson,” 106.

395 allowed them by the Colony.” Council minutes reveal that Clarkson proposed giving two shillings per day to those “who chuse to work.” Colonists could buy a full ration for six pence or a half ration for three pence.48 He made rules that only those who worked for the

Company two days out of the week would receive Company provisions, and he subtracted settlers’ wages to pay for the cost of items that the Company had originally said would be free until after the first harvests.49 Clarkson’s food diplomacy essentially dovetailed with that of American Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins; he sought to make people purchase their food rations with their labor. Both of these modifications in food diplomacy—Hawkins among the Creeks, and Clarkson with the Nova Scotians—point to

American and British efforts to institutionalize a less generous form of that language.

Given previous circumscription of black foodways in Nova Scotia, it is not surprising that the Nova Scotians seized the first opportunity to change Clarkson’s system. Initially Clarkson clashed with Thomas Peters, who, having met with Sir Henry

Clinton as well as Granville Sharp and William Wilberforce in London, considered himself a capable representative of the Loyalists. He criticized Clarkson’s way of running the colony. Luckily for Clarkson, Peters became less of a threat to his authority after someone accused him of stealing food—“Some hams & other articles of Diet”—from a

48 Ingham, Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, 65; 19 November 1792, “Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson,” 106; Council Minutes, 12 May 1792, ff. 37-38, CO 270/2, TNA. By August 1792, Anna Maria Falconbridge was reporting that employees received two shillings per day in wages, but had to pay four shillings per week for provisions. Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 87. 49 Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 93-97.

396 dead man who had owed him money.50 The situation resolved itself completely when

Peters died of a fever in June of 1792.51

Thomas Peters’s voice was only one among many. When poor food supplies forced Clarkson to reduce the colony to half rations, the Nova Scotians responded promptly. John Strong, a captain of the black Loyalists, wrote to Clarkson and said that if

Clarkson did not possess enough provisions, the Nova Scotians would “work one day for the half raisions,” rather than the two that Clarkson originally mandated; Strong suggested Clarkson could pay them the remainder of those wages in company credit. The

Nova Scotians did not expect to work for the same amount of time in order to receive less food. The other captains told Clarkson that his alteration in their provisions had put

Captain Strong “in a great peaice of uneaseness.” The blacks stated that their labor equaled a certain amount of food, that a reduction in their provisions should result in a comparable lessening of their work, and that a failure to do so would create conflict.

Clarkson, who worried that extra pay would allow colonists to purchase too much rum, compromised by crediting “the savings of provisions in consequence of their being put to short allowance,” to “the account of each individual.”52 So long as Clarkson remained some give and take remained possible.

Once the rainy season passed the people who managed to survive—995 of the

1,131 who came from Nova Scotia, and 57 of the colony’s 119 white officials—seemed

50 1 May 1792, f. 35, Add. MS 12131, BL. 51 Winks, The Blacks in Canada, 63; Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 54, 93-94, 97; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 282; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 23. 52 John Strong to John Clarkson, Freetown, 19 November 1792; [Captains of companies] to John Clarkson, Freetown, 18 November 1792; 19 November 1792, all in “Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson,” 105, 107.

397 to be getting by.53 By September the Nova Scotians had planted gardens, and had “been able to furnish the officers with many vegetables, especially cabbages.” They grew grain and vegetables such as beans, cassava, cresses, ground nuts, maize, pumpkin, purslane, rice, sweet potatoes, and yams, herbs like marjoram, sage, and thyme, and “all tropical fruits.” Colonists raised fowls and hogs, and began to store “great quantities of beef and pork,” which they “hung up along the ridges of their houses to smoke.” Clarkson described how they were “all crazy for building boats,” and intended to fish.54

For a time it seemed as though the Nova Scotians could produce enough food to create a surplus to resell to white colonists, much the same as they had in Nova Scotia.

Furthermore, an August 28 decision by the Sierra Leone Company’s directors changed the shape of government in a way favorable to Clarkson’s vision of proper rule: they made it so that one governor (Clarkson) would be aided by two councilors—in this case, future governors William Dawes and Zachary Macaulay. This alteration gave Clarkson much more authority than he had previously enjoyed. He earned yet more credibility among the colonists once the first forty farms (about five acres each) appeared ready for distribution.55

Such bounty did not last. Clarkson set sail for London on the Felicity on

December 29, 1792, with plans to return the following year. This plan, however, was not to come to fruition. The Sierra Leone Company, as it turned out, did not wish to reengage

53 Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown, 136. 54 Inham, Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, 122; 21 September and 2 November 1792, “Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson,” 51, 94; 15 September 1792, “Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson,” 49. 55 Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 106, 113.

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Clarkson’s services.56 When he was getting ready to leave in December, 1792, the

Loyalists came to him with “provisions for the voyage.” Some gave him eggs, “another a chicken, another pigs,” and others, “various kinds of vegetables, fruit, etc.”57 With these gifts of food the colonists demonstrated that they had acquired enough to share with

Clarkson, and that they respected him enough to do so. Gifts of food even followed

Clarkson out of the colony; as late as 1798, one colonist sent him a barrel of rice.58

Despite the fact that Clarkson’s food diplomacy restricted some of the Nova Scotians’ mobility, his presence ensured that life in the colony remained peaceful.

***

A compliant new governor (William Dawes) who was willing to take orders from the Company’s directors translated to more trouble for the colonists. Although land allotment issues existed during Clarkson’s governance, his food diplomacy temporarily quieted the Nova Scotians. Although he may have regretted his inability to comply with the Nova Scotians’ “anxious” requests “to have their lots of land laid out,” the Loyalists also knew that “the general confusion in the colony, the state of the weather, and many other obstacles” justified his tardiness.59 William Dawes appeared less accommodating than Clarkson; his “austere, reserved conduct,” his “prejudices of a rigid military

56 Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 127, 130-5; Sidbury, Becoming African in American, 104. 57 Ingham, Sierra Leone After a Hundred Years, 153-4. Cf. to Anna Maria Falconbridge’s departure to London, when the Temne loaded her vessel with provisions for the voyage. Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 54. 58 Isaiah Anderson to John Clarkson, Sierra Leone, 21 January 1798, f. 151, Add. MS 41263, BL. 59 Ingham, Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, 36.

399 education,” his tenure at Botany Bay, and the “awful severity” of his “looks and actions” stood in stark contrast to Clarkson’s “sweet manners.”60

Land allotment and surveying ceased almost immediately following Clarkson’s departure, and by January the colonists once again depended on nearby African settlements for food. In early 1793 Isaac Du Bois (probably pronounced “Duboz”), a

North Carolinian Loyalist well-versed in agriculture and sympathetic to the Nova

Scotians, wrote to Clarkson to inform him that all attempts to lay out the lands “seem to be vanished.”61 He mentioned the need to buy provisions from a French and American vessel, noting “there is neither beef, Pork, flower or any kind of provision sufficient to last the colony a week.”62 This dearth became especially problematic given the fact that by mid-1793, Macaulay estimated that the colonists could easily consume half a ton of rice per day.63

Epistles from black colonists demonstrated their continuing faith in John

Clarkson, as well as the worsening of conditions in Freetown; they connected his absence with the dearth of food. Isaac Anderson had lived in Charleston before the Revolution; he threw in with the British as early as 1775, and in 1776 left for New York with Lord

William Campbell. He arrived in Nova Scotia in 1783, and eventually made it to Sierra

Leone with the other emigrants. Cato Perkins had been enslaved to a man named John

Perkins in Charlestown—he probably ran to the British during the siege of Charlestown,

60 Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 100. 61 14 January 1793, f. 6, Add. MS 41263, BL. For background on Du Bois see Walker, The Black Loyalists, 166; Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 103; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 270; for pronunciation of Du Bois’s name see Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 116. 62 Journal of Isaac Du Bois, sent to John Clarkson, 10 January 1793, f. 4, Add. MS 41263, BL. 63 8 August 1793, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, f. 118, MY 418 (1), Macaulay Papers, HL.

400 and possibly made it to New York with General Clinton. In a move that bypassed the authority of Governor Dawes, the colonists chose Anderson and Perkins to appeal to the

Sierra Leone Company’s leaders in London about poor food conditions.64 In late October, they sent a petition to the directors, which they also sent to Clarkson. Despite the growing frequency of their complaints, however, it is important to note that the colonists remained reliant on traditional Anglo-American forms of protest, such as letter- and petition- writing.

In their letter, cited at the opening of this chapter, Anderson and Perkins detailed the colonists’ grievances, many of which centered on food. They stated that their current situation compared unfavorably to Nova Scotia. They acknowledged that in Nova Scotia they were poor, but they had also enjoyed the freedom of selling goods where they pleased. Their abilities to sell goods in Africa, by contrast, was more limited. According to Anderson and Perkins, clashes over trade goods also extended to battles over comestibles. In Sierra Leone, they wrote, “There is no Store here but the Company’s,” which charged “extortionate” prices. The two men described a dishonest moment during which Governor Dawes “put thirty Gall. of water into a peck of Rum...& then [sold] it to us for a shilling a Galln. more than we ever paid before.” Clarkson, who retained a copy of the letter, punctuated their complaints with underlining in much the same way that he underlined his own correspondence with other men such as Henry Thornton and Isaac Du

64 Christopher Fyfe says Anderson was born free; Cassandra Pybus states that he was originally from Angola and later enslaved in South Carolina. On Anderson, see Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 51; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 23, 209; for Perkins, who sometimes appears in the records as “Pirkins,” see Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 215; for their journey to London, see Wilson, John Clarkson and the African Adventure, 134.

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Bois.65 The thought that Dawes had deliberately adulterated rum to cheat the Nova

Scotians made him angry. So too, did descriptions of black Loyalists “punished here without a Cause...turned out of the Service,” and then “not suffer’d to buy any Provisions from the Store.” This punishment became especially problematic because the colony only used paper money, which “shall not pass any where else.” Perkins and Anderson described a coercive system in which white leaders deprived blacks of military titles, and then revoked their ability to purchase food at all.66

The newest iteration of British food diplomacy was not really diplomacy at all.

The Nova Scotians believed that Dawes planned to exercise authority through a plan of gradual forced starvation. Other writings from the time confirm that Dawes exerted unprecedented amounts of control over colonists’ foodways: Anna Maria Falconbridge wrote that Dawes “engrosses all the Yams, Pumpkins, Turtle, and almost every kind of provisions in the neighbourhood, and has them retailed from the Company’s store at an enormous advance.”67 Dawes did not merely fix prices: according to the Nova Scotians

(and other less invested observers), he stole food from colonists, and resold it for his own profits.

Anderson and Perkins said that these conditions made them feel as if they and their fellow colonists had reverted back to a state of slavery. Clarkson’s earlier diary entry recorded colonists’ saying, “We must either get into debt or be starved, and if we incur debts, we are at that time at the mercy of the company and their agents.” The Nova

65 In keeping with common practices, I have silently edited Clarkson’s underlining into italics. 66 Cato Pirkins and Isaac Anderson to the Hble the Chairmain & Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company London [sent to John Clarkson 30 October 1793] 13 October 1793, ff. 98-99, Add. MS 41263, BL. 67 Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 105-06.

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Scotians saw debt and starvation as two opposing options: they could go into debt by paying exorbitant prices for food from the company store, or they could go hungry. Later in 1794, the colonists would write to Clarkson saying that in his absence they found reason to call Freetown “A town of Slavery.”68 They wrote, “we feel ourselves so distressed because we are not treated as Freemen.” They even said that Dawes “seems to wish to rule us just as bad as if we were all Slaves which we cannot bear.”69 This was an untenable situation. Food supplies were once again at a nadir, inequalities manifested themselves through food distribution and control, and the current environment so resembled former slave conditions that the petitioners emphasized this fact twice in the same letter.

Clarkson could not help them. The Perkins and Anderson petition ignited a slew of correspondence between the two men and Clarkson, during which they expressed their thankfulness for his governance, and he lamented his inability to offer further assistance.

On November 9, Perkins and Anderson wrote that in response to their petition, the

Company had decided “send us back like Fools,” an imprudent response in their mind because nothing mollified the colonists like “the thoughts that when the Company heard their Greivances [sic] they would see Justice done them.” Clarkson wrote back to explain

68 Ingham, Sierra Leone after a Hundred Years, 80; Moses Wilkinson, Isaac Anderson, [?] Peters, James Hutchinson, Luke Jordan, Jno. Jordan, Burbin Simmons, Amarica Tolbert, and a Great many More the paper wont aford to John Clarkson, Sierra Leone, 19 November 1794, f. 114, Add. MS 41263, BL. 69 Cato Pirkins and Isaac Anderson to the Hble the Chairmain & Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company London [sent to John Clarkson 30 October 1793] 13 October 1793, f. 99, Add. MS 41263, BL.

403 that he could do nothing more for them: “it must now rest entirely with the Directors,” he said.70

Clarkson understood the some of the roots of colonists’ complaints stemmed from food shortages. Writing his history of Sierra Leone around 1813, he wrote that although land scarcity caused initial conflicts, the absence of land engendered “the Prospect of famine.” Referring to his journal, he wrote that on April 7, the settlers were put on short allowance, and on April 18 they were discontented; in mid-July, the settlers suffered from

“a want of fresh Provisions,” and on July 30 “there was a strong fermentation in the

Colony about the Land.” Land complaints gave rise to food complaints because the absence of one highlighted the lack of the other, and when food remained scarce, discontent proliferated. Clarkson included a warning from future governor James Watt, who stated, “with hunger comes Mutiny...Who can convince an empty Belly, or say to the hungry Man be satisfied.”71

For a time, it seemed as though the new government in Sierra Leone would manage to mollify the angry colonists diplomatically. After John Clarkson left, the Nova

Scotians adhered to the form of government that Granville Sharp first proposed for the original Granville Town emigrants: every ten householders formed a tithing; and every ten tithings formed a hundred; ten freeholders elected a Tythingman, and every ten

Tythingmen elected a Hundredor. Collectively, the Hundredors and Tythingmen

70 Cato Pirkins and Isaac Anderson to the Hble the Chairmain & Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company London [sent to John Clarkson 30 October 1793] 13 October 1793; Cato Perkins and Isaac Anderson to John Clarkson, London, 9 November 1793; John Clarkson to Isaac Anderson and Cato Perkins, 11 November 1793, ff. 99, 105, 107, Add. MS 41263, BL. 71 John Clarkson, History of the Colony of Sierra Leone, [c. 1813], f. 183, Add. MS 41263, BL.

404 proposed rules and regulations that the Sierra Leone Council could approve or reject.72 In

November 1793 a group of these Nova Scotians complained to the council about “the badness and insufficiency of the Lands already allotted” to them. The Council proposed that if the colonists wished, they could relocate to the Bullum Shore, provided that they agreed “to pay to the Sierra Leone Company an Annual Rent of One Bushel of Clean new

Rice for each of their town lots and of one Bushel of Rice for each Acre of Land on the farm lots.”73 Thus the council tried to remedy colonists’ complaints by giving them new land in exchange for what was in essence a yearly tribute of rice.

The Sierra Leone Council tried to use food in other ways to maintain peaceful relations in the colony. In May 1793 they began to enact rewards for colonists who grew the best provisions. They offered £5 to the colonist who grew the greatest number of plantains, and £3 to the colonists with the next greatest quantity. They promised similar rewards for cabbages, cassava, and yams, and to whoever planted the most number of holes Guinea, Indian, and Barbary corn, “or any other kind of grain.” They also pledged rewards for people who raised pigs and cattle. In 1795 the council offered money to colonists who raised calves, and in 1798 they offered rewards for sugarcane.74 By 1799 the Council switched from offering prizes for the best forms of produce to giving away money “To every one, who...shall clear, plant, and keep in good order, not less than one

Acre and a half of land” within the space of the following year and a half.75 Even after

72 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 16, 48; 73 Council Minutes, 11 November 1793, ff. 109-10, CO 270/2, TNA. 74 For calves, see 19 May 1795, f. 157-58, CO 270/3, for sugar cane see 5 February 1798, f. 192, CO 270/4 . For general prizes see 19 May 1795, ff. 155-61, CO 270/3; 5 February 1798, ff. 191-93, CO 270/4; 20 January 1801, f. 35, CO 270/6, TNA. 75 16 November 1799, f. 317, CO 270/4, TNA.

405 the French attacked in the fall of 1794 and Freetown lay in ruins, Zachary Macaulay seemed happy to observe that he saw “no appearance of want among” the Nova Scotians.

They were far enough inland from the attacks that their farms suffered minimal damage, and, further, “The rice they had procured, together with fifty or sixty Puncheons of

Molasses which the French permitted them to take away was a considerable assistance to them.”76 By essentially bribing colonists to grow food, the Council ensured food security and effected brief interludes of peace.

The council also sought—in brief, exceptional instances—to give colonists the right to pass judgment on those who disobeyed the norms of food production and distribution. In 1793, when three sailors came on shore and “wantonly killed a duck belonging to one of the Settlers,” the thieves were jailed, and the next day tried, “not by their Peers, but by Judge McAuley and a Jury of twelve blacks” (emphasis original). The

Nova Scotian jury found the sailors guilty, sentenced one to receive thirty-nine lashes, and imposed fines on the other two. Although the master of the sailors’ ship dubbed the court “a mere usurpation, and a mockery on all law and justice,” and although he obtained the sailors’ release, the damage had been done: one of the sailors had been

“dreadfully mortified at being whipped by a black man.”77

During various times and in a wide array of places throughout the Revolutionary

Atlantic, fights over foodways illustrate moments when power relations shifted. In this brief interlude, the Sierra Leone Council relied on colonists to supply them with provisions in the wake of the French attack, and Zachary Macaulay led the Sierra Leone

76 3 October 1794, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (4), Macaulay Papers, HL. 77 Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 124.

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Council’s efforts to ignore racial distinctions and to encourage black Loyalists to enforce regulations regarding the theft of food.

For the most part, however, the Sierra Leone Council’s efforts came to naught.

Rewards for food growth were counterbalanced by the fact that in 1794 the council passed a resolution requiring colonists to build a house on their land before they could qualify for provisions. Furthermore, they decided that colonists who continued to refuse to pay their quitrent were disqualified from earning cash prizes, despite the fact that John

Clarkson had promised the Nova Scotians they would not have to pay quitrents.78 The colonists rejected the offer of land on the Bullum Shore because the rice tribute was too high. The Hundredors and Tythingmen resolved that settlers who did choose to migrate should be given land amounting to “one fifth of the quantity originally promised,” but that this land should be granted “without any Conditions being annexed to the grant, excepting” an annual rent.79 In other words, Nova Scotian leaders opined that rice did not qualify as an appropriate type of rent.

The formal complaints of the Hundredors and Tythingmen obscure the fact that the situation in Freetown was rapidly deteriorating. In 1794, the colonists rioted. Zachary

Macaulay, now governor, handled the riot by erecting cannon outside his house and offering free passage back to Nova Scotia on a former slave ship. No one took him up on his offer.80 At a 1795 meeting between Macaulay and the Hundredors and Tythingmen,

Macaulay did little to repair the damage initially caused by John Clarkson’s

78 Resolution of Council Omitted, [?] January 1794 , f. 139, CO 270/2, TNA. 79 3 June 1794, ff. 171-2, CO 270/2, TNA. 80 Jasanoff, “The Other Side of the Revolution,” 226.

407 overconfident promises regarding quitrents, which continued to inform Nova Scotians’ complaints about land.81 He stated that “words dropt by Mr C. in the course of conversation...can hardly be admitted a confirmation” of company policy. Nor could they ask for “wages bestowed without a return of labour.” Thus Macaulay negated earlier attempts by the Nova Scotians to lessen the amount of labor they needed to undertake in exchange for provisions.82

Macaulay’s speech caused further antagonism. He argued that inherent differences between white colonists and Nova Scotians justified the explicit inequalities between the two groups: “Whites live better perhaps than you do, but why...because they can afford it.” To Nova Scotians who asked, “why should not we have the same”?

Macaulay countered, “Because you don’t deserve them.” When the Nova Scotians could

“Write as well, figure as well, Act as well, think as well as they do...you shall have a preference.” But at that moment, he continued, there was not “an office in the Colony filled by a white, which a Black could fill with any propriety.”83 Macaulay suggested that by clinging to the promises of John Clarkson and refusing to pay their quitrents (and thus to work their farms), the Nova Scotians had decreased themselves in the eyes of the white

Council members, who did not trust them enough to govern themselves. He linked

81 John Clarkson made a bad situation worse by making promises to the Nova Scotians that he was incapable of fulfilling. Before departing, Clarkson had assured them that they would be exempt from quitrent payments, a promise that turned out to be false (the quitrents the Sierra Leone Company planned to enforce were also ten times higher than anything the blacks would have paid in America). The problem was that Henry Thornton did not inform John Clarkson about the quitrent until the very end of December 1791, and since Clarkson and the black Loyalists set sail for Sierra Leone in early January, it seems probable that Clarkson promised the future colonists there would be no quitrents before receiving Thornton’s letter. Henry Thornton to John Clarkson, London, 30 December 1791, f. 41, Add MS. 41262A, BL; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 189; Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 34. 82 In Council, 7 March 1795, ff. 55-56, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (3), Macaulay Papers, HL. 83 In Council, 7 March 1795, ff. 55-56, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (3), HL.

408 divisions in governance with divisions in foodways. As the Nova Scotians found their foodways circumscribed, they in turn directed their energies against indigenous Africans.

***

Loyalists left North America carrying emotional and cultural baggage, and the

Nova Scotians were no exception. As Maya Jasanoff has pointed out, the “spirit of 1783” imbued former colonists with a mindset more similar to than different from their rebel enemies.84 Like American colonists, the black Loyalists wanted to control their economy.

Most of the Nova Scotians saw themselves as a group distinct from indigenous Africans, and thus rationalized the act of exerting power over them. As a result of their subjugation via restrictive food laws in British North America, as well as the subsequent circumscription of their access to food in Sierra Leone, the formerly oppressed became oppressors in their own right.

To be sure, some contact remained peaceful and diplomatic. Many of the Nova

Scotians felt driven by a religious impulse that helps to explain their flight from the North

American colonies, what they saw as their mission in Africa, and their initial good relations with the Temne.85 Visitors to Nova Scotia recorded that fourteen different

84 Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 5-17, esp. 12. The quest for post-Revolutionary self-definition was not confined to the reaches of the British empire; Americans also struggled to delineate what it meant to be American. Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 12-13; James Sidbury, “Entangled Legal Traditions and Constitutional Visions in Early Freetown, Sierra Leone,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession. I am grateful to Jim Sidbury for sharing this work-in-progress with me. 85 Wesleyan Methodists, for example, probably ran from Virginia to various outposts of the British army as a cohesive congregation. I am grateful to Jim Sidbury for pointing me to Cassandra Pybus’s preliminary database on this group of former slaves, which can be found at http://methodists.blackloyalist.info/.

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Methodist groups met every night.86 Before leaving Nova Scotia various Baptists,

Huntingdonian Methodists, and Wesleyan Methodists felt as though God was calling them into exodus. They conceived of themselves as freed Israelite slaves who, having escaped from Pharaoh-like American slaveholders, were destined to wander before settling down somewhere new.87 When they landed in Sierra Leone, they landed with the intention to inculcate indigenous Africans with Christian religion.88 Ostensibly, religious conversion would allow the Nova Scotians to unite with Africans and become an African people.89

In the early years of colonization, the Nova Scotians cautiously welcomed the

Temne into Freetown because it increased the possibilities for contact (and thus religious conversion). On a more practical level, the Temne brought much-needed food supplies with them. The people “of the Timmany nation” came “every day to the settlement in great numbers, bringing with them...Anana’s Banana’s, Plantains, Limes, Oranges,

Cassada &c.” They exchanged this fresh produce for “Biscuit, Beef, Soap and Spirits.”90

In October 1792 John Clarkson seemed pleased that almost 150 Temne came to town

86 Cassandra Pybus, “Mary Perth, Harry Washington, and Moses Wilkinson: Black Methodists Who Escaped from Slavery and Founded a Nation,” in Alfred F. Young, Gary B. Nash, and Ray Raphael, eds., Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (New York: Alfred F. Knopf, 2011), 163. 87 Pybus, “Mary Perth, Harry Washington, and Moses Wilkinson,” 164; Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” 6. 88 Although the push to effect the conversion of indigenous Africans may have been a motivating factor for the formation of the Sierra Leone Company, that project was largely unsuccessful during the time period covered in this chapter. Anna Maria Falconbridge called it “preposterous” to attempt “to imprint notions of Christianity, or any sort of instruction, upon the minds of people, though the bare medium of a language they do not understand.” Colonists’ efforts to inculcate the Temne with Christianity failed in part because of significant communication barriers, but also because of British assumptions that Africans wanted to be converted. Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 110. 89 Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” 8. 90 “Anana’s” are pineapples, from the French ananas. 17 March 1792, f. 13, Add. MS 41264, BL.

410 each day. Each Temne trader had “among our settlers one whom he calls his friend, with whom he barters for commodities.”91 Although white council members owned the commodities that the Temne traded for fresh fruits, it was the black Loyalists who, in keeping with previous histories of food, transportation, and mobility, conveyed these foods throughout the colony.

Good relations did not last for very long. As Nova Scotians became dissatisfied with their lands on the coast of Freetown and began to build out into the mountains, they encroached on Temne lands in much the same way that white colonists in the United

States interfered with Indians’ foodways by land-grabbing. Both indigenous Africans and

Native Americans entertained concepts about land tenure that differed from Anglo-

European ideas of land ownership. Predictably, hostilities increased. When the Temne sold their lands along the shore to Clarkson and the Sierra Leone Company, they did not realize that the British believed their purchase extended inland. Clarkson had to meet with Naimbana to clarify the reaches of the Colony’s boundaries, but confusion persisted.92 Although Clarkson and Naimbana eventually agreed on a line of settlement,

Temne plantations continued to be “obstacles in removing our lines into the country.”93

As late as 1798, the Nova Scotians complained that because “the land allotted to them” was “Still the Subject of dispute with King Tom, they were wholly deprived of the means of engaging in cultivation.”94 These obstacles blocked the Nova Scotians’ abilities to grow food, and fueled resentment against indigenous Africans.

91 23 October 1792, “Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson,” 91. 92 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 47. 93 Ingham, Sierra Leone After a Hundred Years, 80. 94 5 March 1798, f. 193, CO 270/4, TNA.

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Between 1792 and 1800, the Nova Scotians began to act through the Hundredors and Tythingmen, and with the approval of the Sierra Leone Council, to enact food laws to their benefit. Scholar Christopher Fyfe has dated these food laws to 1795, but actually they began as soon as land issues between the Temne and Nova Scotians became apparent.95 As long as the Nova Scotians could use food for the purpose of dominance, their relations with the Sierra Leone Council remained fairly stable. Historian James

Sidbury has suggested that the Nova Scotians “hoped to use the market to establish a reasonable standard of living without becoming fully enmeshed in, and thus dependent upon, market relations.”96 In a way, this is true: the Nova Scotians did indeed hope to use the market to escape a state of dependency that resembled their former slave statuses. But they aimed to do so by controlling the marketplace, rather than avoiding dependency, with the food laws they put into practice.

The Nova Scotians began trying to change foodways as early as 1792, and at first, they relegated their efforts to controlling the behavior of fellow colonists. In August they petitioned Clarkson, complaining “of the extravagant charge made by the fishermen for every article they sold.” Clarkson solved the problem by meeting with one Robert

Horton, and making him sign an agreement promising to change his prices from one shilling per six fish to one shilling per twelve fish. Furthermore, Horton agreed to offer

95 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 64. For two scholars who have talked briefly about the laws, but painted them only as Nova Scotians’ efforts at self-government, rather than efforts to circumscribe Temne foodways, too, see Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 299; Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown, 186. James Sidbury argues that “The Nova Scotians’ struggles for autonomy began at the level of procedure,” meaning that the colonists cared more about how laws were enforced than in rewriting colonial law. I disagree. Although I do think that during the 1800 rebellion the colonists were angrier about lack of enforcement, I think that the Hundredors’ and Tythingmens’ efforts to rewrite food laws contributed to the problem in the first place. Sidbury, “Entangled Legal Traditions,” 26. 96 Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 93-94.

412 fish at these prices within the Colony “before he offered them for sale to other people.”97

Colonists wanted to make sure that a moral economy gave them the first chance to purchase such edibles.

The colonists also tried to control the prices of bread and meat, as well as the distribution of alcohol. In 1793 the Hundredors and Tythingmen proposed a law that “no person whatever shall sell fresh Beef for a greater price than 4 d [per] lb, nor Goat &

Sheep Mutton for a greater price than 6 d [per] lb, nor fresh Pork for a greater price than

8 d [per] lb, under the penalty of forfeiting all such meat as the offender may have in his

Possession.”98 The Sierra Leone Council agreed to approve this law. Zachary Macaulay relayed that he “caused experiments to be made with respect to the quantity of Bread which would be produced from a given quantity of Flour.” After enlisting the help of a baker named Pompey Young and “many experiments were made,” he concluded, “that from 8 wt of Flour nearly 11 wt of Bread was produced,” and that the price of bread, therefore, “should on no account exceed 3d” per pound.99 A slightly later 1795 resolution from the Hundredors and Tythingmen asked the council to fix the price of bread “at fourpence half penny_per pound.” Rarely did the white colonists find fault with the fact that the Nova Scotians sought to standardize and control the circulation of food in the colony, precisely because the precedent for such laws already existed within an Anglo-

American legal tradition. When the Hundredors and Tythingmen proposed a fine for anyone in the colony convicted of “selling Spirituous Liquors Wine or other strong

97 31 August and 1 September 1792, “Diary of Lieutenant J. Clarkson,” 34. 98 4 July 1793, f. 77, CO 270/2, TNA. 99 For “many experiments,” see 21 August 1794, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (3), Macaulay Papers, HL; for other quotations see Resolutions of Council, 23 August 1794, Freetown, Sierra Leone, ff. 5-6, CO 270/3, TNA.

413 drink” without a license, the Governor and council went so far as to deem this resolution

“highly proper & expedient” before they agreed to pass it.100

These regulations, like the first fishing regulation, also aimed to control the movement of foods beyond the colony’s boundaries. Over time, and as trade and food networks expanded outside of Freetown, it became apparent that the colonists’ moral economy was shifting to one that favored a form of protectionism. In 1795 the

Hundredors and Tythingmen recommended that the governor and council of Freetown should “issue an order to prevent strangers selling Meat in the Colony by Retail.”101

Further explanation of this matter revealed that this recommendation originated with conflicts with people from the Susu country, located just north of Freetown. Susu men had brought “some fine Cattle” into Freetown, but they refused to sell them unless the

Nova Scotians allowed them “to kill them and sell them out by the Pound.” The Nova

Scotians did “not think that is proper.” They requested “that no strangers or People that doth not belong to the Colony should bring live stock here and kill them” with the intention to “sell it out by the Pound.”102 The colonists remained willing to allow indigenous Africans to sell live animals because they could control those prices, much as butchers within the colony controlled prices for meat, and bakers set prices for loaves of

100 In Council, 9 June 1795 and 12 October 1795, ff. 174, 230-3, CO 270/3, TNA. 101 In Council, 9 June 1795, f. 174, CO 270/3, TNA. 102 Richard Corankapoor and Thomas Jackson to [the Governor and Council], Free Town, 8 June 1795, f. 175, CO 270/3, TNA. Notably, the Nova Scotians distinguished between “strangers” and people who did not belong to the colony. In Islamic societies, nonbelievers were considered strangers. The colonists would have been familiar with this term; in 1798 a ruler named Firama told Zachary Macaulay that he thought of the colonists at Freetown “as my Strangers.” Though the Nova Scotians continued to try to convert indigenous Africans to Christianity, they recognized that variants of Muslim religion held sway. Perhaps they thought that it was better to discriminate against Muslim nonbelievers than adherents to the Muslim faith. Either that, or they were appropriating the term for their own uses in order to discriminate against nonbelievers in their Christian society. Morgan, “Africa and the Atlantic,” 228; King Firama to Mr. Macaulay, Robaga, 22 April 1798, f. 199, CO 270/4, TNA.

414 bread. But the colonists wanted to prohibit the sale of meat by the pound because in that instance, it became too difficult to regulate prices.

The rationalization for this law also related to changes in the types of comestibles that indigenous Africans brought into Freetown. In 1792 Anna Maria Falconbridge commented that although Africans brought fruits into Freetown, they seldom sought to sell livestock, with the exception of “a few fowls, or perhaps a goat, which they barter away for cloth, soap or spirits.” In December 1792, King Naimbana possessed only two or three “fat beeves,” which comprised almost “all in this part of the country,” according to her observations.103 By 1796 the situation had changed, and writers observed Africans trying to sell larger animals in exchange for cash or bars.104

Over time, even live animals posed problems for Nova Scotian-Temne relations.

In 1793 the Hundredors and Tythingmen stated that “all persons possessed of Hogs,

Goats, or Sheep, are to Keep them Shut up.” Owners of animals still at larger after three days would suffer fines “in the Sum of One Dollars,” and “Pay for all damage done.”105

Regulating the behavior of wandering animals was something that colonists would likely be capable of doing, but obviously, Native Africans who could not read, or who were not present in the colony within three days of this regulation’s passing, would be fined for not controlling their livestock. In 1796 the Hundredors proposed the necessity of “trimming the fences about town.”106 This item suggested continuing problems with animals in

103 Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, (“a few fowls”) 88, (“fat beeves”) 102. 104 On the fluctuation of bars as currency, see Christopher Fyfe’s editor’s note in Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 35n32. 105 Council Minutes, Freetown, 27 May 1793, f. 73, CO 270/2, TNA. 106 7 July 1796, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (11), Macaulay Papers, HL.

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Freetown, and also the possibility that some of these animals originated outside of the colony’s borders.

As is always the case when examining colonial laws, the historian must take care to examine gaps between prescription and practice. As late as 1801 domesticated animals were still wandering through the colony: in August of that year, “an Act for the better preservation of Live Stock within the Colony of Sierra Leone” noted that “Live stock of various kinds have, in several recent instances, been killed and devoured by Hogs turned loose in the Highways and Streets of this Colony.”107 This act demonstrated that Nova

Scotians remained unable to prevent animals, especially hogs, from ranging throughout the colony. Just because people sought to control the movements of these animals does not mean that custom conformed to law.

Because the gap between law and practice is difficult to quantify, we must turn to the ways in which the Temne reacted to these restrictive food laws in order to understand the impact they had on Temne-Nova Scotian relations. In the late-1790s, Temne words and actions indicated that indigenous Africans did indeed suffer from these laws, and that they sought to reverse them in various ways. In 1798 King Tom appeared at a palaver (or meeting) and claimed that Zachary Macaulay was “a bad man, & not his friend, for he had spoiled the Country...by lowering the Price of Produce.” As an example he cited the cost of rice, which had fallen dramatically. King Tom argued, “that if Mr. Macaulay wished to do good to the Country, he must again give the same.” Macaulay refused, and

King Tom told him that he had to agree, or “[quit] the Country.” Macaulay told him “that

107 21 August 1801, ff. 241-2, CO 270/6, TNA.

416 he could not do the one, nor yet would he do the other,” and so King Tom “dissolved the meeting and departed in great Anger.”108 King Tom’s anger betrayed growing discontent with English and Nova Scotian control of food prices.109

Although King Tom’s voice was one of the most audible because of his position in African society, the actions of other Africans indicate the widespread unhappiness over

Loyalist price-fixing. Africans tried, and in some cases succeeded, in controlling the movement of domesticated animals—but not to the colonists’ benefit. In 1797 Macaulay reported a great “Mortality among the Settlers hogs.” No one could figure out why so many animals were dying until “a Native was caught in the very act of laying Ratsbane enclosed in Cassada near some Hogs, evidently for the purpose of killing them.”

Macaulay speculated that had “the man Succeeded, the Natives wd. have gone as usual & begged the dead body of the owner, and thus have had a Supply of fresh meat at very little expence.”110 Yet it is also possible that the poisoner planned to resell the dead animal.

Sometimes cattle simply vanished. In 1798, a storekeeper in Freetown reported

“that Several of the Company’s cattle had recently disappeared.” He speculated “from various circumstances it was probable they had been drawn into the woods by Natives &

108 6 January 1798, ff. 184-5, CO 270/4, TNA. 109 One scholar has noted that various governors, including Dawes and Macaulay, believed that trade was the best way to stabilize Sierra Leone’s economy, but he also points to the inconsistency of policy that came down from London. Council members did not consistently back one side (the colonists) over the other (the Temne). Winston McGowan, “The Establishment of Long-Distance Trade between Sierra Leone and Its Hinterland, 1787-1821,” The Journal of African History, vol. 31, no. 1 (1990), 37. 110 12 September 1797, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (22), Macaulay Papers, HL.

417 there Slaughtered.”111 This incident revealed that indigenous Africans became likely suspects when domesticated cattle went missing. This observation further clarifies Nova

Scotians’ new laws about sales of meat: the colonists wanted to disallow Temne sales because they possessed no way to identify stolen animals if the animals were already dead. They may also have worried about contamination from poisoned meat.

Obviously, foodways do not completely explain how the Nova Scotians failed to find common ground with the Temne, or how they formed a collective identity in Sierra

Leone. It is impossible to ignore the role that religion played in the Nova Scotians’ conflicts. Over time, religious differences caused more significant problems, and political leaders became increasingly synonymous with religious leaders. Once in Africa, the

Wesleyan Methodists became the strongest proponents of a separatist theology.112 When the Company decided to impose the quitrent, the Baptists, led by David George, hesitatingly conceded that they would pay it. Methodist leaders, on the other hand, warned their parishioners that if they agreed to do so they would suffer the penalty of banishment.113 In 1796 a group of Methodists, led by Nathaniel Snowball, Luke Jordan, and Jonathan Glasgow, withdrew from the colony and move to Pirate’s Bay, with the permission of two Temne headmen.114 They extended the exodus metaphor to their new residence, and claimed a new identity as Africans living beyond the reach of English law.115

111 In Council, 23 March 1798, f. 196, CO 270/4, TNA. Mary Louise Clifford has also covered these instances briefly. Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown, 185. 112 Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” 8. 113 Egerton, Death or Liberty, 218. 114 Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” 12-13. 115 Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” 18.

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Despite the fact that religious issues factored into the Nova Scotians’ complaints, however, they do not completely explain the roots of the 1800 rebellion. The effort to convert indigenous Africans was largely unsuccessful because of language barriers and the firm establishment of Muslim religion, so Christian fervor waned in that quarter.116 It is true that the Methodists led the charge in calling Freetown a town of slavery after

Clarkson’s departure.117 That complaint however, rested just as much on issues surrounding marketplace control as it did on white Council members’ attacks on the

Loyalists’ religion. Although some of the Wesleyan Methodist Nova Scotians called themselves Africans during their separation from Freetown, their form of protest was still predominantly Christian and Anglo-American.118 In addition, many of the colonists made clear efforts to distinguish themselves from Africans by virtue of their Methodist faith.119

And if, as scholars have claimed, the Methodists (who were the majority) led the rebellion, there is no explanation that states why only 50 colonists out of 300—less than twenty percent—joined in.

In addition to religion, then, historians must consider other issues leading to rebellion, such as struggles over political rights. The Nova Scotians tried on the one hand to define themselves as British subjects, and on the other hand as people unrestricted by the confines of British rule. Though they came to Freetown with “relatively conventional

Anglo-American judicial and political assumptions” regarding rule by consent, trial by jury, and written law, the black Loyalists also sought to stretch the limits of those judicial

116 Falconbridge, Narrative of Two Voyages, 110. 117 Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” 3-4. 118 Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” 18. 119 Pybus, “Mary Perth, Harry Washington, and Moses Wilkinson,” 164.

419 and political traditions.120 Their religious identities may not have resulted in widespread conversion, but they did enable them to push the boundaries of British governance.121

Numerous historians have described how the Nova Scotians rioted in 1800, but the rebellion makes much more sense when placed in the context of victual warfare, food, and power. The rebellion was not merely a gathering of discontented Hundredors, nor a concerted effort by religious leaders; nor a continuation of quarrels over quitrents: it was also a reaction to food issues plaguing the colony.122 During the late-1790s when the

Hundredors and Tythingmen, with the approval of the Sierra Leone Council, controlled food prices and distribution, relations between the Nova Scotians and white Englishmen remained fairly peaceful—though they were brokered at the expense of Temne-Nova

Scotian relations. Once the white council members began to preference the Temne over the Nova Scotians, and old issues of land, scarce provisions, and environmental issues came to the fore, the Nova Scotians rebelled.

120 Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” 9. 121 When, in 1796, the Sierra Leone Company attempted to impose the quitrent, the Wesleyan Methodists flooded the ranks of Hundredors and Tythingmen. These men began to suggest that the colony belonged to the colonists, and started to advocate a separatist movement in which the Nova Scotians would distance themselves from the control of the Sierra Leone Company—most notably, with the implementation of their own court outside of Freetown. Macaulay may have inadvertently encouraged the formation of such a court during his conduct with the sailors who stole food in 1793. The separatists’ power waned with the 1797 elections, which elected Hundredors and Tythingmen friendlier to Zachary Macaulay. Sidbury, “Entangled Legal Traditions,” 23-27. 122 Historians have detailed how in the late-1790s, some of the Councilmen revived the debate about imposing a quitrent on the Nova Scotians’ lands. Yet they have largely ignored the fact that the rebellion proceeded anyway, despite the fact that the Council ultimately resolved to abolish the quitrent in 1799. For primary documents on the quitrent, see Zachary Macaulay and James Watt to the Chairman and Court of Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, Freetown, 15 November 1794, f. 2, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (7), Macaulay Papers, HL; for secondary works, see Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 68, 81-87; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 191-202; Egerton, Death or Liberty, 219; Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 383-401; Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 125-28; Clifford, From Slavery to Freetown, 130-9 (for religion more broadly), 189-96.

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The white government in Sierra Leone displayed growing dissatisfaction with the men that the Nova Scotians elected as Hundredors and Tythingmen. Isaac Anderson, who wrote the letter to Clarkson in London, was elected a Hundredor in 1796. Macaulay observed that he was “as disaffected as ever.” Though he said generally good about ten of the Tythingmen—Thomas Clarence, George Lewis, Thos. Hog, Isaac Bleever, Fras.

Warwick, Tarlton Fleming, Cato Burden, John Kizell, Joseph Ramsay, and London

Bligh—Macaulay concluded that except for one or two of them they were all “timid & irresolute, and easily led a way.” As for the other Hundredors, Ishmael York was “a noisy factious fellow, exceedingly griping & Selfish...Sadly unprincipled”; one named George

Carrol was “more hot & passionate & more ignorant”; and Nathanial Snowball (one of the Methodists) “may truly be called a pestilent fellow...factious, noisy busy, bold, & blind.”123 Divisions between white council members and black Loyalists were clear.

The Sierra Leone Council’s annoyance over these new appointments decreased their willingness to countenance the laws and actions the Hundredors and Tythingmen men proposed. The roots of the rebellion are grounded in the Sierra Leone Council’s increasing tendency to privilege Temne foodways over Nova Scotian ones, which rankled the black colonists by highlighting their decreasing political and legal rights. An encounter in December of 1796 presents one of the first instances of a white colonist interfering with one of the Hundredor’s policies. Macaulay described how he discovered

Hundredor Ishmael York “Selling rum to the Natives at an unlawful price...exacting a

Sixpence more [per] Gallon from Natives, than the Stated price.” In this instance a Nova

123 20 December 1796, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (17), Macaulay Papers, HL.

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Scotian deliberately charged an indigenous African more for a consumable commodity because he was not one of the colonists. After summoning York, York argued, “He did not See why any one Shd. interfere in his trade with the natives.” Macaulay was unresponsive to York’s logic, and revoked his liquor license.124 Although it is possible that York was also overcharging fellow colonists for liquor, in his encounter with

Macaulay he asserted his right to cheat indigenous Africans specifically. York asserted that it was no one else’s business if he overcharged outsiders; Macaulay disagreed. He deprived York of the right to fix his own prices with Natives. York was one of the men who rebelled in 1800.

It was one thing for the Sierra Leone Council to prohibit the Nova Scotians’ price- fixing; it became a more serious matter when they failed to prevent outbreaks of violence between the Nova Scotians and the Temne. In June 1799 the Sierra Leone Council proved incapable of averting victual warfare. Governor Thomas Ludlum perplexedly described how “many cattle belonging to the Colony were killed by the Natives” that spring. One man named Thomas Cuthbert suffered the loss of “a very fine Cow.” When some of the culprits had been identified, “a serious complaint was made to King Tom, who promised redress.” Before King Tom could remedy the matter, however, “another

Cow belonging to Eli Ackin was stolen in the same matter.” What followed was simple,

Nova Scotian-imposed justice: “Exasperated at so bold a repetition of the offence,” the colonists “armed themselves, went in to King Tom’s Territory, and seized the persons

124 22 December 1796, Journal of Zachary Macaulay, MY 418 (17), Macaulay Papers, HL.

422 whom they suspected to be guilty.”125 Natives continued to steal colonists’ domesticated animals, despite laws attempting to prevent the sale of stolen meat, as well as the construction of fences to prevent animals from wandering into willing hands. The fact that a number of the colonists tried to use extralegal violence to solve the matter themselves displayed a growing lack of faith in the Sierra Leone Council’s ability to mediate between them and the Temne.126 This was not a matter of one white council member forbidding a Nova Scotian to charge the Temne what he wanted; this was an instance of the Sierra Leone Council’s total failure to prevent the Temne from stealing colonists’ animals.

Ludlum though that the Nova Scotians’ actions were unprecedented. He wrote that they were “so inconsistent with those equitable principles by which we professed to be governed,” that King Tom gained “an advantage which he did not fail to seize.” King

Tom captured three of the Nova Scotians, and although he later released them, he

“refused any indemnification to Eli Ackin.” He argued that the fact that the Nova

Scotians’ acted without the Sierra Leone Council’s consent negated his obligation to pay for the theft and slaughter of animals. The Council would not agree to King Tom’s mode for settling the matter, but after plying him with “a more than usual liberality in the article of presents,” King Tom still showed no willingness to compromise: he “kept the

125 In Council, 24 June 1799, f. 269, CO 270/4, TNA. 126 It is important to acknowledge James Sidbury’s contention that the records of the Sierra Leone Company are biased in favor of relating “contentious encounters between settlers and natives” because officials hoped to emphasize “the superiority of Company policies and the degree to which the Nova Scotians were dependent upon, and should be grateful to, their white British patrons.” Sidbury, “‘African’ Settlers in the Founding of Freetown,” 10.

423 presents (or many of them,) and called no meeting.”127 The Council could not obtain reparation for Eli Ackin, and was thus incapable of mediating between the Nova Scotians and the Temne. The colonists’ actions were “inconsistent” because the Sierra Leone

Council no longer guaranteed them an equitable government in the way that they had defined and participated in it since the early 1790s.

After Zachary Macaulay departed Freetown in 1799, the colonists appointed

Methodist preacher Mingo Jordan as a judge, and Isaac Anderson and John Cuthbert justices of the peace. These men “then created a bicameral assembly and began to pass legislation.” According to Douglas Egerton, these were acts “of quasi-independence” because the Nova Scotians claimed that they (and not the white council members) were the true proprietors of Sierra Leone; the Sierra Leone Company in their minds was entitled to regulate only the external aspects of trade.128 The creation of a bicameral assembly may have been new, but in fact that system merely built on the established form of government established through the Hundredors and Tythingmen after John Clarkson’s departure in 1792. Jordan, Anderson, and Cuthbert became judge and justices of the peace because there was an established precedent—in Macaulay’s appointment of an all- black jury, and in the formulation of Hundredor- and Tythingmen-conceived (and

Council-approved) laws governing trade and food exchange within the colony.

The rebellion in 1800 began as a Nova Scotian attempt to regain control of foodways. James Sidbury has argued that the rebels, in their commitment “to a notion of

127 In Council, 24 June 1799, ff. 269, 272, CO 270/4, TNA. 128 Egerton, Death or Liberty, 219. On the bicameral assembly see also Cassandra Pybus, “Henry ‘Harry’ Washington (1750s-1790s): A Founding Father’s Slave,” in Karen Racine and Beatriz G. Mamigonian, eds., The Human Tradition in the Atlantic World, 1500-1850 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2010), 112.

424 moral economy,” believed that the Sierra Leone Company was cheating them by

“overcharging or refusing to sell goods at a just price.”129 And it is true that they sought to standardize fair prices for edible goods. In September 1800 the Hundredors and

Tythingmen, led by Isaac Anderson, James Robertson, Nathaniel Wansey, and Ansel

Zizer, posted a code of laws that fixed prices for butter, cheese, salt beef, salt pork, rice, rum, and sugar.130 The rebels also forbade people from denying “the Settlers of any thing that is to be exposed of in the Colony.” Anyone who refused to sell to the colonists, and was then “found carrying it out of the Colony” would incur a heavy fine.131 The paper of laws, then, represented more than an outcry against unfair price-fixing with the colony: it was also the Nova Scotians’ attempts to assert their right to dictate the norms of food exchange beyond the colony’s borders; in other words, it was their push to regulate food exchanges with indigenous Africans.

The paper of laws was also a reworking of the Nova Scotians’ concepts of their political, legal, and natural rights. In addition to regulating the prices of comestibles, the colonists also delineated punishments for adultery, stealing, and Sabbath-breaking, and proclaimed that the Hundredors and Tythingmen—and not the Sierra Leone Council— would be responsible for adjudicating colonists’ debt issues with the Sierra Leone

Company. In contrast to previous Nova Scotian-Temne interactions, the paper denied the governor and Sierra Leone Council the authority to interfere, and warned colonists that

129 Sidbury, “Entangled Legal Traditions,” 28. 130 Ellen Gibson Wilson and Simon Schama interpret these laws as essentially domestic issues. Neither writer acknowledges the longstanding issues between the Nova Scotians and the Temne. Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 391; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (London: BBC Books, 2005), 379. 131 “Paper of Laws stuck up at Abram Smith’s house by the Hundredors and Tythingmen,” Appendix, f. 98, CO 270/5, TNA.

425 they had to abide by the code, or leave the colony.132 They revised their code and reposted it on September 25th. These codes were clear indicators of Nova Scotians attempting to reassert their control of the marketplace; but so, too were they a way of blending a new protectionist economy with ideas about criminal or moral law.133

In the Sierra Leone Council’s description of the incident, which they titled “A

Narrative of the Rebellion which broke out in this Colony on the 25th of Septr. 1800,” victual warfare played a prominent role. The rebels “plundered the Governor’s house on the mountain”; and elsewhere “they took liquor, sugar tea & wearing apparel.” Stealing edible commodities from the men in power translated into signs of hostility against them

(and also indicated the practical alimentary needs of the rebels). The Council interpreted the fact that the rebels “were receiving hourly supplies of men & provisions” from

“Freetown & the Country” as signs of complicity from other colonists, and possibly the

Temne.134

Governor Ludlum overreacted and had the Nova Scotians pegged as rebels. He armed company employees and trusted Nova Scotians, and sent them after the recalcitrant Hundredors and Tythingmen. Robertson was captured; Zizer surrendered; and

Anderson and Wansey escaped to a nearby bridge, where they rallied about fifty of the

300 Nova Scotian householders to their cause. The situation remained at a standstill until the arrival of the Asia. The ship carried forty-five British soldiers from the Twenty-

Fourth Regiment, and Jamaican maroons from Nova Scotia. The Sierra Leone Council

132 “Paper of Laws stuck up at Abram Smith’s house by the Hundredors and Tythingmen,” Appendix, f. 98, CO 270/5, TNA. 133 Sidbury, “Entangled Legal Traditions,” 28-29. 134 Appendix, ff. 104, 102, CO 270/5, TNA.

426 recalled the arrival of the 600 Maroons as no less than “a most unexpected intervention of providence” that “completely changed the face of affairs.”135 The combined force finally captured enough of the rebels to procure a peace in October.136 Isaac Anderson was hanged, as was Francis Patarick. Many others were exiled.137 The rebellion was speedily stymied, and in its wake the Nova Scotians lost their right to elect representatives.

***

Food diplomacy also factored into the bargains that the Maroons made with the

Sierra Leone Council before they agreed to put down the rebellion. Coming from the cold shores of Nova Scotia, the Maroons already claimed a good deal of experience negotiating about food. Despite the fact that they had suffered from provisions scarcities and notably difficult winters, the Maroons entered the colony from a position of strength.

The Council required the Maroons’ assistance desperately enough that the

Maroons inadvertently altered the nature of food diplomacy in the colony. Recall that before the Maroons’ landing, the Sierra Leone Company had established a precedent of providing the Nova Scotians with six months provisions total (three months of full provisions, and three of half provisions). The Maroons used the fact that the Sierra Leone

Council needed them in order to bargain for more provisions up front, and to implement qualifications about their farm requirements.

135 Appendix, f. 105, CO 270/5, TNA. 136 Approximately 600 men, women, and children arrived in the colony; approximately 200 of the men were deemed “capable of bearing Arms.” The Asia also carried “a detachment of forty five Soldiers under the command of Lieut. Lionel Smith of the 24th Regt.” For the number of Maroons, see [John King] to John Schoolbred, Whitehall, 7 July 1796, f. 139, CO 267/10, TNA. For the council’s quote and the number of soldiers, see Appendix, f. 105, CO 270/5, TNA. These numbers differ slightly from Douglas Egerton’s account, which puts the number of soldiers at 47. Egerton, Death or Liberty, 220. 137 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 82-86.

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The Sierra Leone Council members made food preparations for the Maroons’ journey and arrival before the rebellion was in full swing, as they already knew that the

British government planned to relocate the Maroons to Sierra Leone. These plans differed somewhat from previous ones. The Sierra Leone Council proposed that the Maroons should receive at least four months of provisions. In May 1799 John Gray and Thomas

Ludlum sent a letter on behalf of the Council to William Cavendish-Bentinck, 3rd Duke of Portland and Prime Minister of Britain, and suggested that in addition to these provisions, “it would be advisable to send also about 25 or 30 Tons of Rice,” while they would also endeavor “to provide a quantity of that article.” They worried that the

Maroons would arrive “at a season when they will not have an opportunity of making any immediate provisions for themselves, nor even for 6 or 8 Months after,” and thus anticipated the need for more provisions.138 Whereas in the early years of settlement, three months of full provisions seemed sufficient, by 1799 the Council already knew to plan for more than that amount of time. They wanted four months of provisions at the ready, but also stated that the Maroons would be unable to provide for themselves for a minimum of six, and a maximum of eight months. They also seemed more knowledgeable about conditions on the ground, and thus knew when certain foods such as rice would be scarce.

Only a month later, in June, the Council members revised their initial estimate to include yet more provisions, as well as other proposals regarding the Maroons’ arrival.

The Council decided, “that in our opinion it will be necessary to supply the Maroons with

138 John Gray and T[homas] Ludlum to the Duke of Portland, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 6 May 1799, f. 173- 4, CO 267/10, TNA.

428 full rations for 6 months,” after which they “supposed that the expence of provisions may be reduced one third” because they expected that the Maroons would have cleared land and raised animals by that time. After those nine months, the Council proposed to continue providing provisions, but to reduce them again, on account of the Maroons gathering “a crop of Indian corn.” They also increased their estimate of rice, from 25 or

30, to 72 tons.139 These lines betrayed remnants of earlier optimism about colonists getting a jump on clearing land, planting crops, and raising animals, but they also displayed a willingness to provide food for a full twelve months, rather than six.140

The Sierra Leone Company also took care to put terms in place that would prevent a repetition of the problems they had experienced with the Nova Scotians. They made clear from the outset that a quitrent of twenty cents per acre would apply to land grants, and that people would earn money but not provisions for their labor. They stipulated that in order to claim their pay, tenants had to build a house, and clear and cultivate at least a quarter of their land allotment within their first year; three-quarters of the land had to be cleared by the end of the second year; and unoccupied land would revert back to the Company after three years. The Company could institute this strict timeline by promising that the Maroons would receive at least one third of their land within three months of their arrival. Most important, however, was the seventh article of

139 Copy of that part of the Dispatches of the Governor & Council at Sierra Leone to the Court of Directors, dated June which respects the Settlement of the Maroons in Africa, [June 1799], f. 186, CO 267/10, TNA. 140 They stated that for the first six months, each man and woman would receive one pound of beef or pork; children would receive half a pound. One pint of rice, oatmeal, or half a pint of peas comprised the rest of the diet for all men, women and children. Together, these commodities ran to approximately £3,500. After that time, all things were divided by a third, to the tune of just under £1,150. The remaining three months would cost the company £860, for a total of about £5,500 for the year. John Gray and T[homas] Ludlum, Estimate of the expense likely to be incurred by the Maroons for Provisions for the first twelve months after their arrival in Africa, supposing them to be in number 560 and about an equal proportion of Men, Women & Children, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 10 June 1799, f. 195, CO 267/10, TNA.

429 this proposed agreement between the Company and the Maroons, which stated, “An adequate Supply of Provisions shall be furnished to all the Maroons, free of Expence to them for the first Three months...But after that period the Supply will be diminished or wholly stopt.”141 The Sierra Leone Company and Council tried to be transparent about the quitrent and the fact that the Maroons were expected to build houses and become farmers, but they also bluffed about the quantity of provisions they had prepared to offer.

What followed when the Maroons arrived in Sierra Leone was somewhat unexpected, and it demonstrated the Maroons’ continuing abilities to use food diplomacy, perhaps as a result of years negotiating with Jamaican authorities, or from their experiences with starvation and dearth in Nova Scotia. When the Sierra Leone Council members met with the Maroons in the fall of 1800, the Maroons made two significant changes to the terms the Company offered to them. First, “they declined, as they had also done at Halifax, to sign the paper of conditions.” They justified this refusal based on “the injury they had sustained in Jamaica, by the breach of a treaty” which eventually led to their exile.142 The fact that the Maroons refused to sign consequently meant that the

Sierra Leone Company and Council had no proof, other than verbal proof, that the

Maroons had agreed to the quitrent proposed. Their refusal opened the door for future disagreements over quitrent payments.

Second, the Maroons altered the amount of provisions they expected to receive.

Instead of the three months proffered to them, the Maroons obtained “a promise from the

141 Terms on which the Sierra Leone Company propose to receive under their Protection and Government the Maroons now in Nova Scotia, about to be removed thence to the Coast of Africa [enclosed in Mr. Thornton’s, 5 October 1799], f. 223, CO 267/10, TNA. 142 Appendix, ff. 105-6, CO 270/5, TNA.

430

Governor, that, unless the Maroons were guilty of some fault, as for instance, neglecting to clear and cultivate their lands, the necessary supply of provision should be continued to them till they could maintain themselves,” though that period would not “exceed twelve months.”143 Although the Maroons acknowledged that they might neglect their farms, they nevertheless obtained a promise from Governor Ludlum that guaranteed their provisions for a maximum of twelve months. Of course, the Council was prepared to make concessions on this issue because they had secretly planned to give the Maroons twelve months of provisions, anyway, as per Gray’s and Ludlum’s earlier 1799 letter to the Sierra Leone Company. Yet the Maroons still got the food promises they wanted.

They had succeeded in effecting their departure from Nova Scotia based on the argument that they could not live where the pineapple—and, by inference, other Maroon foods— would not grow. They doubtless remained aware that the Sierra Leone Company and

Council needed their assistance. And they seized upon the opportunity to demand more food for their services. They did not accede to the offer to put down the rebellion immediately; rather, they took the time to obtain favorable terms of military service.

Once the Council agreed to “an extension of the seventh article,” and thus the terms of their engagement, the Maroons “unanimously accepted” the Council’s request for help.144

They speedily stymied the rebellion.

The Maroons’ involvement in quelling the rebellion initially introduced a degree of hostility to Maroon-Nova Scotian relationships. In March 1801 George Ross,

Superintendent of Maroons, sent a letter to the Council notifying them that some of the

143 Appendix, f. 114, CO 270/5, TNA. 144 Appendix, f. 105, CO 270/5, TNA.

431 lots of land the Maroons had drawn already had “buildings erected on them, and crops in the ground.” Such was the case because these lots were “the late residences of rebels and others.” The Council resolved to give these crops and houses to the Maroons. Nova

Scotians who had rebelled, been associated with the rebellion, or been driven off of their lands may have witnessed Maroons appropriating their property, and eating the crops they had worked to grow. Letters dating from before the Maroons’ departure from

Jamaica betrayed whites’ fears that “jealousy between the two bodies” would ensue if

Maroons and Nova Scotians were allowed to live too closely together.145 Soon, however, the Maroons and Nova Scotians bonded together by turning their mutual hostility against the Temne, as well as the Sierra Leone Council.

Very quickly, the Maroons began to have experiences in Sierra Leone that mirrored those of the Nova Scotians who preceded them into the colony. By January

1801, the Council observed that “the Maroons have been prevented from having their lands allotted; and are yet totally unable to make any provision for maintaining themselves.” The Council voted to continue to supply them with provisions. Then, the

Maroons lodged a complaint about the quitrent. One of the Maroons’ captains reported “a pretty considerable agitation among the Maroons in general.” Governor Dawes, who had been elected to another term, told the Maroons that he did not intend “to ask them to pay the quit rent.” In fact, he offered to negate the quitrent—as long as the Maroons relinquished their claims to land. He also warned them that those who gave up their farm

145 George Ross, Superintendent of Maroons, to the Council, Thornton Hill, 31 March 1801, ff. 176-8, CO 270/5, TNA; Copy of that part of the Dispatch of the Sierra Leone Company to their Governor and Council at Sierra Leone, 22 March 1799, f. 242, CO 217/70, TNA.

432 lots would also relinquish “their right to any future allowance of provisions.”146 Thus did history repeat itself: the Maroons did not receive their land; they complained about quitrents; and the government at Sierra Leone attempted to redress their complaints with a firm hand that threatened to withhold food. When the Maroons did grow food, they did so in ways contrary to the Sierra Leone Company’s goals of cash crop production: they grew vegetables such as cassava, rather than coffee or sugar, and with it they made fufu, a staple Jamaican food.147

Although the Council had voiced qualms about the Maroons and Nova Scotians living together because of the possibility of conflict, so too did they worry about degrees of familiarity and cooperation: they also feared “the danger of our being assailed at any time by the joint complaints of these two descriptions of People and of our being attacked by the turbulent and disaffected of each party with their united force.”148 After the

Maroons voiced their complaints about the quitrents, Governor Dawes immediately concluded, “there is reason to believe that the whole of the objection owes its rise to the artful insinuations & misrepresentations of some disaffected Nova Scotian Settlers.”149

This observation displayed Dawes’s suspicions that the Nova Scotians and Maroons were communicating, sharing stories, and even bonding over the absence of food. Thereafter, the Maroons’ provisions were reduced—once in April, and again in August.150 As the

146 In Council, 31 March 1801, f. 139, CO 270/5; In Council, 27 January 1801, ff. 51, 54, CO 270/6, TNA. 147 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 99. 148 Copy of that part of the Dispatch of the Sierra Leone Company to their Governor and Council at Sierra Leone, 22 March 1799, ff. 242-3, CO 217/70, TNA; see also John Gray and T[homas] Ludlum to the Duke of Portland, Freetown, Sierra Leone, 6 May 1799, f. 174, CO 267/10, TNA. 149 In Council, 27 January 1801, f. 56, CO 270/6, TNA. 150 In Council, 29 April 1801 and 21 August 1801, ff. 156, 245, CO 270/6, TNA.

433

Maroons witnessed the Sierra Leone Council decide to give them less and less food, they no doubt heard tales from the Nova Scotians about similar past episodes.

Soon the two groups would come into still closer contact. In November 1801, the

Temne attacked Fort Thornton. A “Body of Natives drawn together by kings Firama and

Tom, Prince Tom, Banna Compa and other headmen of the Timmany nation; and said to be conducted by Nathaniel Wansey, one of the Rebel settlers near Robis,” struck at half past five in the morning. They burned crops and pillaged farms in a general display of victual warfare.151 A similar group attacked again, this time led by King Tom, Pa

Wamba, other Temne headmen, and some Mandingoes, the following April.152 In

November 1801, Dawes and the Council proposed that the Maroons evacuate Granville

Town, and in September 1802 the Council noted that there was no longer a need for a superintendent of Maroons, “on account of the Maroons being now settled in Freetown under the immediate control of the Governor and Council.” When the Maroons moved from Granville Town, they were put “upon full rations of provision from the present date.”153 In-between the time of the second attack and the Maroons’ total relocation, the

Nova Scotians were given flour in exchange “for ready money.”154 Although the records do not say so explicitly, one has to wonder whether the shared experiences over quitrents,

151 [c. November 1801], f. 303, CO 270/6, TNA; for the burning of crops and pillaging of farms, see Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 400. 152 11 April 1802, f. 79, CO 270/8, TNA. See also Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 89-90; for a discussion of some of the causes of this attack, see V. R. Dorjahn and Christopher Fyfe, “Landlord and Stranger: Change in Tenancy Relations in Sierra Leone,” The Journal of African History, vol. 3, no. 3 (November 1962), 396. 153 In Council, 20 November 1801, f. 303, CO 270/6 and 29 September 1802, f. 145, CO 270/8, TNA. 154 17 July 1802, f. 113, CO 270/8, TNA. Some of this food came from the Rio Pongo. Bruce L. Mouser, “Trade, Coasters, and Conflict in the Rio Pongo from 1790 to 1808,” The Journal of African History, vol. 14, no. 1 (1973), 62; McGowan, “The Establishment of Long-Distance Trade between Sierra Leone and Its Hinterland, 1787-1821,” 36.

434 provisioning, and land issues translated to food sharing between the Maroons and Nova

Scotians when one group possessed food to spare. The orchestrated Temne attacks also suggest that both the Maroons and the Nova Scotians suffered from the violence, a fact which, though it does not eradicate Nova Scotian-Maroon violence, certainly makes it seem less likely given the existence of a common enemy.

Furthermore, restrictive food laws continued to proliferate after the Maroons’ arrival and resettlement in Freetown. The 1801 regulation that noted the continuing ranging of domesticated animals preceded the Asia’s landing, but even in 1805 the Sierra

Leone Council observed that “a practice has prevailed of killing diseased Animals, and offering their Flesh for Sale.” This complaint was eerily reminiscent of earlier accusations of Temne natives poisoning animals, or trying to sell meat piecemeal in the colony. The Council enacted a policy of fining guilty persons “triple the sum received or demanded for the said Meat.”155 Punishments for such crimes became even more stringent, but it is difficult to gauge the effectiveness of such laws.

***

These encounters point to the fluidity of identity in Sierra Leone, an identity that was decidedly not African in nature. Neither, though, was it entirely Maroon or Nova

Scotian. What the Maroons and Nova Scotians wanted was to be recognized as British subjects, yet their shift toward protective food laws rather than moral ones made this recognition difficult. Their passing of protective food laws, and their use of food to exercise power over the Temne illuminate this dichotomy. By December 1800, “all

155 31 August 1805, ff. 42-3, CO 270/10, TNA.

435 produce of the growth or manufacture of Africa”—with the exception of spice, products from Madeira, the Island of Cape Verde, and the Canaries—was to “be imported into this

Colony free of all duty,” thus giving the colonists preferential trade access. Corn, bread, biscuit, flour, rice, beef, pork, livestock, and salted fish were all duty-free.156

In America, slaves’ and ex-slaves’ sense of African identity “was forged through the common experience of slavery and did not rest on a notion of an essential difference between ‘Africans’ and other peoples.”157 This forging of common experience did not happen in Sierra Leone. In Freetown, black Loyalists and Maroons fashioned a common identity in part through their foodways: first, through the disaster of land failure; then, in their experiences with provisions scarcities; and finally, through the use of food laws to dominate the Temne. Food scarcity was not just something the Maroons and Nova

Scotians suffered from—it was something they deliberately wrought against Africans, when the Sierra Leone Company and Council allowed them to do so. Because they saw themselves as essentially British subjects who had suffered so many wrongs, Nova

Scotians and Maroons did not think it unnatural that they should be the beneficiaries of restrictive food laws that targeted Temne foodways.158 By controlling the prices of bread and fish, and dictating the ways in which meat could be sold in the colony, free black

Loyalists and Maroons privileged their foodways over indigenous African ones—and they did so with the blessings of the white colonists.

156 27 December 1800, f. 3, CO 270/10, TNA. 157 Sidbury, Becoming African in America, 7. 158 On the failure to forge a joint African identity and the Nova Scotians’ identification as Britons, see Wilson, The Loyal Blacks, 241.

436

This philosophy, then, became the Revolutionary inheritance of black Loyalists and Maroons in Sierra Leone. They certainly feared slavery, but they feared slavery in the sense that American rebels during the Revolution spoke about slavery: they feared the enslavement of an exacting and controlling marketplace.159 Once in Africa they sought to control the market through food, instead of trying to escape from it. This power was short-lived. In August 1807, the British Crown gained command of Freetown. It assumed formal rule in January 1808.160 Thus the freedoms that the black Loyalists gained in

Africa at the expense of indigenous African autonomy were also transient. But they existed. And the Loyalists wrought them through the language of foodways.

159 For more on white colonists’ fears about enslavement to the market, see Egerton, Death or Liberty, 44. 160 Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, 97.

437

Conclusion

Do food diplomacy and victual warfare change the extant historical narrative of the Revolution? Yes. And no. At the end of my story, the Iroquois settle in a buffer zone between British North America and the new United States; the Cherokees implement the

Plan of Civilization and then suffer removal on the Trail of Tears; Tecumseh,

Teskwatawa, and the Redstick Creeks lose to the United States; and black Loyalists become the imperial actors they fought to escape. These events do not turn out any differently.

But the ways that historians understand these happenings changes drastically.

Throughout the War for Independence people acknowledged that food functioned on simultaneous physical and symbolic levels. When conflicts between Americans and

Britons commenced, the self-interested behavior of American inhabitants engendered food hoarding, which in turn prompted crop and animal scarcities and the implementation of victual warfare. Military bodies proved so inept at provisioning themselves that they eagerly encouraged Native and black allies to assist them in these sorts of expeditions.

When foodstuffs ran low, commanders tended to send former slaves out in search of food; consequently, food shortages inadvertently increased the mobility of black soldiers.

Blacks in the military did not simply receive food: they found it, stole it, prepared it, and served it, and these activities frequently placed them in a capacity to obtain and share secret information.

Americans and Britons sought military alliance more than they looked for information from Native groups, and to a large extent they employed food diplomacy to

438 obtain it. Early on in the war American food diplomacy with Iroquois Indians meant using food metaphors, whereas British diplomacy involved giving symbolic gifts of food to important Indian chiefs. By the end of American John Sullivan’s 1779 campaign against the Iroquois, however, Americans and Britons increasingly felt compelled to employ Native iterations of food diplomacy, which dictated that allies share the experience of hunger. In 1783—the formal end of the Revolution—British officials’ decision to continue supplying Indians with food indicated the continuing power of

Northern Natives long after Americans and Britons signed the terms of peace.

In some cases, such as the South, food diplomacy with Creek and Cherokee

Indians failed because these Indians retained the ability to maneuver between multiple imperial entities, which created an overly competitive environment. When provisions shortages forced people to try to block enemy food diplomacy, victual warfare broke out.

Southern victual warfare involved comparatively greater thefts of slaves and cattle, thus setting a precedent for increased Indian slaveholding and cattle-ranching in the postwar

South. Victual warfare clarifies some of the complicated divisions among Britons,

Americans, and Natives, and provides the continuity necessary to understand how the violence of the war bled into the Early Republic. Postwar scarcity prompted Southern states to look after their own interests, which created competition that mirrored the self- interested behavior of Revolutionary-era inhabitants.

After the war, the U.S. government tried to implement its Plan of Civilization.

Although the Plan served as a way for Americans to seize Native lands, it also attempted to alter Indian foodways by pressuring Natives to adopt Anglo-American ideas about

439 husbandry. Delaware, Miami, and Shawnee Indians resisted the enactment of the plan.

During the 1790s American officials’ success at implementing the Plan among Seneca members of the Six Nations created an entering wedge that allowed the Americans to transition from using Native food diplomacy to relying on a more restrictive system.

American Indian agents gradually tried to decrease the amount of food they distributed, and to make Natives come to them to receive it. In the South, state governments revived metaphorical food diplomacy without success among the Creeks, and the Georgians’ failure at Colerain allowed federal Indian agents to more definitively seize control.

American food diplomacy became less flexible, and more effective at controlling the physical movement of people. Despite these developments, however, Indians continued to employ food diplomacy. Native women managed to maneuver by obtaining fixed prices and permanent marketplaces, which they wanted in order to avoid competition with foodstuffs grown by American inhabitants.

Yet the Revolution and the Western Confederacy War honed Indians’ modes of resistance against American imperialism. It was no mistake that Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa were Shawnees, and that they settled their 1808 village called

Prophetstown within the confines of Miami territory. Tenskwatawa’s adherents abided by the rules of victual warfare that Indians, colonists, and Britons cemented during the

Revolution. More significant was the fact that Tenskwatawa called for a total eschewal of non-Native foodways among Iroquois, Chickamauga, Creek, Delaware, Miami, and

Shawnee followers: alcohol, bread, and the meat of domesticated animals became anathema, as did tools forged in the American style, such as ploughs. Tenskwatawa

440 wanted Indians to return to a diet of beans, corn, maple sugar, and deer meat—the diet of a semi-sedentary, hunting people.1

The ways in which Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa tried—and failed—to rally

Natives to their pan-Indian movement reveal Indians’ ultimate inabilities to avoid imperial foodways. Tenskwatawa may have ordered his followers to kill domesticated animals, but in reality the transformation he effected was not so absolute.2 When

Tenskwatawa’s band attacked Moravians living in the White River country, they took what they could carry—half of the animals—and killed the rest.3 They engaged in victual warfare by killing animals and preventing their foes from stealing their own crops and cattle. Still, they recognized the value of domesticated animals as sustenance, so they kept some alive to consume later. Physical sustenance became inseparable from symbolic idealism, and despite the fact that Tenskwatawa pushed Natives to avoid eating livestock meat, Indian soldiers ignored him. The American Revolution irrevocably changed some

Indians’ foodways, but so too did it reaffirm other Natives’ desires to avoid domesticated animals at all costs. Tecumseh could preach this code of anti-American foodways because he could be sure of its catching on—albeit briefly—to the Natives who had embraced it before.

People continued to fight over foodways when they left the United States and entered new worlds. In Nova Scotia the implementation of fixed prices and centralized

1 Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York: Viking, 2007), 131. 2 For a recent acknowledgement of this fact, see James H. Merrell, “Second Thoughts on Colonial Historians and American Indians,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d series, vol. 69, no. 3 (July 2012), 498. 3 Stephen Aron, “Pigs and Hunters: ‘Rights in the Woods’ on the Trans-Appalachian Frontier,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 193.

441 marketplaces infringed upon black Loyalists’ abilities to feed themselves and to turn a profit. In the 1780s the rise of restrictive food laws decreased blacks’ economic freedom throughout the province. The emergence of such laws forced blacks to draw on the only type of mobility left to them: the ability to leave North America entirely. In Sierra Leone, formerly powerless black Loyalists used food laws to dominate indigenous Africans.

These laws signaled a shift toward a more modern, protectionist economy that privileged black Loyalists’ foodways over Temne ones. When British officials prevented the success of that new economy, the Loyalists rebelled. This struggle over the control of foodways shows how food diplomacy and victual warfare continued to function as ways of communicating in various outposts of the Atlantic world.

From 1774 to 1812 the nature of food diplomacy changed. Whereas during the

Revolution blacks and Natives used food to travel from place to place, to request provisions when necessary, to share information, and above all, to maintain power, by the first decade of the nineteenth century food diplomacy stopped working for them. In the far reaches of the British Empire officials asserted their authority over rebellious black

Loyalists by refusing to enforce their food laws. As the 1800s bled into the 1810s, drought and crop failure ushered in famine, violence, and prophetic movements against the United States and too-compliant Indians. When the dust of the Redstick War settled after the Treaty of Fort Jackson in February 1815, it seemed as if food diplomacy no longer existed. Indians received no food rations; Americans expected them to purchase

442 their food, “at exorbitant if not criminal prices.”4 Food diplomacy had transformed— from a language that enabled everyone to retain power, into a way for a selective group of officials to control the actions of significantly less powerful peoples.

***

In asserting that I am a food historian, I sometimes fear that other scholars will perceive my work as too narrow. To be sure, many food histories of the past twenty years have been written by individuals outside of academia and, in focusing on a single edible commodity, have often bypassed the historiographical and methodological concerns of scholars in order to speak to a popular audience. Yet I see food studies as a key opportunity for scholars of many stripes to bridge the gap between popular and scholarly work. Food possesses the potential to be highly inclusive of many social and racial groups, because everyone eats.

My project offers the first examination of how people in the Atlantic world used food as a tool of social and political control as the American Revolution drew to a close.

Rather than separating histories of violence from histories of peacemaking, my methodology creates a range from accommodation to violence because everyone destroyed, consumed, and shared foodstuffs. “Food and War” explains how American,

British, and Native peoples used food to communicate with each other as other forms of diplomacy became less effective. In so doing, it addresses historians’ fears that the

Atlantic paradigm is too large, and suggests that foodways allow scholars to consider the

4 Angela Pulley Hudson, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 119.

443 lives of Natives, slaves, and indigenous Africans in tandem without losing sight of their individual narratives.

The American Revolution becomes a war fought on Native terms amongst the

Iroquois, Americans, and Britons; the rise of cattle-ranching and slaveholding amongst the Creeks becomes a process forged during the war; the implementation of American agriculture in Cherokee towns turns into a battle between Cherokee men and women; the triumph of an intertribal group of Natives headed by the Western Confederacy seems— albeit for a fleeting, ephemeral moment—possible; and the black Loyalists briefly envision themselves as British subjects with substantive rights akin to the white councilmen who failed to govern them.

Most importantly, these separate stories become one multifaceted narrative of food and power in the Revolutionary Atlantic. Historians need not separate peacemaking from violence, nor must they lose sleep over the fact that the Atlantic world is very large and very diverse. Americans have been using food aid with caveats attached since the

War for Independence. In this work I have tried to provide a portion of that history, and to explain how historic food practices could begin to transform into modern food aid policies.

444

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Vita

Rachel Beth Herrmann was born in New York City, the daughter of Marilyn

Nevard Herrmann and Richard Alan Herrmann. After graduating from the Bronx High

School of Science in 2003, she entered Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She received her Bachelor of Arts in history and English from Vassar in 2007. She entered the

Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin in 2007, and received her Master of

Arts in history in 2009.

Permanent email address: [email protected]

This dissertation was typed by the author.

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