Two Centuries of Costume in America, Volume 1 (1620-1820)

by Alice Morse Earle

A Woman’s Doublet. Mrs. Anne Turner.

The following year an Englishman, Colonel John Musgrove, accompanied by his son, went out as a mediator to the Creek Indians to secure their friendship, or at any rate their neutrality. The young squaw, Mary, served as interpreter, and the younger English pacificator promptly proved his amicable disposition by falling in love with her. He did what was more unusual, he married her; and soon they set up a large trading-house on the Savannah River, where they prospered beyond belief. On the arrival of the shipload of emigrants sent out by the Trustees of Georgia the English found Mary Musgrove and her husband already carrying on a large trade, in securing and transacting which she had served as interpreter. When Oglethorpe landed, he at once went to her, and asked permission to settle near her trading-station. She welcomed him, helped him, interpreted for him, and kept things in general running smoothly in the settlement between the English and the Indians. The two became close friends, and as long as generous but confiding Oglethorpe remained, all went well in the settlement; but in time he returned to England, giving her a handsome diamond ring in token of his esteem. Her husband died soon after and she removed to a new station called Mount Venture. Oglethorpe shortly wrote of her:—

“I find that there is the utmost endeavour by the Spaniards to destroy her because she is of consequence and in the King’s interests; therefor it is the business of the King’s friends to support her; besides which I shall always be desirous to serve her out of the friendship she has shown me as well as the colony.”

In a letter of John Wesley’s written to Lady Oglethorpe, and now preserved in the Georgia Historical Society, he refers frequently to Mary Musgrove, saying:—

“I had with me an interpreter the half-breed, Mary Musgrove, and daily had meetings for instruction and prayer. One woman was baptized. She was of them who came out of great tribulation, her husband and all her three children having been drowned four days before in crossing the Ogeechee River. Her happiness in the gospel caused me to feel that, like Job, the widow’s heart had been caused to sing for joy. She was married again the day following her baptism. I suggested longer days of mourning. She replied that her first husband was surely dead; and that his successor was of much substance, owning a cornfield and gun. I doubt the interpreter Mary Musgrove, that she is yet in the valley and shadow of darkness.”

One can picture the excitement of the Choctaw squaw to lose her husband and children, and to get another husband and religion in a week’s time. Her reply that her husband “was surely dead” bears a close resemblance to the hackneyed story of the response to a charivari query of the Dutch bridegroom who had been a widower but a week, “Ain’t my vife as deadt as she ever vill be?”

Her usefulness continued. If a “talk” were had with the Indians in Savannah, Fredonia, or any other settlement, Mary had to be sent for; if Indian warriors had to be hired, to keep an army against the Spanish or marauding Indians, Mary obtained them from her own people. If land were bought of the Indians, Mary made the trade. She soon married Captain Matthews, who had been sent out with a small English troop to protect her trading-post; he also speedily died, leaving her free, after alliances with trade and war, to find a third husband in ecclesiastical circles, in the person of one Chaplain Bosomworth, a parson of much pomposity and ambition, and of liberal education without a liberal brain. He had had a goodly grant of lands to prompt and encourage him in his missionary endeavors; and he was under the direction and protection of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. His mission was to convert the Indians, and he began by marrying one; he then proceeded to break the law by bringing in the first load of negro slaves in that colony, a trade which was positively prohibited by the conditions and laws of the colony. When his illegal traffic was stopped, he got his wife to send in back claims to the colony of Georgia for $25,000 as interpreter, mediator, agent, etc., for the English. She had already been paid about a thousand dollars. This demand being promptly refused, the hitherto pacific and friendly Mary, edged on by that sorry specimen of a parson, her husband, began a series of annoying and extraordinary capers. She declared herself empress of Georgia, and after sending her half-brother, a full-blooded Indian, as an advance-courier, she came with a body of Indians to Savannah. The Rev. Thomas Bosomworth, decked in full canonical robes, headed the Indians by the side of his empress wife, dressed in Indian costume; and an imposing procession they made, with plenty of theatrical color. At first the desperate colonists thought of seizing Mary and shipping her off to England to Oglethorpe, but this notion was abandoned. As the English soldiers were very few at that special time, and the Indian warriors many, we can well believe that the colonists were well scared, the more so that when the Indians were asked the reason of their visit, “their answers were very trifling and very dark.” So a feast was offered them, but Mary and her brother refused to come and to eat; and the dinner was scarcely under way when more armed Indians appeared from all quarters in the streets, running up and down in an uproar, and the town was in great confusion. The alarm drums were beaten, and it was reported that the Indians had cut off the head of the president as they sat together at the feast. Every man in the colony turned out in full arms for duty, the women and children gathered in groups in their homes in unspeakable terror. Then the president and his assistants who had been at the dinner, and who had gone unarmed to show their friendly intent, did what they should have done in the beginning, seized that disreputable specimen of an English missionary, the Rev. Mr. Bosomworth, and put him in prison; and we wonder they kept their hands off him as long as they did. Still trying to settle the matter without bloodshed, the president asked the Indian chiefs to adjourn to his house “to drink a glass of wine and talk the matter over.” Into this conference came Mary, bereft of her husband, raging like a madwoman, threatening the lives of the magistrates, swearing she would annihilate the colony. “A fig for your general,” screamed she, “you own not a foot of land in this colony. The whole earth is mine.” Whereupon the Empress of Georgia, too, was placed under military guard.

Then a harassing week of apprehension ensued; the Indians were fed, and parleyed with, and reasoned with, and explained to. At last Mary’s brother Malatche, at a conference, presented as a final demand a paper setting forth plainly the claims of the Indians. The sequel of this presentation is almost comic. The paper was so evidently the production of Bosomworth, and so wholly for his own personal benefit and not for that of the Indians, and the astonishment of the president and his council was so great at his vast and open assumption, that the Indians were bewildered in turn by the strange and unexpected manner of the white men upon reading the paper; and childishly begged to have the paper back again “to give to him who made it.” A plain exposition of Bosomworth’s greed and craft followed, and all seemed amicably explained and settled, and the Creeks offered to smoke the pipe of peace; when in came Mary, having escaped her guards, full of rum and of rancor. The president said to her in a low voice that unless she ceased brawling and quarrelling he would at once put her into close confinement; she turned in a rage to her brother, and translated the threat. He and every Indian in the room sprang to their feet, drew tomahawks, and for a short time a complete massacre was imminent. Then the captain of the guard, Captain Noble Jones, who had chafed under all this explaining diplomacy, lost his much-tried patience, and like a brave and fearless English soldier ordered the Indians to surrender arms. Though far greater in number than the English, they yielded to his intrepidity and wrath; and the following night and day they sneaked out of the town, as ordered, by twos and threes.