The one overshadowing fact in the history of Tennessee during Blount's term as governor was the Indian warfare. Hostilities with the Indians were never ceasing, and, so far as Tennessee was concerned, during these six years it was the Indians, and not the whites who were habitually the aggressors and wrongdoers. The Indian warfare in the Territory during these years deserves some study because it was typical of what occurred elsewhere. It illustrates forcibly the fact that under the actual conditions of settlement wars were inevitable; for if it is admitted that the land of the Indians had to be taken and that the continent had to be settled by white men, it must be further admitted that the settlement could not have taken place save after war. The whites might be to blame in some cases, and the Indians in others; but under no combination of circumstances was it possible to obtain possession of the country save as the result of war, or of a peace obtained by the fear of war. Any peace which did not surrender the land was sure in the end to be broken by the whites; and a peace which did surrender the land would be broken by the Indians. The history of Tennessee during the dozen years from 1785 to 1796 offers an admirable case in point. In 1785 the United States Commissioners concluded the treaty of Hopewell with the Indians, and solemnly guaranteed them certain lands. The whites contemptuously disregarded this treaty and seized the lands which it guaranteed to the Indians, being themselves the aggressors, and paying no heed to the plighted word of the Government, while the Government itself was too weak to make the frontiersmen keep faith. The treaties of New York and of Holston with the Creeks and Cherokees in 1790 and 1791 were fairly entered into by fully authorized representatives of the tribes. Under them, for a valuable consideration, and of their own motion, the Creeks and Cherokees solemnly surrendered all title to what is now the territory of Tennessee, save to a few tracts mostly in the west and southeast; and much of the land which was thus ceded they had ceded before. Nevertheless, the peace thus solemnly made was immediately violated by the Indians themselves. The whites were not the aggressors in any way, and, on the contrary, thanks to the wish of the United States authorities for peace, and to the care with which Blount strove to carry out the will of the Federal Government, they for a long time refrained even from retaliating when injured; yet the Indians robbed and plundered them even more freely than when the whites themselves had been the aggressors and had broken the treaty.

Confusion of the Treaties.

Before making the treaty of Holston Blount had been in correspondence with Benjamin Hawkins, a man who had always been greatly interested in Indian affairs. He was a prominent politician in North Carolina, and afterwards for many years agent among the Southern Indians. He had been concerned in several of the treaties. He warned Blount that since the treaty of Hopewell the whites, and not the Indians, had been the aggressors; and also warned him not to try to get too much land from the Indians, or to take away too great an extent of their hunting grounds, which would only help the great land companies, but to be content with the thirty-fifth parallel for a southern boundary. [Footnote: Blount MSS., Hawkins to Blount, March 10, 1791.] Blount paid much heed to this advice, and by the treaty of Holston he obtained from the Indians little more than what the tribes had previously granted; except that they confirmed to the whites the country upon which the pioneers were already settled. The Cumberland district had already been granted over and over again by the Indians in special treaties, to Henderson, to the North Carolinians and to the United States. The Creeks in particular never had had any claim to this Cumberland country, which was a hundred miles and over from any of their towns. All the use they had ever made of it was to visit it with their hunting parties, as did the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Shawnees, Delawares, and many others. Yet the Creeks and other Indians had the effrontery afterwards to assert that the Cumberland Country had never been ceded at all, and that as the settlers in it were thus outside of the territory properly belonging to the United States, they were not entitled to protection under the treaty entered into with the latter.

Blount's Good Faith with the Indians.

Blount was vigilant and active in seeing that none of the frontiersmen trespassed on the Indian lands, and when a party of men, claiming authority under Georgia, started to settle at the Muscle Shoals, he co-operated actively with the Indians in having them brought back, and did his best, though in vain, to persuade the Grand Jury to indict the offenders. [Footnote: Robertson MSS., Blount to Robertson, Sept. 3, 1791.] He was explicit in his orders to Sevier, to Robertson, and to District Attorney Jackson that they should promptly punish any white man who violated the provisions of the treaty; and over a year after it had been entered into he was able to write in explicit terms that "not a single settler had built a house, or made a settlement of any kind, on the Cherokee lands, and that no Indians had been killed by the whites excepting in defence of their lives and property." [Footnote: Do., Blount to Robertson, Jan. 2, 1792; to Bloody Fellow, Sept. 13, 1792.] Robertson heartily co-operated with Blount, as did Sevier, in the effort to keep peace, Robertson showing much good sense and self-control, and acquiescing in Blount's desire that nothing should be done "inconsistent with the good of the nation as a whole," and that "the faith of the nation should be kept." [Footnote: Blount MSS., Robertson to Blount, Jan. 17, 1793.]

Bad Faith of the Indians.

The Indians as a body showed no appreciation whatever of these efforts to keep the peace, and plundered and murdered quite as freely as before the treaties, or as when the whites themselves were the aggressors. The Creek Confederacy was in a condition of utter disorganization, McGillivray's authority was repudiated, and most of the towns scornfully refused to obey the treaty into which their representatives had entered at New York. A tory adventurer named Bowles, who claimed to have the backing of the English Government, landed in the nation and set himself in opposition to McGillivray. The latter, who was no fighter, and whose tools were treachery and craft, fled to the protection of the Spaniards. Bowles, among other feats, plundered the stores of Panton, a white trader in the Spanish interest, and for a moment his authority seemed supreme; but the Spaniards, by a trick, got possession of him and put him in prison.

Intrigues of the Spaniards.

The Spaniards still claimed as their own the Southwestern country, and were untiring in their efforts to keep the Indians united among themselves and hostile to the Americans. They concluded a formal treaty of friendship and of reciprocal guarantee with the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees at Nogales, in the Choctaw country, on May 14, 1792. [Footnote: Draper MSS., Spanish Documents; Letter of Carondelet to Duke of Alcudia, Nov. 24, 1794.] The Indians entered into this treaty at the very time they had concluded wholly inconsistent treaties with the Americans. On the place of the treaty the Spaniards built a fort, which they named Fort Confederation, to perpetuate, as they hoped, the memory of the confederation they had thus established among the Southern Indians. By means of this fort they intended to control all the territory enclosed between the rivers Mississippi, Yazoo, Chickasaw, and Mobile. The Spaniards also expended large sums of money in arming the Creeks, and in bribing them to do, what they were quite willing to do of their own accord,—that is, to prevent the demarkation of the boundary line as provided in the New York treaty; a treaty which Carondelet reported to his Court as "insulting and pernicious to Spain, the abrogation of which has lately been brought about by the intrigues with the Indians." [Footnote: Draper MSS., Letter of Carondelet, New Orleans, Sept. 25, 1795.]

Carondelet's Policy.