Human Settlement of the Southeast

The Four Indian Nations

n the eighteenth century, the Muscogulges or Creeks, from whom the Seminoles were descended (and with whom they were still affiliated at the time of Bartram’s trip), covered a wide area from eastern Georgia to central Alabama. The region between the Savannah River and the Mississippi was occupied by three other major Indian groups, distinguished mainly by differences of language, but organized as tribal confederacies or “nations.” The Cherokees dwelt in the mountain valleys of Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia; the Choctaws held sway from the Tombigbee River to the Mississippi; and the Chickasaws controlled the area north of them. Their villages, almost without exception, lay clustered upon the stream banks where canoes might ply and fish be trapped, and where bottom (streamside) clearings would yield good crops of maize (corn).

At the time of Columbus’s coming to the New World, it is estimated that there were 100,000 Indians in Florida, descendants of nomadic hunters who had been coming to this area for at least 10,000 years.(5) These Indians were completely wiped out by warfare, European diseases (measles was one of the worst killers, since the Indians had not been exposed to it and thus had no immunity), and enslavement under the successive white regimes. By 1720, North Florida was deserted and when the first Spanish rule ended in 1763, they took with them to Cuba the remaining Indians and mixed-bloods.

Soon after the exodus of the original inhabitants, other groups of Indians in Georgia and Alabama moved south. These were the ancestors of the present Florida Indians. Primarily of Creek origin, they were called Seminoles from a Spanish word meaning wanderer, wild one or runaway. During the British period (1763–1783), the Seminoles began to emerge as a separate group, and by the time this period ended, there were many Seminole villages in Florida.

In 1776, Indians probably outnumbered whites in Florida. Lower Creeks and Seminoles predominated in the Gainesville and Tallahassee areas and Lower Creeks and Choctaws in West Florida. These Indians were farmers and many of them lived in permanent settlements, sometimes occupying cleared farming areas left by the Indian tribes who had disappeared from Florida. There were, of course, hunting parties who ranged far and wide to obtain the deerskins and other pelts brought to the trading stores.

White Populations

he white settlers Bartram encountered in the 1770’s were people whose wealth and sophistication varied as much as their ethnic backgrounds. Closely tied to the land, their differences can best be examined on a regional basis.(6)

Mountains

In the mountain coves, luxuries were never known and leisure was mere loafing. Gradations ranged from homespun comfort to habituated eking of the barest living. With a wool hat, a cotton or tow shirt, and breeches upheld by a single “gallus” a man was fully clad, though he might use coat and shoes against winter’s chill. The cotton shifts and poke bonnets of the women and their shapeless linsey- woolsey gowns varied from the fashion of the city. The great world of books and men was kept alien by remoteness and illiteracy.

Supper and breakfast comprised identically bacon, eggs, cornbread and sometimes coffee. A steady diet of cornbread frequently caused pellagra—a disease resulting from a diet deficient in vitamin B complex constituents, especially niacin. At dinner there were vegetables in season from small gardens, the cultivation of which fell into the women’s purview. The standard of family comfort was indeed scant. The land in the mountains, except for small streamside pockets, was poor and steep. In fact, thin as the population was, the coves received and retained more people than they could support except in stark poverty.

Valley

Kinsmen to the mountaineers, but more varied in their fortunes, were the people of the great valley chain stretching north to south across Tennessee into northeastern Alabama. Broad fields of lasting fertility gave substantial revenues to many, from wheat and whiskey and a bit of Tobacco, where freighting was not too dear. The sale of livestock was a great importance to many.

Households generally made their own furniture as well as their bread. Work was steady and living somewhat plain. A sprinkling of slaves gave assistance to their owners in later years. Few establishments would grow to plantation scale until the next century. As a rule, the people lived much like the farmers of inland Pennsylvania from whence many of them had come.

By and large, these valley dwellers’ houses were snug, their stone fences strong and their pastures lush. At the same time poverty as dire as that existing in the mountains could be found with relative frequency, for the valley was not an Eden. The distinguishing feature of the region was merely that most of the well-to-do had no cult of urbanity, of nicety in speech or fashion in dress, of distinction in house or equipage, of competitive expenditure or conspicuous waste. In short, they were plain men and women.

Piedmont and Plains

As in the mountains and the valley, so in the piedmont and plains, poverty was in some cases personal, in some cases regional.

The developments in Georgia will serve to show the divergencies. The lands within the present limits of the state were distributed in the first instance almost uniformly in small lots—by the trustees as part of their charity, by the royal province and the early commonwealth on headrights, and later by the state in successive lotteries in which every head of a family had a chance to draw a farm tract without price.

Some chanced upon rich lands, others upon poor; some were near navigation, others were far; some were expert, vigorous, frugal and far-sighted, others were slack, spendthrift or merely unlucky. Profits from efficiency and good forture enabled some to buy slaves and then buy neighboring lands and attain eventually the scale and rank of planters.

In the upper half of the piedmont, although the climate was adapted to cotton, ruggedness of contour diminished the size of available fields and distance from navigable streams enhanced the cost of marketing. The opportunity to expand farms into plantations was therefore not so great as in the middle region, and the slaves in the gross were fewer than whites. In most of the southern quarter of the commonwealth, on the other hand, a plantation development was restricted, not by remoteness, but by the leanness of the land.

The growing season in the coastal plain was very long and the rainfall ample, but the sandy soil had not enough plant food to support any vigorous growth except the forest of pines and the tough wire grass on its floor. Turpentine and lumber would yield livelihood, but agriculture was penurious. Turpentine operations in the 1970’s are not as extensive in acreage as in the 1770’s, but new harvest techniques yield a higher amount of turpentine, resin and other products from the pine tree. There was much more lumber harvested in 1976 than there was in the 1770’s. Pulpwood, in lieu of timber, is now the forest industry because of the increasing demand for newsprint, fiber board and related forest products.

Thus, Georgia was broadly banded: a strip of sea isiand cotton and rice plantation on the coast, with a dense Negro population; the pine barrens with sparse whites and very few slaves; the main cotton belt spreading southwestward across the state, with mingled farms and plantations and the Negroes more numerous than the whites; the upper piedmont with farmers predominating; and the mountains with, of course, no plantations and virtually no slaves. This belting with its lines curving variously, was characteristic of the South at large. It was an agrarian society.

With land initially gratis, in Georgia at least, and its price always restrained by the absorption of capital in the purchase of slaves, no monopoly of locations can explain the differentiation of individual fortunes between planters and farmers. It was rather the variance of talent, resolution, health, luck and the status of agricultural technology. The divergencies, furthermore, were not sharply between the rich and poor but of continuous gradation from millionaires to paupers; and the classes were by no means static in their divisions.

Footnotes

5. For this account of Indian populations in the South, the Bartram Trail Conference is indebted to Woodward B. Skinner for “An Historical Background Report Relating to the Travels of William Bartram in the British Floridas,” Bartram Trail Conference Technical Study, 1978; Dorothy Driggers, “Historical Overview of William Bartram’s Travels Through Florida,” Bartram Trail Conference Technical Study, 1978; Horace P. Morgan, Bartram Trail Conference Technical Study, op. cit. See also: Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians, Knoxville, 1977.

6. The following accounts of “White Populations” and “The Southeast: Then and Now” are drawn from H. P. Morgan, “Description of the Southeast Region,” op. cit.