Zamumo's Gifts. Joseph M. Hall, Jr.
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contact with all three colonial powers, enough contact, in fact, to teach Europeans new ways to think about exchange. The rivers that fed these valleys descended, like the Oconee, from tributaries in the southern Appalachian Mountains. They reached the rolling hills of the piedmont with abundant water for crops, and the silt from their springtime floods replenished the cornfields along their banks. Their oxbow lakes and neighboring hardwood forests provided habitats for wild plants and animals that further enriched humans’ diets. The rivers’ relatively placid flow also made canoe travel easy among towns along the same river. Just downstream from the Georgia and Alabama piedmonts, these rivers crossed a transition zone called the fall line that separated the hardwood forests and richer ecosystems of the piedmont from the pine forests and poorer soils of the coastal plain. Besides marking a rough border between lands more and less suited to dense settlement, the fall line also served as an overland communication route. Later towns like Augusta, Georgia, or Montgomery, Alabama, grew on top of Native towns and European trading posts that took advantage of these intersections of water and land routes. Where these rivers emptied into the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico, they supported communities that fed themselves from riverine and also estuarine ecosystems. Poorer coastal soils limited agricultural harvests. With the exception of the fertile hill country of the Florida panhandle and the savannah country of the northern Florida peninsula, populations did not grow large along the coastal plain. In Zamumo’s day, most southeastern power resided in the piedmont. It was this fact that attracted de Soto inland in search of wealth; it was also what enabled Zamumo to confront him with such confidence. After 1540, Spanish, English, and French colonists would discover in their turn why they faced little competition for the relatively poor soils of coastal Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama. In fact, only after 1700, when the English forced African slaves to turn marshes into rice plantations, would the preeminent centers of southeastern power move downstream to the coast.9
The book’s principal protagonists inhabited these southeastern lands as the members of Indian towns or European empires. In the four or so centuries before 1540, most of the inhabitants of the lands between the South Carolina coast and the Arkansas River Valley centered their lives around towns. They supported these communities with the maize they planted and they celebrated them with the mounds they constructed. Archaeologists refer to these pre-contact peoples as “Mississippian,” but even those towns that survived or were born from the changes of colonization possessed meeting places for ceremonies of war and peace, of death and fertility. Whether Mississippian or colonial, Native towns depended on networks of relationships to augment the power that they extracted from the sun, soil, and water of their river valleys. Some towns, like Ocute in 1540 or Altamaha in 1700, enjoyed influence over others, but none could dominate their neighbors because townspeople showed respect only to those leaders who provided resources to ensure local autonomy and well-being.10 Zamumo might depend on Ocute for objects of power, but Altamahas looked to Zamumo for their strength. Their story is distinct from those of the coastal Indians who were eventually overwhelmed by colonial missionaries, traders, and settlers, but it is also intimately connected to these better-documented developments. From coastal peoples, these inhabitants of the Georgia and Alabama interior learned the value and danger of close association with Europeans.
These Europeans and their empires constitute the book’s second set of protagonists. I am most interested in the colonists in La Florida, Carolina, and La Louisiane who had to consider the interests of their European and Indian neighbors in ways that superiors in Europe did not. Furthermore, these colonists enjoyed an independence from metropolitan control that routinely frustrated their European overseers. Nonetheless, monarchs and ministers, whether in Madrid, London, or Versailles, still exerted an influence disproportional to their numbers and their distance. They underwrote the grand visions of national hegemony centered on European capitals. The people of St. Augustine, Charles Town, and Mobile all possessed local interests, but they articulated them within larger imperial visions and transatlantic networks. They could not survive without the support of distant centers that gave them legitimacy and succor.11
The gifts and trade goods that bound European imperialists and Native townspeople also deserve brief explanation. Gifts are offered without immediate expectation of a return and are ultimately devoted to the promotion of interpersonal relationships, often one that endebts the recipient to the giver. A trade commodity, in contrast, leaves the hands of a seller only when the buyer can offer a thing or currency of equivalent value. Buyer and seller care more about the objects exchanged than their personal relationship. The contrast becomes even starker when we compare the objects that changed hands in southeastern exchanges. Most gifts that appear in the records were prestige goods, objects whose rarity symbolized the power of giver and recipient. Zamumo and de Soto both understood the silver feather as just such a conveyor of power. Most trade items were available to all who had the wherewithal to purchase them. Though the distinctions seem simple enough, the problem with them is that they exaggerate the differences between the two kinds of exchange and erroneously imply an unbridgeable divide between primitive, gift-giving Indians and manipulative, commercial Europeans, between the orderly hierarchy that preceded colonization and the egalitarian mayhem that followed it. Gifts and trade, with their attendant considerations of politics and profit, influenced nearly every colonial transaction. I am interested in the changing dynamics of giving and receiving because Indians and Europeans were constantly renegotiating their relationships through exchange. So to put it more technically, this is a study of political economies more than commercial ones, a study of power more than prices.12
Such a focus illuminates three topics crucial for the history of the early colonial Southeast and also, in a comparative way, colonial North America. First, because archaeologists devote much of their work to the study of objects and colonial officials wrote relatively frequently about many of these same things, a material focus provides a methodological lens for examining what several anthropologists call “the largely forgotten, but critically important, century in between” de Soto and Nairne.13 It was a period before intensive colonization, when southeastern Indians reworked their political relationships, abandoning the singular leadership of chiefs for communal debates within large council houses, and reconfigured the intertown bonds of tribute into more broadly based alliance networks. It was also a time when Spaniards and then their English and French rivals articulated the colonial relationships that would define the eighteenth-century Southeast. A study of exchange offers important insights into both of these developments. Second, by understanding the changing nature of exchange, we can better understand these new Indian nations that populated the eighteenth-century Southeast, including the Cherokees, Creeks, Catawbas, Chickasaws, and Choctaws.14 Among the most successful of these colonial polities were the Creeks, who played a pivotal role in the region thanks to their relative proximity to French Louisiana, Spanish Florida, and English Carolina. Despite the abundance of scholarship on the eighteenth-century Creeks, even the two most careful analyses of their history do not explain why this multilingual and multiethnic alliance worked.15 It was through long-standing ties of trade and alliance that Creeks forged a collective identity without sacrificing local diversity. In addition to helping us appreciate the foundations of Creeks’ local and national identities, a focus on exchange also reveals the foundations of Creeks’ regional influence. Creeks’ willingness to negotiate with all three colonial powers developed in part out of earlier efforts like Zamumo’s to court multiple allies and multiple protectors.
Creeks’ influence over—and close connection to—the colonial powers highlights a third benefit of a focus on gifts and trade. If John Stuart was right, then Zamumo’s and de Soto’s gifts were the first small knots in this “great tie” that made each a player in the other’s history and bound towns and empires in a colonial Southeast. Europeans, for instance, encouraged Indians to modify their practices of diplomatic gift giving in the service of European notions of profit and debt. As the historian Alan Gallay has shown, the English of Carolina were especially effective in this endeavor between 1690 and 1715, when they promoted a brutal trade in Indian slaves that financed their expansion in the region. In fact, the success of the slave trade highlights a simple but crucial fact: Europeans’ imperial expansion brought new worlds of violence into the lives of their Indian trading partners and victims.16 And Creeks’ and others’ willingness to maintain relations with Europeans enabled the Spaniards to retain an underfunded military outpost for two