32.8 America: a.d. 1701 to 1800  (Page 9/20)

All the slaves were kept together in compounds and it was inevitable that much mixing took place. At times Indians owned African slaves and vice versa. The 1725 census in St. George Parish, South Carolina discloses that the Indian Nero possessed one Negro black slave and the Indian Sam Pickins owned six. In turn Negro Robin Johnson owned 9 slaves, all of whom apparently were Indians. Alexander McGillivray, a mestizo Upper Creek, died in 1793, leaving a considerable estate, including 60 Negro slaves.

In time most southern Negroes adopted, at least in a modified form, the white man's religion and the evangelical sects won more converts than the staid Anglicans. Another change occurred in the Negro culture after they came to America - they dropped the patrilineal society of Africa and became matrilineal. There were probably several factors in this, but one was certainly the matrilineal culture of the southern Indians. A handful of surviving Christian Indians abandoned Florida in 1763 when the British took over, retiring with the Spaniards to Cuba or Mexico. Although a few Catholic converts still remained among the Florida Indians when that area was restored to Spain in 1783, no effort was made to re-establish the missions and no Catholic Indians remain today. Any remnants had been absorbed by the emerging Seminoles.

The mississippi region, the "old northwest, and the french and indian war

Frenchmen were at the upper end of the Mississippi watershed and Detroit was founded by Sieur Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac in 1701 as a fort to control the entrances to Lakes Huron and Erie. There were Indians all over the eastern part of what we now call the Midwest. The Shawnees, who were known in the south as Savannahs, were at various periods widely dispersed, but by 1725 most of the southern bands had rejoined their kinsmen in Pennsylvania. Pressure there from the expanding white frontier and the Iroquois slowly pushed them westward, where they established new villages in the Wyoming and Susquehanna valleys. During the second quarter of this 18th century part of the tribe again moved south, seeking refuge among the Upper Creeks in Alabama, while the majority was settled in mid-century along the Scioto River in central Ohio. They were surrounded by a great many other tribes, including the Liamis, Potawatomis, Delawares, Wyandots and Senecas. (Ref. 293 ) In the territory now known as the State of Illinois, there were herds of 400 to 500 buffalo seen frequently even as late as 1792, but within 5 years of that time they were all gone, driven across the Mississippi by hunters and domestic farming activities. (Ref. 217 ) With them went the Indians. In Minnesota, Chippewa and Sioux fought over the wild rice stands in the northern lakes in mid-century. (Ref. 222 ) The Sioux moved into the South Dakota area as nomadic horsemen with a far different life style than the original valley farming Indians, whom we have described there from the 10th to the 14th centuries. (Ref. 241 ) They had received their horses indirectly from the Spaniards in the southwest.