Washington Treaty (1826)
The Treaty of Washington from 1826 was a land transfer agreement between the Government of the United States of America and the Council of Muskogee Confederation of Indian Muskogee . The negotiations for the Muskogee were led by their spokesman, Opothleyahola . In this contract, large parts of the ancestral settlement area of the Muskogee in the state of Georgia were assigned to the US government.
prehistory
The Muskogee Confederation was made up of a large number of tribes, some of which had very different customs, traditions and individual tribal histories. For several decades they had ceded small parts of their land to the federal government under contracts and agreements. A split occurred within the confederation over the issue of adaptation to white culture and the cession of settlement areas. During the British-American War of 1812, parts of the Muskogee, the so-called Upper Creek , were allied with the British, for the Confederation the war culminated in a civil war, the Creek War . This ended in 1814 with the intervention of the American government and the Treaty of Fort Jackson . In this agreement, which came about under pressure from Andrew Jackson, the Muskogee were forced to transfer 93,000 square kilometers of their land to the southern states . They only had a remnant of their land along the Chattahoochee River . To prevent further land assignments and sales, the Muskogee enacted a law that made further land assignments a felony.
In the mid-1820s, Georgia stepped up its efforts to drive the Indians completely to the west. In particular, the Democratic governor George Troup advocated an aggressive policy of Indian resettlement . The Lower Creek Council , led by cousin troups William McIntosh , signed the Indian Springs Treaty on February 12, 1825 . With this treaty, a large part of the remaining tribal land was transferred to the federal government. The other chiefs, especially those of Upper Creek , protested against this contract, making it clear that the signatories had no right to sign the contract on behalf of the entire Muskogee. McIntosch was executed by his opponents on May 13 for breaking the law to prevent further land sales.
Washington Treaty (1826)
The newly elected President John Quincy Adams believed that the treaty had no legal validity and put Troup under pressure to prevent white settlers from entering Indian land. The Muskogee chiefs were invited to Washington, DC to negotiate a new amicable treaty. A new contract was signed between the government and the Muskogee, this time with the participation of many chiefs from the various tribes led by their spokesman, Opothleyahola. The agreement canceled the Indian Springs Treaty and gave the government the rights to all of Muskogee land on the east side of the Chattahoochee River for $ 217,600 and an annual payment of $ 20,000. Further agreements of the contract regulated the equality of the signatories of the canceled and the new contract, who had received certain privileges. In addition, the financing of an expedition of five participants under McIntosh was set, which should look for potential new settlement areas in Indian territory . The government agreed to finance a resettlement of the Muskogee in the new tribal areas, to provide for a full year of subsistence for the resettled and to provide a full-time Indian agent , translator, blacksmith and wheelwright . The contract guaranteed the Indians financial compensation for the damage caused by the war between the Lower and Upper Creek. According to the treaty, the Muskogee would retain control of their land on January 1, 1827, after which date they would still own a small piece of the border between Alabama and Georgia.
The contract was signed on January 24, 1826. An amendment was signed on March 31, 1826, correcting a number of errors and defining the exact boundary between Georgia and the Muskogee Reservation. For a further agreed payment of $ 30,000, the Muskogee also ceded a small area, today's Carroll County .
Disregard of the agreement
Troup was very dissatisfied with the new agreement and was under extreme pressure from white settlers willing to expand. He ordered the land of the Muskogee, including the reservation promised in the contract, to be measured and divided into plots. These were raffled among the settlers as part of a land lottery. The president intervened and sent troops, but when Troup called the Georgian militias to arms, Adams withdrew his troops for fear of civil war. The government allowed Troup to renegotiate the treaty at short notice and take all of the Muskogee land for Georgia. By 1827, the Muskogee were evicted from Georgia, and within the next eight years most of them were deported to what is now Oklahoma on the Path of Tears .
Individual evidence
- ^ Francis Paul Prucha: American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly , University of California Press 1997, ISBN 0520208951 , p. 150
literature
- Michael D. Green: The Politics of Indian Removal. Creek Government and Society in Crisis . University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE et al. 1985, ISBN 0-8032-7015-1 .
- Sean Michael O'Brien: In bitterness and in tears. Andrew Jackson's destruction of the Creeks and Seminoles . Praeger, Westport CT et al. 2003, ISBN 0-275-97946-6 .
- Francis Paul Prucha: American Indian Treaties. The History of a Political Anomaly . University of California Press, Berkeley CA et al. 1997, ISBN 0-520-20895-1 .
- Francis Paul Prucha: The Great Father. The United States Government and the American Indians . Abridged edition. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE et al. 1986, ISBN 0-8032-8712-7 .
- Robert V. Remini: Andrew Jackson and his Indian Wars . Viking, New York NY et al. 2001, ISBN 0-670-91025-2 .