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Alexander McGrllivary
At the start of the American Revolution (1775-83) McGillivray permanently returned to Little Tallassee and Creek society when the revolutionaries confiscated his Tory father's property in South Carolina. Upon his return to the Creeks McGillivray discovered that his linguistic ability and understanding of Creek and colonial societies allowed him to take on increasingly important roles. During the war he held a commission as a colonel in the British army, worked for British Superintendent of India -
William Mcintosh
McIntosh was among those who supported the plans of U.S. Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins to "civilize" the Creeks. Slaveowning, livestock herding, cotton cultivation, and personal ownership of property were examples of changes to traditional Creek ways of life that McIntosh promoted. He himself owned two plantations, Lockchau Talofau ("Acorn Bluff") in present-day Carroll County, and Indian Springs, in present-day Butts County. Both are maintained today as historic sites. -
Worcester V.GA
In the 1820s and 1830s Georgia conducted a relentless campaign to remove the Cherokees, who held territory within the borders of Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Tennessee at the time. In 1827 the Cherokees established a constitutional government. The Cherokees were not only restructuring their government but also declaring to the American public that they were a sovereign nation that could not be removed without their consent. -
Sequoyah
Impressed by the whites' ability to communicate over distances by writing, Sequoyah invented a system of eighty-four to eighty-six characters that represented syllables in spoken Cherokee (hence it is a syllabary, not an alphabet).
Cherokee Syllabary
Completed in 1821, the syllabary was rapidly adopted by a large number of Cherokees, making Sequoyah the only member of an illiterate group in human history to have single-handedly devised a successful system of writing. -
Dalonega Gold Rush
By late 1829 north Georgia, known at the time as the Cherokee Nation, was flooded by thousands of prospectors lusting for gold. Niles' Register reported in the spring of 1830 that there were four thousand miners working along Yahoola Creek alone. While in his nineties, Benjamin Parks recalled the scene in the Atlanta Constitution (July 15, 1894). The news got abroad, and such excitement you never saw. It seemed within a few days as if the whole world must have heard of it, for men came from. -
Andrew Jackson
Based in frontier Tennessee, Jackson was a politician and army general who defeated the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (1814), and the British at the Battle of New Orleans (1815). A polarizing figure who dominated the Second Party System in the 1820s and 1830s, as president he dismantled the Second Bank of the United States and initiated forced relocation and resettlement of Native American tribes from the Southeast to west of the Mississippi River with the Indian Removal Act 1830 -
The Trail Of Tears
At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina and Florida--land their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations. By the end of the decade, very few natives remained anywhere in the southeastern United States. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians’ land. -
John Ross
Ross's fait in the republican form of government, the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the political power of Cherokee supporters, especially the Whig Party, gave him confidence that Cherokee rights would be protected. When the fraudulent Treaty of New Echota was authorized by one vote in the U.S. Senate in 1836, Ross continued to believe that Americans would not oust the most "civilized" native people in the Southeast. -
John Marshall
). His court opinions helped lay the basis for United States constitutional law and made the Supreme Court of the United States a coequal branch of government along with the legislative and executive branches. Previously, Marshall had been a leader of the Federalist Party in Virginia and served in the United States House of Representatives from 1799 to 1800. He was Secretary of State under President John Adams from 1800 to 1801.
