THE MOST PERFECT JUSTICE

Bouler tells the story of Alexander McGillivray and the attempt to save the Muscogee Nation in this history.

McGillivray isn’t a well-known figure in contemporary America. Born around 1759, the son of a wealthy Scottish trader and a half-French woman from a powerful Muscogee clan, he received an English education among his father’s relatives in Charleston, South Carolina. His knowledge of white society and the world of trade placed him in a unique position to lead the Muscogee people through a period of American encroachment on their territory. At the time, the Muscogee (or “Creeks,” as the English called them due to the many waterways that crossed their land) controlled more than 60,000 square miles of what is now Alabama, western Georgia, and northern Florida. When the Revolutionary War began, the Americans seized the plantation of McGillivray’s father, a loyalist, so the younger man recommitted himself to Muscogee affairs, working as a liaison between the nation and the British government. Muscogee country was a crossroads during the war, with different towns inclined toward the Americans or the British and agents from Spain and France present in the territory. It was after the war that McGillivray’s leadership was most needed, however, as the victorious Americans looked greedily on Muscogee lands as a reward to be doled out to veterans of the Continental Army. Luckily for McGillivray, his counterpart in the American government—the recently elected President George Washington—was committed to justice for Native Americans. However, the utopian vision of McGillivray, Washington, and Secretary of War Henry Knox wasn’t enough to hold back the tide of American expansion. 

Bouler writes with clarity and detail, re-creating a vanished world with which few modern Americans will likely be familiar. The portrait of the prewar Muscogee Nation—a polyglot community that combined traditional ways with those of new white settlers—is remarkable in its richness and contrasts: “Men in Little Tallassie wore headbands decorated with beads or a plume of feathers. They dressed in ruffled shirts and a flap pulled through a belt over their loins. Leggings and moccasins with a cloak of fine cloth completed their attire.” McGillivray, who changed his own dress depending on whom he was meeting on a given day, doesn’t fit the typical picture of a Colonial-era Native leader, and Bouler doesn’t shy away from the fact that he lived on a plantation with 60 slaves. The author also does a wonderful job of showing the complex and varied interests of all parties of the period. It’s a short work—only about 100 pages of primary text—but the author manages to pack in a great deal about this undercovered chapter of American history. The story does not end happily, as the reader will likely suspect from the beginning; even so, Bouler leaves readers with new knowledge of a relatively unknown but important figure as well as a much better sense of Knox, a largely forgotten soldier and idealist.

A compelling story of the attempts to keep Muscogee land intact following the Revolutionary War.