In August 1775 rumors abounded among South Carolinian colonists that the British were working to secure Cherokee interests. Some Indians seemed unwilling to ally with Britons, but others, like the Overhill Cherokees, were “preparing to Fight for the King.” “In short,” wrote Minister William Tennent to Henry Laurens—the recently elected president of the South Carolina Council of Safety—the British and their Native supporters were “preparing a great Dish of Blood for you.” Tennent had been trying to ascertain potential threats in the event of war between the colonies and England, and his letter encapsulated the state of southern Indian relations. It revealed that Indians remained divided over the question of what to do. The letter, probably without meaning to, evoked the one-dish metaphor that Natives and non-Natives used to suggest military alliance and respect for land boundaries. Tennent’s message also transformed the metaphor. This was no shared meal; the bloody dish represented the connectedness among power struggles, confusion over who was in charge of Indian Affairs, violence, and hunger in the southern theater of war.¹

In Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, and West and East Florida, food diplomacy failed almost entirely, in spite of various attempts to practice it. It was not for a lack of trying that food diplomacy proved unfeasible. Officials and Indians championed continuity in diplomatic practices, and rebels and Britons kept up some distributions of food goods and gifts. By the 1780s some officials even invoked the metaphor of shared hunger and sent food to meetings because they knew they needed to host attendees. In a few instances, southern Indians even destroyed the foodstuffs of their allies so that everyone suffered together. At the same time, infighting among both the British and the rebels grew frequent, resulting in diplomatic blunders. Non-Native officials, after considering these multiple obstacles to good relations, tried to block each other’s food diplomacy rather than practicing it themselves. When this tactic did not succeed, Britons and Americans turned to victual warfare—against each other, and against Indians whom they considered disloyal. Whereas Iroquoian food diplomacy won out in the north, a bloody dish of victual warfare prevailed in the southern colonies and then states.

Victual warfare—the burning of grain, the destruction, maiming, or theft of domesticated animals, and the deployment of threats to engage in these actions—broke out when food diplomacy faltered, and helped Native Americans claim power more effectively than non-Natives. Food diplomacy’s shortcomings did not cause victual warfare, and sometimes interactions related to violence and peacemaking occurred alongside each other. Non-Natives who could not practice food diplomacy with their Indian allies recognized the strategic value of creating hunger among their Native American enemies. They hoped that by destroying Indians’ corn—and thus inducing famine—they could force southern Natives into compliance. In a few instances, they also hoped to appear benevolent by distributing food aid to enemy Indians after such attacks. They miscalculated, because victual warfare had an unpredictable relationship with hunger. In the south, Britons and Patriots discovered that although they practiced victual warfare primarily to create hunger, Indians practiced victual warfare to create and fight hunger.

Three periods of bad food diplomacy, victual warfare, or a combination of the two methods of communication—during 1775–1778, 1779, and 1780–1782—illustrate how confused policy, hunger, and violence became intertwined. The first time span reveals inadequate food diplomacy and changes in victual warfare. Indians’ behavior shifted from killing and maiming animals to stealing, butchering, and eating them. During the second period previous changes, in combination with the death of John Stuart—the southern agent for British Indian Affairs and a key official among the Creeks—disrupted Anglo-Indian alliances. This year was characterized by extreme confusion caused by shoddy British food diplomacy, and by increased American attempts to create Native hunger, which they did by intensifying their victual warfare and circumscribing food-aid distributions. From 1780 to 1782 power relations were hard to predict. As British military leaders deprioritized Indian diplomacy, American states grew more likely to use the threat of victual warfare to try to create hunger and control people. At the same time, the states’ Indian policies became inconsistent. Unsuccessful food diplomacy had three results: it created confusion, it made white Americans reluctant to distribute food aid, and it forced people to associate victual warfare with famine creation, famine prevention, and violence.

The prewar land problems and changes in trade that had affected the Iroquois also destabilized southern Indian affairs. Edmond Atkin—William Johnson’s counterpart as southern superintendent of Indian Affairs—made efforts to reform trade, just as Johnson had. In the late 1750s Atkin recommended implementing additional controls on traders, building permanent forts and outposts, destroying French forts, and creating a southern Indian confederacy that would mirror the diplomatic might of the Iroquois.² It was a tall order.

The fourteen thousand Creeks and the twelve to fourteen thousand Cherokees living in North America by the 1770s enjoyed less room to maneuver than the Iroquois. The Creek confederacy was young, having emerged during the early eighteenth century. The 1763 Peace of Paris that ended the Seven Years’ War impeded the Creeks’ practice of triple-nation diplomacy: their abilities to play British agents off of French and Spanish ones. Creek attacks against colonists in December 1773 and January 1774 prompted the British to embargo the trade of the Creeks who lived in present-day Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.³ Relations with the Cherokees had been fraught since campaigns against them in 1760 and 1761. The causes of these conflicts seem clear. Virginian and South Carolinian colonists, who privileged their landgrabs over Indian sovereignty, embarked upon scorched-earth campaigns that perpetuated a cycle of retaliatory violence between them and Overhill and Lower Cherokees. By 1775 a Cherokee population gutted by warfare and disease had dropped from twenty-two thousand earlier in the century. The Creeks ceded land in 1773, and the Cherokees sold away most of Kentucky and Middle Tennessee in 1775. Georgia’s white population quadrupled between 1745 and 1760, and by 1775 eighteen thousand colonists stood primed to invade Creek lands.⁴

When war broke out, British and rebel American officials scrambled to gain control of an already chaotic situation. Congress had made plans to divide Indian Affairs into three departments in 1775, allotting ten thousand dollars to the southern portion and placing the Irish-born trade agent and go-between George Galphin in charge. Only in August 1776 did South Carolina learn about this plan. John Stuart, a Scots immigrant to South Carolina, had taken over for Atkin in his role as superintendent for the southern tribes in 1761; he remained employed for the British. He would eventually command a company of Loyalists “Wholly Annexed and Attached” to the Indian department; they fought alongside Indians.⁵ Galphin and Stuart found that the American Congress and ministers in England, respectively, sent instructions that were often at odds with conditions on the ground.

To a small extent, food diplomacy continued to matter in the southern region. In October 1776, for example, John Stuart decided to redirect Creek efforts away from war with Cherokees and Choctaws, and toward assisting the British against the rebels. He set about trying to supply himself with “necessaries, for engaging the Indians firmly in his Majesty’s interest,” including “a supply of provisions.” Although in 1778 he criticized the Creeks for wavering loyalties, he still felt that he could not afford to refuse to feed them. Indeed, Stuart wrote that “Many of the Creeks remain here the whole Winter for the sake of Provision.” They were joined by “about five hundred Cherokees,” causing “a very great Expence of Presents and Provisions.” In 1779 Alexander Cameron, Indian agent to the Cherokees, procured corn from Cherokee towns that he described as “Neutral” to redistribute to other Cherokees, while at the same time proclaiming the “Neutral” Cherokees’ inclination “to serve me as ever.”⁶ The British distributed rations to Native warriors to gain alliances and to maintain them, and they fed the Native civilians who arrived at British strongholds during pauses in the war. They also sometimes overestimated their influence with their Indian allies.

Rebel government officials also made diplomatic overtures; they substituted domesticated animals and alcohol for trade goods and gunpowder, promised to regulate trade irregularities and colonists’ land encroachments, and used food metaphors. In July 1776 members of the Georgia Council of Safety observed that Indians would “expect to be well paid, even for neutrality.” Georgians knew that Natives would prefer “Ammunition & Cloathing” but also acknowledged their inability to provide those articles. Their solution came in the form of “Cattle as a substitute.” In September 1777, when word arrived in North Carolina that nearly three dozen Middle, Overhill, and Valley Cherokees planned “to wait on the General Assembly,” the governor’s office agreed “to appoint a Commissary to furnish the said Indians with provisions.” At a 1783 meeting with the Cherokees, Georgia governor Lyman Hall used as many metaphors as possible. He offered goods to the Cherokees so that Cherokees and Georgians could “embrace each other as Friends … Eat out of the same Dish and drink out of the same Cup,” and “have a plain open Path to you and you to us.”⁷

Indians also attempted to employ food diplomacy during the war. They used food to delineate the terms of their military contributions, used the one-dish metaphor, and requested and distributed goods and foodstuffs. In the winter of 1776, when John Stuart sought the aid of the Creeks, “their Answer was ‘That they were willing to assist us but it must be in their own Way … with White Men who would furnish them with Provisions.’ ” The Creeks also warned that “any great Number of Red Men could not subsist in a Body together.” In the same letter Stuart wrote that another group of Indians would only agree to attack “Georgia, as soon as a sufficient Quantity of Corn could be got to support them upon the Expedition.”⁸ Indians demanded additional fighting men and rations, refused to commit to extended terms of service, waited to fight until they could be sure of their supplies, and stated their expectations that non-Native military commanders would accept the fact that Indians fought differently.

Southern Indians also continued to use food metaphors. During a 1782 meeting with Georgians, an Upper Creek named the Tallassee King expressed a desire for “a white and straight” path before proclaiming, “that it was ordained that our Children should eat out of one Dish that is one with a Red Hand and the other with white.” Indians who asked for trade goods, like their northern counterparts, called themselves “naked” or “hungry” to underscore the generosity of those who provided gifts. British and rebel officials, however, likely remained confused about whether these Indians were hungry or not.⁹

These practices make clear some of the similarities between the northern theatre of war and the southern colonies, but food diplomacy in the Revolutionary south was different because its efficacy in maintaining peace proved short-lived. It is unclear whether, in 1779, when Alexander Cameron sent corn to Cherokees, they really were willing “to serve” him, given Indian attitudes toward military service. Georgian Lyman Hall did well to use mutually comprehensible food metaphors, but because Hall and his associates gestured to future rules for regulating trade, rather than setting them there and then, readers must be skeptical of Georgians’ negotiating efforts because Indians likely were too.¹⁰ The shared experience of hunger, which was so crucial to northern Indian relations, did not seem to matter as much during the moments when people in the south used food diplomacy. Officials could not escape the fact that their food gifts made poor substitutes for the guns and ammunition that southern Indians preferred. Whereas an Iroquoian form of food diplomacy dominated the New York region by 1780, southern inhabitants by that time had not institutionalized comparable practices, and divisions between rebels, British officials, and Indians contributed to outbreaks of violence in the form of victual warfare.

Between the beginning of the Revolutionary War and the end of 1778, failed food diplomacy and an expedition of victual warfare against the Cherokees prompted some changes and revealed other continuities. Rebel colonial leaders tried to block British diplomacy rather than replicate colonial practices, and then further undermined their negotiations with a Virginian, North Carolinian, and South Carolinian scorched-earth campaign against the Cherokees in 1776. These factors created a split between the Cherokees, which represented not only a joining of Cherokees with Britons and British-allied Creeks, but also an event that deprived rebel-allied Cherokees of provisions. Victual warfare in this region differed from its northern counterpart. The 1776 campaign illuminates mostly preemptive (rather than retaliatory) attacks on edible supplies. Whereas the Americans struck Iroquoia to punish Indians for their alliance with the British, they targeted Cherokee towns even earlier to create fear and hunger, and because southern colonists had a longer history of attacking southern Indians. The motivations behind Indians’ victual warfare also changed: during the late 1770s, Creeks and Cherokees shifted from killing cattle to stealing them, which stopped their own hunger and presaged famine-prevention efforts later in the war.

In July 1775 South Carolinians seized British Indian Superintendent John Stuart’s estate as “a security for the behaviour of the Indians in the Southern Department.” Then they attempted to pressure him into providing “copies of all my correspondence on Indian affairs,” which, citing his “duty to the King,” he refused to do. Colonists correctly suspected that Stuart was trying to secure the southern tribes to the British interest (he denied that he was also attempting to arm slaves and Indians). One of the confiscated letters revealed that Stuart hoped to gather the Creeks and Cherokees together in St. Augustine, East Florida, where he would use “all possible means … for engaging the Indians firmly in his Majesty’s interest.” He feared that he would “find difficulty in getting a supply of provisions,” because he knew that he would need food to solidify alliances.¹¹ Stuart wanted to court the southern tribes; colonists did, too, which is why they tried to limit his contact with Indians.

Southern rebel colonists also tried to stem the flow of diplomatic trade goods. In July 1775 colonists’ schooners intercepted two British ships bound for Georgia bearing “Arms, Ammunition and Indian Trading Goods.” This letter did not describe the goods seized, but contemporary letters suggest that “goods” often included food supplies—so it is possible that this event involved the confiscation of provisions as well as trade presents. Creeks needed gunpowder to hunt deer for the venison they ate and for the deerskins they sold to non-Natives. The following year, when the Georgia Council of Safety contemplated substituting cattle for trade goods, they imagined that the swap would be most successful “if the communication” between the Creeks “& our Enemies were cut off.”¹² It was easier for South Carolinians to interfere with the diplomacy of other imperial officials rather than try to maneuver with Indians, and easier for Georgians to improve the appeal of their presents by limiting British-Creek contact.

Soon southern American colonists proved uninterested in pursuing an accommodating Indian policy. The Cherokee Dragging Canoe had raised a war standard at Chota and raided the Holston, Clinch, and Powell Valleys in May 1776. In the summer of 1776 fears that Indians would mount a more extensive assault resulted in a concentrated strike against Cherokee towns. The aims of Americans’ campaign mirrored the 1779 expedition into Iroquoia: “a Corps of at least fifteen hundred men” sought “the destruction of the Crops of the lower Nation” and to provoke “necessary terror.” Henry Laurens described the burning of towns, crops, and stored grain as “the only possible way of reducing the Barbarians.”¹³ In this instance, as in earlier English campaigns, aggressors justified their military decisions by portraying Indians as savages.

Three separate groups of soldiers proceeded into the Cherokee towns. A Virginia and North Carolina force under Colonel William Christian headed toward the Overhill villages, while North Carolinians under General Griffith Rutherford moved against the Middle and Valley towns, and a South Carolina army led by Major Andrew Williamson struck out for the Lower towns. None of the American columns met with serious resistance (Andrew Williamson’s suffered some casualties in two ambushes). In general, most Cherokees dispersed and refused to come to close quarters with the rebel militia. In September and October 1776, forces destroyed more than thirty-six Cherokee towns.¹⁴

Americans might have portrayed this campaign as a revengeful one. No such claim could be made the following year, when the rebels fell once more “upon the poor distressed Cherokees,” destroying “their Villages and Crops.” Rebel officials would only deign to make peace in 1777, South Carolinians and Georgians at the Treaty of DeWitt’s Corner, and Virginians and North Carolinians at the Treaty of Holston. The Cherokees who signed these treaties officially split from the Cherokee Dragging Canoe, who formed a British-allied polity of Cherokees, Creeks, and self-liberated bondpeople often called the Chickamauga Cherokees.¹⁵ John Stuart, who described these distressed Cherokees, argued that the rebels had attacked British-allied Indians overaggressively. His tone implied that the Americans may already have succeeded in subduing their enemy by the time they attacked again in 1777; he denigrated preemptive American war tactics. No one could deny their terrible efficacy.

This more violent victual warfare initiated conversations about the Indian hunger such campaigns were designed to cause. Rebel soldiers’ destruction of Cherokee crops and villages tested even Chickamaugas’ loyalty to the British. Dragging Canoe sent word that “they cou’d not be of any Service” to the King, and that, further, “if they shou’d not raise Bread this Year the white People nor no one else wou’d have occasion to kill them for they wou’d all die with Hunger.” Dragging Canoe’s message lacked the metaphorical tropes that Indians used to request provisions. These Native families were not “naked,” nor were they “starving”; some of the Indians had already felt “obliged to eat Horses & Dogs & any Thing they can get,” and some were “dead already.”¹⁶ These were famine conditions. Dragging Canoe’s information about dying Cherokees evokes similar worries of Iroquois men in 1779; in that instance, too, Natives questioned their trust in British allies. The Iroquois had critiqued Britons’ obsession with provisions, expressed their willingness to withstand future hunger, and destroyed allies’ foodstuffs to strengthen alliances. Chickamauga Cherokees questioned their support for the British by emphasizing deaths by starvation. In both instances, hunger tested alliances.

Despite Dragging Canoe’s doubts, he and the rest of the Chickamaugas ultimately chose to assist the British. He was joined by his brother, Little Owl, along with Bloody Fellow, Hanging Maw, Young Tassel (John Watts), Kitegiska, and Outacite. Older Cherokees opposed this move, as did many Cherokee women. This division also resulted in blocked food aid: British officials provisioned the five hundred hungry Chickamaugas but prevented these supplies from reaching other Cherokees.¹⁷

Indians had to explore new ways to fight hunger, which is why the late 1770s witnessed increased domesticated-animal use, particularly cattle ownership, among them. Native Americans were about a century late to the beef craze; in England, long-distance cattle trade from the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands to London’s Smithfield Market increased significantly after the 1707 Act of Union, and in North America, by the end of the seventeenth century, beef consumption had risen from 14 to 58 percent of meat consumed in the Chesapeake. In some towns Creeks were acquiring horses (but probably few cattle) by the 1760s, and a “New Order” of cattle ranching and slaveholding made animals more important during and after the American Revolution. Some Cherokees had encountered horses, because Dragging Canoe mentioned people eating them. It was likely as a result of the Treaty of DeWitt’s Corner that additional horses and cattle entered rebel-allied Cherokee towns. One article of the treaty stipulated that Cherokees could keep the cattle, horses, and goods belonging to any unlicensed trader in Cherokee country after they turned such traders in at Fort Rutledge. The treaty also demanded a return of horses and slaves stolen from South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, indicating that an increase in animal thefts preceded the treaty.¹⁸

Given the fluctuating symbolic and practical meanings of domesticated animals in the mid-eighteenth century, it is unlikely that Creeks and Cherokees always viewed cattle as food sources. Some animals functioned more as status symbols; they signified the ability to accumulate property. Natives also used cattle in ways that differed from colonists’ practices. When Scots-Creek leader Alexander McGillivray tried to bequeath his cattle and horses to his sons, the matriarchs in his mother’s clan ended up with the animals. Yet it would have been possible for cattle to take on symbolic meanings as property without losing practical value as meat sources. Creeks expected provisions while traveling through lands they had ceded to the British—a practice they recognized as part of hospitality, but which non-Native inhabitants viewed as hostility. In a 1763 talk an Upper Creek called the Mortar explained that Creeks killed “the Cattle they meet in these lands” because “their Buffalo, Deer and Bear” were “being drove off the Land and killed.” “They fill their Bellies when they are hungry having nothing else to do with it,” he concluded.¹⁹ Indians, when denied hospitality, might have preferred game meat, but due to declining game populations they hunted cattle instead. During a time of game scarcity it is clear that some beef made its way into Indian cooking kettles.

Obviously, some Indians did acquire cattle and eat beef before the Revolution, as the Mortar’s talk implies. This tendency is also confirmed by the fact that in 1769 Georgians considered a bill to prevent “the Stealing and driving away [of] Horses and Cattle.” For the most part, in the decades prior to the Revolutionary War, Indians killed cattle. A 1733 law stated that when traders chaperoned Indians on visits to Georgia, the trader would be expected to “make good all Damages done to any of the inhabitants by such Indians … by killing of Cattle or otherwise.” Stolen animals did not pose a significant enough problem to merit explicit mention. By 1750 Creeks, acting in concert with Yuchis, were spotted “plundering” cornfields but still killing colonists’ cattle. A 1771 talk by George Galphin to the Lower Creeks criticized the Indians for stealing horses but destroying cattle and corn.²⁰

The proliferation of cattle thefts during the war is consequently arresting, and reveals how British-allied Indians obtained these animals. “The Creek Indians have broke with Us,” wrote one Georgian correspondent to Henry Laurens in October 1778. These Indians “killed & cruelly butcher’d upwards of thirty of our Inhabitants,” drove “off large Gangs of our Horses & Cattle,” and shot down what they could not “conveniently carry away.” This strategy combined the tactics of animal mutilation and destruction that had characterized previous decades with newer thefts of animals—either to prevent other people from taking them or to restock Indian herds. Often, Indians acted in concert with British allies; a South Carolina report explained how a combined force “carried off a considerable number of Negroes and not less than two thousand head of cattle.”²¹ Whereas Iroquois Indians used violence to make their allies hunger in a way that highlighted Native indispensability, Creeks and Cherokees used violence to obtain animals from their enemies, which in turn prevented their allies from calling them useless.

The British had more success than the Americans at managing alliances with powerful southern Indians during this first phase of the war, but even British approaches to working in Indian Affairs required adjusting between 1776 and 1779, as two letters to Superintendent John Stuart demonstrate. In May 1776 General William Howe wrote to Stuart to say that because Howe was working from “such a distance” in the northern military theater, he trusted Stuart to make decisions about Indian negotiations “without expecting particular directions from me.” In 1779, by contrast, Lord George Germain complained to Stuart from Whitehall, London, that “the Expence of your Department has increased so prodigiously that it is become a matter of public and parliamentary observation.” As new alliances formed, as the Americans mounted preemptive campaigns of victual warfare, and as Indian violence grew more pronounced, the British position changed. When British spending on co-campaigns increased, high-ranking officials demanded more oversight. British-Indian attacks from St. Augustine into Georgia continued throughout the 1770s and early 1780s.²² This uncertainty made crucial the presence of officials like Stuart who remained capable of working with their Indian allies—at the same time that it made London ministers nervous. Germain had good reason to worry, because John Stuart never read his letter; he was dead before it arrived.

In 1779 the death of Superintendent John Stuart created immense confusion in British Indian Affairs, which reduced the effectiveness of British food diplomacy and moved rebel food diplomacy further along toward the violent end of the accommodation-violence spectrum of behavior. Reports of famine among the Creeks beginning in the summer of 1778 necessitated generosity during 1779, the precise moment when British officials, because of administrative mix-ups, could not secure funds for food gifts.²³ Stuart’s work with Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws had lent stability to British relationships with southern Indians, but his successors struggled to transition into their roles as intermediaries. British food diplomacy never fully recovered after Stuart’s death, and officials, in desperation, fell back on the practice of trying to block rebel diplomacy. The Americans seized on the confusion in the British Indian department to again set fire to extensive stretches of Cherokee cornfields, and then to offer a new, less compromising form of food diplomacy to force Creeks and Cherokees back into a state of neutrality. By this point in the war the food diplomacy of the rebel southern states did not include distributions of actual foodstuffs; the Americans instead tried to portray their “generosity” as restraint from victual warfare. Because Creeks and Cherokees possessed new, aggressive ways to avoid hunger, results proved disastrous.

In March 1779 British brigadier general John Campbell reported the death of John Stuart. The whole Indian department stood “in the greatest Confusion.” It is difficult to say how Indians reacted to the news, but the fact that Stuart had intermarried into the Cherokee Long Hair Clan and been adopted by them suggests that his demise was likely troubling. In their reorganization of the department, the British split it in two. In October Alexander Cameron, who had until Stuart’s death acted as superintendent for the Cherokees, became superintendent of the Choctaws and Chickasaws; Colonel Thomas Brown was appointed to the Catawba, Creek, and Cherokee Indians. They each received a salary and could employ deputies and interpreters. Brown got £1,000 as “allowance for presents, Rum, Provisions, Carriage and all other contingencies.” Cameron feared that such changes would hinder British-Native alliances. He received a sum of £1,450, which he found “barely sufficient to defray the Sallaries of Officers,” let alone satisfy “Visiting parties of those Nations under my management.”²⁴

For one thing, British leaders had been critiquing John Stuart’s overspending for several years; £1,450 was not likely to go far for Cameron or Brown. For another, Indians tended to engage with the diplomacy practiced by the men whom Native women had married; Mohawks had been tied to Sir William Johnson, Creek loyalties had been tied to Stuart, and Alexander Cameron had been responsible for the Cherokees. Now Johnson and Stuart were dead. By moving Cameron from his position among the Cherokees, the British weakened this node of patronage and ignored the fact that it would take Cameron time to cultivate ties with the Choctaws and Chickasaws. “The Cherokees will all return to the Rebels,” wrote Cameron, as “soon as they are informed that I am deprived of the Management of their Affairs.” Cameron worried that his departure would push Cherokees to reestablish alliances with another imperial power, so he delayed acting on his orders. By September the Indian department was again “in Confusion” because Cameron had not yet left the Cherokee nation.²⁵

Even if Indian loyalties were secure, Britons would soon find that they did not possess the means to maintain them, in part because they could not procure food. In September 1779 a ship “laden with 300 Barrels of Provisions And a considerable Quantity of Rum … ha[d] unquestionably fallen into the Enemy’s Hands,” and the Indians could not be employed “for want of Provisions” on the Mississippi. Spain declared war on Great Britain in 1779, and Bernando de Gálvez, Spanish governor of Louisiana, decided to launch preemptive attacks against the British at Manchac, Baton Rouge, and Natchez to protect the valuable port of New Orleans. The Indians in this report may have been Chickasaws, and the enemy Spanish rather than American, but the overall sentiment was the same: theft resulted in British inabilities to secure Indians’ assistance. And this letter was the same letter that reported on the confusion that resulted from Cameron’s dithering. When supplies made it through, distribution problems occurred. Stuart had died in debt. In February 1780 five hundred barrels of pork destined for the Indian department had been sent to Stuart’s attention instead; this slip in address meant that the pork was “seized upon” by Stuart’s executor and “will probably be sold by him as private Property.” “This Pork would be of the utmost advantage” at an upcoming “Congress with the Indians,” complained another official—but the pork was unrecoverable.²⁶

To add to the chaos, right before this bureaucratic change in the British Indian department, Virginians had mounted a scorched-earth campaign, which they followed with offers of curtailed food diplomacy. They attacked neutral Indians and British-allied Chickamaugas with equal vigor. In April 1779, Virginians attacked “Chicgamaga a New Settlement,” where they “surprised the Women & Children,” killed five people, destroyed “Their Homes & Corn,” and “carried off” all the Indians’ “Horses & Cattle.” According to Alexander Cameron, this action reduced the Cherokees “to the utmost distress.”²⁷

When Cameron arrived at the Chickamauga towns at the end of May, he “found matters in very great Confusion.” He discovered that “a Commissary appointed by the Stadtholders of Virginia to Superintend the Cherokee” was laboring, “Through the Mediation” of the Cherokee warrior Oconostota, to convince the Indians to take him up on his offer “to Support them with Provisions and all the Necessaries of Life providing they would return to their Old Towns and live Neutral.” Luckily for the British, Cameron’s arrival precipitated the American agent’s departure: “not Chusing to risque his Safety in my Neighbourhood,” the man “returned to Virginia” when Cameron appeared. Cameron convinced the Cherokees not to agree to peace and provisions, but to wait for their own corn to ripen, when “we should then march to Carolina or Georgia and take Revenge.”²⁸ According to Cameron these homeless Cherokees had no corn, no horses, and no cattle. The disarray of the Indian department meant that Cameron could not offer to provision the Cherokees in exchange for their service. In this case, however, he invoked Cherokee cycles of planting and warfare to get them to agree to the timing of this expedition.

What happened next was not to Cameron’s favor. The rebels had heard of this future attack and sent South Carolinian general Andrew Williamson and his cavalry to march toward the Chickamauga Cherokee settlement.²⁹ Upon arrival Williamson promised the Cherokees “that he did not mean to hurt them or their Effects, providing they would lay neutral” and allow him “to take or destroy” Cameron and his men (Cameron discovered that the Indians had received these talks after the fact, when it was too late).³⁰ Cameron prepared for a fight between the Americans and his company of approximately three hundred Indians and forty Loyalists, only to encounter “the Enemy … in Three divisions, and Five Hundred horsemen in each Division.”³¹ They were outnumbered.

At first the Cherokees seemed to privilege the prevention of their own hunger over their promise to fight with Cameron. It seemed that these Cherokees did still have some corn, because they called a council and decided to send two of their own “to treat for Peace and save their Corn.” Williamson told them that if they would deliver Cameron “into his Hands,” he would agree not to burn their crops. But then the Cherokees told Williamson “that if he would not treat upon any other Terms, he might burn their Towns as soon as he pleased.” Williamson accordingly “Burned Six of their Towns and destroyed their Corn … after which he offered them every assistance and Protection they could wish for Providing they would return to their Old Towns and live in peace.”³² Cameron escaped.

The disorder in the British Indian department made it difficult for the British to try to remedy the situation with food aid. Cameron explained that he had hoped to gather the Indians together “and revenge the loss of their Corn.” In October he finally managed to purchase three hundred bushels for the Chickamaugas from the other Cherokees—“those Indians who lie neuter and listen to the Virginia Folks.” If the Chickamauga population consisted of five hundred families, each family would have received two thirds of a bushel of corn. It is difficult to estimate the weight of a bushel of corn, especially with such a brief description. Britons and Americans measure bushels differently today, and Cameron was a Scot working for the British in North America, so it is hard to say which measurement he might have used. Measurements for American bushels range between 56 pounds per bushel of shelled corn and from 35 to 70 pounds for corn in the ear. This would mean that each family received between 33.6 pounds if Cameron obtained shelled corn, and between 21 pounds and 42 pounds if the corn was unshucked. Given that each Iroquois person (not family) consumed six bushels per year, and that a future attack against the Cherokees destroyed fifty thousand bushels at once, three hundred bushels does not seem like a significant quantity of food relief.³³

In any case, Cameron’s plans to provide additional foodstuffs and to lead a retaliatory attack were foiled by his receiving word that he was no longer in charge of superintending the Cherokees. The funds he possessed could not be spent on more corn or anything else for the Cherokees. Cameron professed himself “much afraid that few of the Indians of this District will join or give Assistance to His Majesty’s Troops this Season.” In October he reported that the Chickamaugas were “living in the Woods upon Nuts and whatever they can get besides.”³⁴ Their corn supplies from the neutral Cherokees had dwindled. Failures in British supplies could have offered Andrew Williamson an opportunity, but he chose to assert power through destruction.

The attack against the Chickamaugas provides evidence of alterations in violence and peacemaking, and continued misunderstandings of Native hunger. Southern rebels’ policy regarding Natives consisted of engaging in aggressive, preemptive victual warfare, reneging on promises made, and, once a campaign successfully ended, offering terms of peace. Americans now offered postattack “assistance” to enemy Indians, but, in a move that anticipated George Washington’s instructions to John Sullivan, they did so only once they were confident of Indians’ defeat and future neutrality. The British, represented by Cameron, struggled to provide provisions. Cameron had to encourage Cherokees to plant their own crops. Cherokees, in contrast to Britons and Americans, and like the Six Nations, continued to use food diplomacy somewhat effectively and may have continued to overstate their hunger to non-Native observers. The fact that the Chickamaugas possessed some corn for Williamson to destroy, and the fact that Cameron obtained corn from neutral Cherokees to give to their Chickamauga brethren, testifies to the existence of corn and the importance of grain in retaining bonds between factions of southern Natives. Given the uncertain conditions of crop production, however—no one could say whether the corn would be allowed to ripen without suffering another scorched-earth attack, whether the weather would turn too soon, or whether the harvest would fail—hungry neutral Cherokees may not have had much to spare.

The absence of provisions, incompetent distribution of what little foodstuffs the British obtained, and infighting prolonged the confusion. In December 1779 Alexander Cameron complained that a group of Creeks had visited him and requested food, which he could not deliver because he was not their superintendent. Desperate, he wrote to Governor Peter Chester at British-held Pensacola and recommended that Chester “Order at least provisions and Ammunition to be Issued to those Indians” as a matter of “Interest and Safety of your Province.” Cameron warned that without provisions, the colony at Pensacola would “become a prey to” the Creeks, who would retaliate with violence that interfered with “Communication betwixt this place and Savannah through the Creek Nation.”³⁵ Governor Chester ignored this warning from an Indian agent, and not for the first or last time.

Chester had refused to provide ammunition and provisions to a group of Creeks in 1774. Part of his stubbornness can be explained by a general lack of funds; when, in the late 1770s, Chester requested troops from British secretary George Germain, Germain said no because he assumed that previous supplies to Indians would suffice to convince Native warriors to help Chester. But Chester also made his own mistakes. In 1780 he went as far as to refuse to receive the Creek Indians who came to visit him. By 1780 one official successfully convinced Chester “to incur a small expence to keep our red allies in a good temper,” but it seems that those efforts did not content the Indians.³⁶

After Chester gave in and used part of his annual allowance of £1,000 to furnish “them with a little Provision,” the Creeks, “being disatisfyed with their Reception … began to kill the Cattle about Town.” They had also “sold most of their provisions for Rum,” and “when drunk” became “very insolent and Riotous.” This destruction of cattle is striking in its resemblance to Iroquois and Shawnee cattle destruction at almost the exact same moment. It is possible that Creek motivations were different. Perhaps they remained ambivalent about cattle ownership. But it is also possible that these Creeks, like the Iroquois and Shawnees, destroyed foodstuffs provided by their allies because symbolic violence and hunger endurance were as important as hunger prevention. The subsequent decision to privilege rum purchases over provisions suggests a continuing disinterest in eating and the increasing temptation of alcohol. By February 1780 Chester had started to seize Creek lands and distribute them to “his Favorets and Dependents.” That month Creeks were spotted “Plundering the English Inhabitants of this Province.”³⁷ These actions might have symbolized retaliation—which is how some Britons understood them—but they might also have represented Creeks taking animals as the expected gifts of non-Native hospitality, or destroying them to ensure a shared experience of hunger. The year 1779 gave rise to a host of contradictions, which had not resolved themselves by the Battle of Yorktown.

On the day in 1781 that the American siege of Yorktown ended in British surrender, a man named St. George Tucker wrote a poem. Tucker, a Bermuda-born Virginia lawyer who had recently been wounded in the nose by an exploding shell, appeared rather glum, despite the American victory.³⁸ He wrote:

See Terror stalking through the’ affrighted Land!

Grim Rage and fell Revenge his Steps pursue,

Rapine, and harpy—Famine join the Band,

And Murder, leading on his hellish Crew:

The wretched Victim’s dying Groans,

The widow’d Matron’s tender Moans,

The Virgins plaints, the orphans cries,

Ascend in Concert to the Skies:

There hollow want in anguish pines,

No more relieve’d from plenty’s chearing Hoard;

There pale Disease the parting Breath resigns,

And Desolation waves around her flaming Sword!³⁹

Even as the Americans triumphed against the British, Tucker’s iambs personified the characters of murder, rage, rapine, revenge, terror, and famine—always famine. His verse concluded with additional references to want and the absence of relief. The twelve months of 1779 had been characterized by incompetent diplomacy on almost all fronts, and although Yorktown marked a turning point, the war was still not over. Now, Indians’ victual warfare had resulted in an unintended consequence: it encouraged fears of murderous, terrifying, and powerful Indians.

During the early 1780s, people in the revolutionary south proved incapable of practicing food diplomacy. Britons, who suffered a major defeat at Yorktown in 1781, fell back on trying to undermine rebel negotiations with Indians. Southern American states struggled because of individual states’ failures to cooperate, which resulted in mixed messages of peaceful overtures, self-congratulations for withholding victual warfare, and intermittent attacks. Rebel-allied Indians used peaceful food metaphors that British-allied Natives contradicted by committing victual warfare. Non-Natives, consequently, became unable and unwilling to distinguish between the Indians responsible for mediation and those responsible for war. British and American representatives complained about Indians who seemed peaceable one month and then, confusingly—sometimes “treacherously”—switched their allegiance and destroyed crops and animals. The Americans usually erred in favor of attacking rather than attempting to figure out which Native Americans wanted peace. During these later years of the conflict, non-Natives’ fears of Indian violence became interwoven with their anxieties about hungry Indians.⁴⁰

Life was chaotic in the early 1780s. After Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown the military conflict was effectively over for the southern British troops, but other sorts of hostility continued; 1780 to 1782 was the most violent part of the conflict. During the last part of the war Britons continued to interfere in rebels’ negotiations with Native Americans. In September 1782, more than two hundred Creeks from Cusseta, Okfuskee, and Tallassee met Americans in Augusta, Georgia. They agreed to return stolen animals and enslaved people, but before the parties formalized the arrangement, the British distracted them. They “Sent up an Indian” who told them “to come and gett goods” from the British, who knew “they ware in great want of goods.” Many of the Creeks who seemed friendly to the Americans now decided to head to St. Augustine to meet the British. Those who remained on their way to Augusta expected “that they will gett goods boath as presents and for them to have a treat, or they say it will be impossible for them to give the satisfaction Required.”⁴¹ British promises of additional goods divided the party of Creeks.

The Indians who still seemed willing to meet the Americans traveled with increased expectations that trade goods would function as payment and presents. Americans would be unlikely to supply them, and without trade goods they possessed few additional options but violence. Alexander Cameron died on December 27, 1781, eliminating yet another person capable of brokering British diplomacy with Indians. George Galphin died in 1782, which prompted a similar situation for the Americans.⁴² Spanish involvement, noticeable since the late 1770s, became more prominent after Yorktown, which hurt not only the British but also the southern states because it offered Creeks more leverage in their negotiations with imperial powers. Peace seemed elusive indeed.

Divisions between American states contributed to a lack of cooperation, which led to inconsistencies in food diplomacy and Indian policy. In the early 1780s North Carolinians and Georgians both sought to make peace with various Cherokee factions, with minimal success. In July 1781 one North Carolina official reported the arrival of “Some of the principal Head-men of the Cherokees” to Holstein River for a treaty. He worried, “The Commissioners are exceedingly embarrassed for want of money” because the Virginia treasurer was “refusing to pay.” During Indian treaties, he remarked, “not only the Ambassadours, but their Wives, and their Train &c; has to be fed by the European negociator.” He pointed out the strategic necessity of “amusing and keeping two numerous Indian Tribes still, or in suspense, during this critical Campaign”—likely referring to American efforts up and down the coast that would culminate in the siege at Yorktown—but worried that this goal would prove impossible to achieve without food supplies.⁴³

The following year it was North Carolinians who disappointed Georgians by failing to appear at a meeting between Georgia and the Cherokees. A Georgia man described not getting “the Busnes Compleated as was Expected upon the account of the faithless North Carolina Men not Meeting agreeable to their Repeated Promises.” He feared that “the scarcety of Provisions”—which may also have impeded the treaty’s success—coupled with an absence of ammunition placed Georgians in a “totering situation” along “our fronteers.”⁴⁴ In both cases one state’s inability to cooperate with another state combined with a food shortage to undercut the stability of Indian affairs.

By 1782 some southern officials’ food diplomacy consisted of telling Indians they should be grateful for an absence of victual warfare. This policy lumped Indian allies together with antagonists. Andrew Pickens, a future federal Indian commissioner, spent part of 1782 touring Cherokee country, sometimes delivering talks to Indians himself and sometimes sending them with other messengers. In one talk sent to the Middle and Valley Cherokees, Pickens’s representative referred to a previous expedition where the man in charge “did not hurt any of the Red People nor suffer his men to pull an ear of their Corn.” The Americans claimed that “by that means we thought to convince your nation that we did not wish to hurt you,” and only push “the Rogues & bad White Men … out of your Country.” Soon after that, complained the speaker, Cherokees attacked, intending “to burn & destroy the whole Country,” though they were prevented when Americans fired upon them. These Indians “run home” after “burning a few Houses & Stealing Some Negroes.”⁴⁵

This was a telling exchange. Pickens, speaking via this go-between, congratulated the Americans for refraining from violence and the destruction of Middle and Valley Cherokee crops—during a campaign whose history he may have modified to downplay rebel atrocities—and after differentiating some Cherokees from Cherokee “Rogues” and white traders working for the British, he then criticized all Cherokees for the attack. Pickens assumed that he knew the Indians’ intentions, when in fact their actions suggested plans for a small raid rather than a larger, more damaging strike. He refused to distinguish between peaceful American-allied Cherokees and the Chickamaugas and Creeks who moved against American towns, and he was unwilling to allow them to retain the cattle they stole to feed themselves. Pickens later demanded that the Indians show good faith by returning domesticated animals stolen during the war.⁴⁶

Interactions with the Creeks in Georgia proved even clumsier. Like Pickens, Governor John Martin blamed one faction of Indians for the actions of another. In a July talk to the Creek headman the Tallassee King, he blamed the British-allied “Treacherous” Emistesigo, who, “for the sake of a few trifling presents … Did wantonly fall on our Warriors in the Night.” Although Martin admitted that Emistesigo, whatever his motivations, acted without consulting the Tallassee King, Martin blamed the Tallassee King for the damage. He also demanded compensation for the victual warfare of other Creeks. Once the Tallassee King agreed to “deliver up … all our Negroes, horses & Cattle that are among you,” Martin looked forward to “Burying the Hatchet, Brightening the Good old Chain of Friendship, & mak[ing] the path streight, Fair and open, so that we shall live like friends & Brothers, living upon the same land and Eating out of the Same Dish.”⁴⁷ It is possible that Martin held the Tallassee King responsible because Okfuskee Creeks also possessed horses and cattle and enslaved people as their property. It is also likely, however, that Martin could not be troubled to differentiate between Creeks. Like his contemporaries, Martin used many metaphors, some of which relied upon the one-dish trope to portray shared territory.

Martin may have been echoing the Tallassee King, who had made overtures of friendship to Georgians only a week after news of a Creek and Chickamauga Cherokee attack in Georgia that May. The Tallassee King warned Martin of a new attack by a combined party of Creeks and Cherokees. At the meeting—which both Upper and Lower Creeks attended—the Tallassee King used the one-dish metaphor to convey his hopes for peace. The “ordained” nature of children eating “out of one Dish” with a combination of a white and “a Red Hand” reminded listeners that some of the Upper Creeks remained loyal to Georgia—though the Tallassee King did not attempt to apply the statement to all Creeks. The Tallassee King’s maneuvering illustrates the two growing factions of Creeks after the Americans took Savannah. The problem was that even in light of this talk, Georgian motives remained questionable. When the Tallassee King and several other Creeks arrived in Augusta around October, the Georgians had no goods to distribute.⁴⁸ This dish cried out for blood.

Georgians also emphasized their attacks against the Cherokees as a threat to the Creeks, and admitted that they currently had few provisions to distribute. “See what the Cherokees are now reduced to, by their folly and pride,” said Governor Martin to the Tallassee King and several warriors and headmen of the Upper and Lower Creeks in 1782. “They are almost brought to nothing.” He prefaced this warning with a reminder that the Georgians had already demanded their “horses, Cattle and Negroes.” He could provide no food—“We have just been able to raise provisions for our present support,” he said—but soon Georgians would “raise plenty of Rice,” and “Ships from all nations will flow in upon us, and we shall be able to supply you with goods of all kinds, and take your Skins in return.” Martin’s portrayal of a free-trade United States emphasized the link between food and trade goods while mentioning his government’s current inability to mete out either. He even went as far as to try to limit the number of men who intended to accompany the Tallassee King on a visit to see Martin in Savannah. Martin noted that “we have neither provisions, nor presents to give them.” Martin died shortly thereafter. By January, when the Tallassee King’s arrival was finally imminent, and the Tallassee and Fat King had complied with Georgian peoples’ requests and “chearfully gave up” slaves, provisions remained in short supply. All attempts to purchase corn from “the Publick” had “been in vain.”⁴⁹ The procurer in charge doubted his ability to find even enough grain for the Tallassee King alone.

Such blundering not only helped to provoke victual warfare but also ensured a continuous cycle of it, in which non-Native attacks destroyed Indian foodstuffs, and Indians then committed victual warfare to steal grain and cattle that would prevent hunger—which, in turn, prompted retaliatory campaigns against them. In 1780, North Carolinians sent five hundred men against the Chickamauga towns; in 1781 Virginia and North Carolina also attacked, targeting houses and provisions specifically. Men led by John Sevier pursued the Cherokees into present-day middle Tennessee and Northern Alabama, burning towns and killing noncombatants. In the spring of 1782 Indians responded. Chickamauga Cherokees and Creeks attacked Georgia. They burned houses, stole “two & a half Waggon loads of Corn,” destroyed a “Potator house & turned in a number of hogs to Distroy what Remaind.” They also killed two people, wounded three, and took four prisoners.⁵⁰ These Indians destroyed and stole foodstuffs because they found victual warfare useful for the dual purposes of hunger creation (among the Americans) and hunger prevention (among themselves).

Suppose that St. George Tucker was a more prolific poet, and had composed lines to precede and follow his Yorktown ode: what might they look like? Perhaps he would have penned some sorrowful words on the state of his nose.⁵¹ If the muses had inspired him to write about Indian affairs up until 1779, he might have introduced readers to the monsters Failure, Thievery, and Confusion. From 1775 to the end of 1778, British and rebel failures to practice food diplomacy occurred alongside increased instances of victual warfare in which Americans preemptively attacked Creeks and Cherokees, and Indians stole cattle. A reexamination of this period suggests that Indians practiced some aspects of victual warfare to prevent their own hunger, which allowed them to gain power even during times of reported famine. It is difficult to say whether bad diplomacy caused victual warfare. What readers can conclude is that failed diplomacy and increases in victual warfare occurred in close connection to each other, and they both destabilized power relationships.

The following years were characterized by worse violence that was birthed from the confusion after John Stuart’s death. His absence made diplomatic solutions nearly unobtainable at the exact moment when the British most needed them. Although Stuart had understood the stakes of feeding Indians, his successors were fairly useless at employing food to negotiate. Meanwhile, American food diplomacy became more closely bound to aggressive crop destruction; it came to mean restraint in scorched-earth campaigns, and sending limited food aid to the enemy villages that had suffered the brunt of those attacks. The last phase of the war can be linked to the erasure of Indian factions from contemporary historical records. Beginning in the late 1770s both British and southern state officials struggled to distinguish allies from enemies; they became incapable of identifying the people who practiced victual warfare. Times of confusion were difficult times to preserve accurate records of the past.

St. George Tucker’s final poem would have needed to reveal a final monster: the Master who enslaved other people.⁵² Numerous Patriot officials observed that in addition to Creek and Cherokee tactics of sharing grain with enemy Indians and stealing cattle, Indians worked together with formerly enslaved people to attack the Americans. White American slaveholders sometimes portrayed these acts as “stealing” slaves, and sometimes as encouraging enslaved people to run away. These black men, women, and children constitute the last group of people whose relationships with hunger and usefulness during the War for Independence merit readers’ attention—but in contrast to Native Americans, people of African descent enjoyed less power during the war itself.