“The Soul of All America” covers roughly 1777 to 1780. Although the Haudenosaunees receive the majority of the runtime provided for Native history, some key events run parallel in other corners. The bulk of the “Southern Strategy” initiated in 1778 receives a quick summary, highlighting the major activities of loyalist forces. However, there is a Native dimension to these stories, too, that the documentary barely mentions if it is mentioned at all.
This campaign belatedly arrived after years of cries for aid from administrators of Britain’s Southern Indian Department. From the fall of 1776 forward, members of the Muscogee Confederacy, a vast network of peoples sprawling across Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, formally joined hands with their loyalist friends in taking offensive action against rebels.[1] Together, they launched numerous attacks into South Carolina and Georgia long before Henry Clinton’s winter 1778 invasion of Georgia. By the war’s end, the combination of Native, loyalist, and rebel campaigns devastated both colonies with little reciprocal damage to Muscogee towns.
Map ornament showing a Native family and a large bison, a pelican perched on a rock below, and above, two Natives pour water from a cornucopia, an opossum hangs by its tail from the border, between 1759 and 1781, Library of Congress: Geography and Maps Division, https://www.loc.gov/item/2004673415/.
Early in the war, trading paths between Muscogees, Georgia, and South Carolina closed due to the dangers presented by the conflict even before Muscogees chose friends and enemies among loyalists and rebels. Trade re-routed to Pensacola, the capital of loyalist-controlled West Florida. In the spring of 1776, Cherokees and Muscogees created a new path binding their economies together. Pensacola became the entrepot for virtually all Anglo trade with Native nations south of the Ohio River. West Florida’s governor, Peter Chester, claimed that southern Indians “must receive almost their whole Supplies thro’ this province.”[2] Cherokees and Muscogees became gatekeepers to other nation’s participation in the trade.
However, as chronicled in Episode 3, “The Times That Try Men’s Souls,” rebels invaded the Cherokee Nation in late 1776, resulting in the destruction of many Cherokee towns. Among them was Chota, the Cherokee town that acted as one of the major centers of this new trading path. As the rebel invasion raged on, many Cherokees sought shelter within Muscogee towns and in Pensacola.[3] As Cherokees returned home, those who did not join Dragging Canoe’s campaigns set about rebuilding their towns and recovering. Later, the war’s destructiveness afflicted Pensacola, too.