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Abstract

So much effort has been directed to the story of the resolving of the post-Revolutionary War problems of the United States and Great Britain that insufficient attention has been paid to equally vexing problems with Spain and her allies, the southern Indians. In some respects this is not strange for even during the 1790’s, the attention of the American people was directed toward Great Britain for it was with this nation that the new republic’s economic future was most intimately associated. The two decades subsequent to the birth of the new nation saw constant friction along the Florida-Georgia frontier which often erupted locally into violent acts of vandalism, robbery, and even murder. A fair portion of the time of the State Department was taken up in attempts to negotiate officially with the Spanish agents accredited to the United States and unofficially in dealing with various Indian chieftains who were supposedly under the protection of the Spanish government. Naturally these unofficial negotiations were undertaken in Indian territory by official agents of the new republic. It did not require much time for the Indians to realize the advantage of their position as they were wooed first by one side and then by the other. The strange thing is that they did not press this advantage to the greatest possible limit as both governments were willing to go to great extremes to assure friendly relations with as many Indian groups as possible. At the first rumor of the conclusion of an agreement between the Indians and one government, the other would put a mission in the field to attempt to negotiate a second agreement that would nullify the terms of the first. This, after all, was the traditional pattern of frontier diplomacy as practiced for centuries by the colonial powers in the new world.

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