The Tension Relieved
While several previous articles have been devoted to the notorious career of Alexander McGillivray, there was a phase of the situation which logically belongs to the interesting proceedings in New York which should not be omitted, and when read in connection with facts already presented, adds increased interest to the narrative.
Keeping his plans well to himself, McGillivray was quietly breeding schemes with which to baffle the able men at the national capital. For days together, the negotiations were kept up, and they were days of serious concern and of lingering suspense to President Washington. The parleying and dallying led to the apprehension that McGillivray would propose terms so startling, as to end the whole affair with a fiasco, and in view of the recent demonstration, reduce the situation to governmental mortification. On the other hand. McGillivray was apprehensive that his intended proposals would be rejected, hence his tactical delay and parley. Knox was patient, McGillivray impatient. At last Knox was able to force from the wily trickster and supple diplomat the condition on which he would be willing to sign the treaty. It proved to be an occasion of as much elation to the one as to the other. McGillivray chuckled over his success, while the government congratulated itself on the settlement of terms so easy.
When, at last, McGillivray stated his terms, they were that fifteen hundred dollars in gold should be paid him outright by the government annually, together with other easy emoluments, yet to be named, and a certain quantity of merchandise, with certain limited sums of money to the Indians each year, for which consideration the vast domains of the Oconees were to be surrendered, while they were to remain under the peaceable protection of the United States, and form no treaties with any others. Yet, on account of that which occasioned this treaty so cheaply, much suspense and terror had been created and much blood spilled, and not a few whites were even then in bondage to the Indians. These slaves were to be liberated, and the two powerful tribes, the Creeks and the Seminoles, were to become subject to the general government. Paltry as the consideration was, McGillivray got the utmost of his wishes, and crowed over the result.
The infamy of this malicious character grows in depth with the probing. Back of his tampering with different embassies in the past, his Judas-like dealing with different nations at the same time, his instigation of the tribes to outbreak, his dragging these Indian chiefs across the country all the way to New York, lay the sinister and sordid selfishness of this perfidious man, already named, McGillivray provided for himself by being made a brigadier general in the regular American army on full pay, which was at that time twelve hundred dollars, while he was to derive additional remuneration as the government agent to the Indian tribes.
Intoxicated with delight at his success, McGillivray headed the procession homeward bound, after an exchange of congratulations with President Washington, where each vied with the other in stilted conventionality. McGillivray flattered the artless Indians into the belief that he had won for them a victory, and they shared with him in the gusto of his elation. His maneuvers were just such as to produce fresh plans of conspiracy and of intrigue for the future. On his return home, he doffed the uniform of the Spanish colonel, and donned that of the American brigadier, all of which heightened the admiration of the Indians, while it afforded newer opportunity to the general to lay deeper schemes and reap richer rewards. This course was occasioned by the reasons now to be given.
One of our modern investigations would have disclosed the fact that while the treaty was based on the conditions named, there lay beneath it, out of the sight of the general public, a secret treaty between President Washington and General McGillivray, on condition that he would manage the Indians as the President might desire. As a sort of secret agent, and in order to enhance his position in the estimation of the Indians, McGillivray was made a channel for the transmission of certain gifts and privileges, which he was to use to the advantage of the government, for which he cared not a thread, and he would never have become the secret purveyor, without the prospect of personal enrichment. He was to give to the Indians, in his own way, the assurance that their commerce was to find exit through the Gulf and ocean ports, while he was to present to each chief, as from himself, but really from the government, a handsome gold medal, besides a yearly gift of one hundred dollars in gold. Besides still, the government was in the same secret way to educate annually four of the Indian youth, free of all charge. All this was to be done in such manner, as to have it appear how strong was the hold and influence of McGillivray on the general government, and thus maintain his grip on the Indians. This looks a little nebulous, from the government side, but it is a matter of history, and at the time, was known only to the favored few. History, like the sea, has hidden depths. That which Washington wished, was to keep in subjection the troublesome Indian; that which McGillivray wished was the enhancement of his importance, in order to the gratification of his personal vanity, and in order, too, to a plethoric purse. At any rate, such are the facts. What our modern muckrakers might make of a proceeding like this now, deponent knoweth not. While in the state councils of New York, there was silent and suppressed glee over the result, in the heart of Alexander McGillivray, at the same time, there were fresh schemes being incubated, as in daily meditation he southward rode. Washington thought he had McGillivray bagged, while McGillivray knew he had Washington hoodwinked. Later developments afford fresher revelations of the diabolical character of Alexander McGillivray.
A season of tranquillity ensued which Washington regarded as auspicious, when as a matter of fact it was ominous. McGillivray never intended to execute the terms of the treaty, only in so far as they would conduce to his personal ends, for on his return to the South, he at once entered into secret negotiations with the Spanish. He explained to them that his jaunt to the capital was a mere ruse, in order to gather information, the better to aid the king of Spain, and that he was just now ready to render to Spain the most efficient service. Here, then, was an American general disporting himself in the national uniform, spurs, boots, epaulettes, and all, betraying the government into the hands of a foreign foe. While drawing the pay of a brigadier, he was, as a secret emissary of Spain, the recipient of a sum much larger.
In order, at last, to promote his schemes, he fomented strife and agitation among the chiefs, by instigating them to protest against the terms of the treaty. Meanwhile, he informed the government at New York that he was doing his utmost to enforce the terms, and must have broad discretion and ample time, in order to accomplish the end in view. Between himself and the secretary of war an active correspondence was kept up in which correspondence the atrocious Alexander McGillivray was more than a match for the cabinet officer of Washington. Thus went events for years together.
THE CURTAIN FALLS
In the records of the race, it would be difficult to find embodied in the life and career of any one, more strange and incongruous elements than those which entered into the history of General Alexander McGillivray. Though unquestionably a man of ability, that ability was turned into the most wicked of channels; highly gifted with the elements of leadership, these were devoted to the single end of the enhancement of his purse; gracious in manner, courteous, and ostensibly obliging to an astonishing degree, yet, at bottom, all this demonstration was only so many decoys to catch the unsuspecting, and even to the suspicious they were oftener than otherwise availing; cool and collected, placid and serene, it was but the charm to wheedle the confidence in order to sinister consummation, and, while emphatic sometimes with a make-believe sincerity, it was only to delude.
McGillivray’s only idea of right was that of self-gratification. If to do right at any time was most productive of methods of self-promotion, why he would adopt that course, but only as a means of convenience. Unhampered by a sense of obligation and unchecked by conscientious scruple, his prodigious intellect and fertility of resource made Alexander McGillivray the most dangerous of men. Yet he could descant at length with all the mein of a moral philosopher on duty and obligation, the rights of man, the turpitude of wrong, the cruelty of injustice, the inhumanity of deception, and all else in the catalogue of morality. His familiarity with all these afforded him room for the amplest guilt. Self was his measuring rod, laid with accurate hand on the most contradictory of conditions.
The amplitude of his personal forces enabled McGillivray to do what the fewest can successfully—wind his sinuous course through the most tangled conditions, while dealing with a number of conflicting agencies and causes, and yet equally dupe all, and if apprehended, be able so to summon to his defense a sufficiency of plausibility as actually to invest the whole situation with a sheen of fairness. Contradictory at many points, he could give to all the aspect of consistency.
The only service that Alexander McGillivray rendered was that of preventing a general outbreak of the Indian tribes, which fact was due, not to his horror of blood, so much, as to the fact that using the deluded red man, he was able to hold him up as an object of fear, and thus elicit by agitation and apprehension, that which would conduce to his emolument. He never did right unless it was to his profit, and falsehood was preferable to truth, if it would serve a turn to his personal profit. He derived abundant encouragement from the conditions of his environment, to which his character was exactly adapted. The man and the occasion met in Alexander McGillivray.
As the agent of the government entrusted with the dispensation of the financial and commercial gifts to the Indians, in accordance with the secret treaty with President Washington, no one ever knew how much, or how little, the poor red men ever received. The fact that the arrangement was a secret one, was much to the purpose and pleasure of McGillivray. The government promptly met its obligation, and there is not wanting evidence that there all sense of obligation ended. This notorious man went to his grave invested with the deepest suspicion. Nor was it altogether restricted to suspicion, this outrageous conduct of Alexander McGillivray. Detection was unescapable under certain conditions. Secret agents of a suspicious government, spying out his varied transactions, exposed his atrocity time and again, but in each instance, it was found that he had so successfully woven a network of defense, that to undertake to eliminate him by force, would have been like tearing a new patch from an old garment, according to the sacred parable, the rent of which would have been made the worse thereby.
The government sought by indirection and not always in the most creditable way, to uproot the confidence of the Indians by due exposure, but McGillivray was never found unprovided with means to account for the reasonableness of each separate charge. With the strategy of a Napoleon, this extraordinary man could outgeneral all who were pitted against him. Such was the character, such the career of Alexander McGillivray.
He was now an old man. The stylus of care and of responsibility, assumed in an arena the most atrocious, had drawn deep grooves on his brow. His silver hair and tottering gait admonished him of the brief time that was his, but so far from relaxing his grip on the things which had actuated him throughout, this condition only served to tighten it. Experience had sharpened his wits, and villainy had made him impregnable in plying his art. His was a master passion that gave fresh desperateness in view of the approaching end. A vast fortune was his, and with the passion of the man who never had a higher dream than that of personal gain, he hugged it with a tenacity common to men under conditions of advancing age, yet knowing meanwhile, that with his end would come that of the use of his immense means.
He lived to see himself repudiated by all alike. He was rejected by the American government, cast out by the Spaniards, and, by degrees, came to be distrusted even by the Indians. All sense of remorse was gone, all the finer emotions which shrink from public exposure of wrong, long ago deadened. Moral obliquity was complete, and hardened iniquity made him insensible to the frown of reproach with which he was everywhere met.
Worn out by the criminality of a long life, McGillivray sought a home, in his last days, at Little River, in the lower part of Monroe County, where he died on February 17, 1793. His remains were taken to Pensacola and interred in the spacious gardens of William Panton, a wealthy Scotch merchant, with whom McGillivray had long been associated in business connections. His very aged father survived him, and was still living at Dummaglass, Scotland, to whom William Panton wrote of the death of his notorious son. Thus passed away the greatest diplomat Alabama ever produced, but he left to posterity nothing worthy of emulation.