Alexander McGillivray, also known as Hoboi-Hili-Miko (December 15, 1750February 17, 1793), was a Muscogee (Creek) leader. The son of a Muscogee mother and a Scottish father, he was literate and educated, and understood the "white" European world and merchandise trading well. These gave him prestige, especially with European Americans, who were glad to finally find a Creek leader they could talk to and deal with. (Prior to contact with Europeans, the Creek did not have leaders or rulers in the European sense.) He used his role as link between the two worlds to his advantage, not always fairly, and became the richest Creek of his time.
McGillivray was literate and his "voluminous" correspondence has survived. In many cases his letters are the only source for events in his life, and they naturally present him in a very good light. Recent historians have taken issue with the heroic status he had in earlier histories.
McGillivray's status among the Creeks, who did not customarily have a single leader, was controversial and sometimes resented. His chief asset to ensure he was seen as a leader was his ability to hand out gifts to the Creek from both Britain and Spain. He was the most "Anglicized" of the Creek, and built solid houses, planted orchards, and ran a plantation (and owned about 60 slaves), which made him suspect. That he knew English well, was literate, and was experienced in the trading world also gave him influence, if not prestige. Yet as the illiterate Creek gradually became aware of his duplicity in the Treaty of New York and other matters, there "began a process that would culminate in the Redstick War." "Not surprisingly, the struggle began in the era of Alexander McGillivray."
Early life
Alexander was born Hoboi-Hili-Miko (Good Child King) in the Coushatta village of Little Tallassee (also known as Little Tallase, Little Talisi and Little Tulsa) on the Coosa River, near present-day Montgomery, Alabama, in 1750. Alexander's mother, Sehoy Marchand, was the daughter of Sehoy, a mixed-race Creek woman of the prestigious Wind Clan ("Hutalgalgi"), and of Jean Baptiste Louis DeCourtel Marchand, a French officer at Fort Toulouse. Alexander and his siblings were born into the Wind Clan, as the Muscogee had a matrilineal system, and gained their status from their mother's clan. They identified as Creek. Their father was Lachlan McGillivray, a Scottish trader (of the Clan MacGillivray chief's lineage). He built trading posts among the Upper Towns of the Muscogee Confederacy, whose members had formerly traded with French Louisiana.
As a child, Alexander briefly lived in Augusta with his father on one of his plantations. By the time he was 12, his father owned several large plantations totalling over , making him one of the largest landholders in the colony. His father was a delegate in the colonial (Georgia) Assembly, and was "a partner in a profitable mercantile firm that dealt in slaves, among other commodities". In 1773, the boy was sent to school in Charleston, South Carolina, where he learned Latin and Greek. He was apprenticed at two trading companies, one of which was the second largest importer of slaves in Georgia. With the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War, his Loyalist father returned to Scotland, and his lands were confiscated. Alexander returned to his mother's people in Little Tallassee in 1777.
While he was accepted as a Creek because of his mother, he "was deeply alienated from most Creek traditions and from the vast majority of the Creek people" When he ascended to leadership, Alexander relied on the help of his sister Sophia Durant, who often assisted him as a translator, interpreter, and as his spokesperson. (Alexander did so because either he had difficulty with the varying Native dialects or because he wished to adhere to a diplomatic practice common among the Creek at the time). He had more book learning than any other Creek, and later in life had a substantial library on natural history.
Career
A skillful diplomat – an early writer called him "Talleyrand of the Creeks" — he was an inept military strategist and rarely participated in battle.