Lachlan Mc Gillivray - Marriage and Family

Marriage and Family

Though there is no record of M'Gillivray having married in the Scottish Presbyterian tradition, he took as a consort a high-status Creek woman named Sehoy Marchand. Their marriage was recognized by the Creek. Early biographers claimed Sehoy Marchand was the daughter of a French officer at Fort Toulouse named Jean-Baptiste Marchand. Her mother was also named Sehoy, and she was a high-status woman of the Koasati (alternative spelling: Coushatta), of the Wind Clan. Hers was a politically powerful family of the Upper Creek nation, which had matrilineal system of descent and property. Sehoy's immediate family included several important chiefs. The marriage was a strategic alliance for her family as well as for the ambitious trader; she could protect her children within the tribe.

Albert Pickett and other biographers portrayed Sehoy as a beautiful black-eyed Indian princess, with whom M'Gillivray was instantly lovestruck. Historical and circumstantial evidence suggest the marriage may have been strategic for both sides, as he gained by being allied with a high-status family of Creek, and Sehoy and her family had benefits from a connected European-American trader. They had three children: Alexander, Sophia and Jean (also spelled Jeanne) McGillivray (the latter named after Lachlan's sister.) The children lived most of the time with their mother in the Creek tribe and learned its language and ways, although the father sent Alexander to a European-American school in Charleston and Augusta.

Many Native American chiefs supported such alliances; European traders, who were men of capital, also sought the alliances of marriage into tribes to strengthen their relationships. Though the Creek tribes treated marriage as a serious institution and had strong taboos against infidelity (especially by women), divorce was permissible and easily achieved. A husband could divorce a wife by leaving her house, and a wife her husband by leaving his possessions outside of her door. To the matrilineal Creek tribe, the house always belonged to the wife; it was usually shared with her female relatives and their husbands. The Creek considered the mother's children as wholly Creek, regardless of partial European ancestry, due to the matrilineal kinship system of the Muscogee.

After the late 1750s, Sehoy married at least two other men (monagamously), with whom she bore at least two additional children, before McGillivray relocated to Savannah. McGillivray made neither provision nor mention of Sehoy in his 1767 will. She was the custodial parent of their son, Alexander McGillivray, whom he did acknowledge and provide for. The younger McGillivray became a prominent Creek chief and planter, and a slaveholder like his father.

Though M'Gillivray made neither mention nor provision for his daughters in his will, their accounts attest to a relationship with him, as they visited him in Savannah, and Sophia named her oldest son, Lachlan McGillivray Durant, for him. McGillivray's will and other surviving writings frequently noted Alexander, referred to as his "natural son," a euphemism for illegitimate.

McGillivray, a patrilineal member of the Clan Chattan, may well have fought a kind of custody battle with his son's mother. As a member of the matrilineal Creeks, she considered her son and daughters as members of her own Wind Clan. As was traditional, Alexander was reared with his maternal uncle Red Shoes, who by varying accounts was either brother or uncle to his mother Sehoy. The role of maternal uncles in the upbringing of a male child was far more important to the Creek than that of the father, as they were of the same clan. The biological father belonged to a different clan. The uncle would mentor the boy through introduction to men's roles and societies.

McGillivray took an interest in Alexander, for he arranged and paid (at considerable expense) for the boy's education at Presbyterian academies in Charleston and Augusta. The father also arranged for the youth's apprenticeship in at least one mercantile house. He bequeathed him the substantial sum of £1,000 and made other bequests in his will. He bequeathed his most valuable assets, his plantations outside Savannah, to the "lawfully begotten" children of his Scottish siblings and cousins.