Cultural Mediator
James Oglethorpe and a group of trustees had been granted a Royal charter by King George II (r. 1727-1760) to start a settlement colony in Georgia. Oglethorpe, a pastor, a physician and 114 colonists arrived in Charles Town in January 1733 before embarking south to ascertain a suitable site. Oglethorpe met the chief of the Yamacraws, Tomochichi (d. 1739) on February 1, 1733 and after several weeks of ritual kinship building on Tomochichi’s part and Oglethorpe’s responsive acts of reciprocity, quasi-kinship ties were established. Tomochichi granted land to Oglethorpe which violated previous Creek Treaties with South Carolina that prohibited English settlements south of the Savannah River . A three day conference was held which resulted in the Articles of Peace and Commerce allowing Oglethorpe to settle “upon the river Savannah as far as the tide flowed and along the Sea Coast, excepting the three Islands, Sapalo, St. Catherine’s and Ossabaw.”
John Musgrove traveled as the interpreter for Tomochichi, his wife and other Creeks who sailed with Oglethorpe to England to meet the King In 1734. During this time the Musgrove’s English partner Joseph Watson drank heavily, caused extensive problems in the trading post, bragged that he helped an Indian drink himself to death, slandered Mary as a witch, tried to shoot her, and caused a sequence of events where Musgrove’s slave Justice was killed. Mary filed actions against Watson, who was fined, but in the end he had to be jailed for his own protection.
On June 12, 1735 John Musgrove died of a fever. Mary married her former English indentured servant Jacob Matthews who was several years her junior in the spring of 1737. Between 1737 and 1738 Mary assisted Oglethorpe in securing land sessions from the Creeks. Under his request she established trading posts along the Altamaha so as to monitor Creek loyalty and Spanish activities. Both trading posts had to be eventually abandoned causing financial losses for Mary. For a decade Mary continued to be interpreter, mediator, and advisor to Oglethorpe helping him to secure treaties and land cessions. The minister John Wesley (1703–1791) also visited her and commented that “Tomochichi’s interpreter was one Mrs. Musgrove. She understands both languages, being educated amongst the English. She can read and write, and is a well-civilized women. She is likewise to teach us the Indian tongue.”
Mary became a widow once more in 1742. The next year Oglethorpe left for London and never returned to Georgia, leaving Mary £100, an unfulfilled promise of £100 a year, and the diamond ring from his finger. Though Oglethorpe had relied on Mary as an important intercessor who entertained important leaders and helped keep Creeks aligned with English interests, the remaining trustees and leaders did not.
Read more about this topic: Mary Musgrove
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or mediator:
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)