Career
McIntosh used his influence to improve a route from Talladega, Alabama to his ferry on the Chattahoochee River, which was a source of revenue. Parts of it are still referred to as the McIntosh Road. He also developed a plantation and owned black slaves.
The Creek were forced to cede lands to the United States in the early 1800s. While influential, McIntosh was said to have collaborated with the US Indian Agent Mitchell on defrauding the Creek of annuity monies from their land cessions. After the United States prohibited the international slave trade in 1808, he arranged to smuggle African slaves into the Mississippi Territory from Spanish Florida.
The Creek Nation struggled with internal tensions after the American Revolutionary War and during the War of 1812, when both sides tried to engage them as allies. The Lower Towns, which comprised the majority, were adapting some elements of European culture, as had been encouraged by the British and later Americans. This included education in English; for some, adoption of Christianity; as well as forms of European dress and houses - to show they were equally "civilized". They expanded their farms and some of the elite purchased chattel African slaves to work their plantations.
Internal Creek tensions resulted in the Creek War (1813-1814), when the Red Sticks of the Upper Towns attacked some Lower Creek settlements. McIntosh and other Lower Creek allied with United States forces against them after 1813. McIntosh fought with General Andrew Jackson and state militias in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, marking the defeat of the Red Sticks and the end of the Creek War. He was made a brigadier general.
After the wars, European-American settlers were increasingly migrating to the interior of the Southeast from the coastal areas.
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