William Mc Intosh - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Taskanugi Hatke (White Warrior) was born in the Lower Towns in present-day Georgia to Senoya (also spelled Senoia and Senoy), a member of the Wind Clan, which was prominent in the Creek Nation. As the Creek had a matrilineal system of property and hereditary leadership, his mother's status determined that of White Warrior. Also called William McIntosh, the boy had a Scots-American father, Captain William McIntosh, connected to a prominent Savannah, Georgia family. Captain McIntosh, a Loyalist, had worked with the Creek to recruit them as allies to the British during the American Revolutionary War. His mother was Jennet (or Janet in some sources) McGillivray, believed to have been a sister of the Scot Lachlan McGillivray, a wealthy fur trader and planter in Georgia, who was of the Clan MacGillivray Chiefs Lineage). After the war, Captain McIntosh moved to Savannah and married his cousin, Barbara McIntosh.

White Warrior gained his status and place among the Creek from his mother's clan. Benjamin Hawkins, first appointed as United States Indian agent in the Southeast and then as Superintendent of Indian Affairs in the territory south of the Ohio River, lived among the Creek and Choctaw, and knew them well. He commented in letters to President Thomas Jefferson that Creek women were matriarchs and had control of children "when connected with a white man." Hawkins further observed that even wealthy traders were nearly as "inattentive" to their mixed-race children as "the Indians". What he did not understand about the Creek culture was that the children had a closer relationship with their mother's eldest brother than with their biological father, because of the importance of the clan structure.

Through both his mother and father, McIntosh was related to numerous other influential Creek chiefs, many of whom at the time were of mixed race. They were descendants of strategic marriages between high-status Creek women and the mostly Scots fur traders in the area. The most prominent was Alexander McGillivray, the son of Sehoy, a Wind Clan mother, and Lachlan McGillivray; and William Weatherford (better known in history as Red Eagle or Lamochatta), also born to the Wind Clan. Both men became well established as Creek chiefs and wealthy planters but Weatherford became aligned with the traditionalist Red Sticks of the Upper Towns.