Cameron, Alexander

by James H. O'Donnell III, 1979
https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/cameron-alexander

d. 27 Dec. 1781

Alexander Cameron, British Indian agent, was born in Scotland during the early eighteenth century and emigrated to the Southern colonies with a number of his countrymen in the 1730s and 1740s. It is not certain whether he engaged in planting or trading during his early years in the colonies, but his first recorded public service was as ensign in the British Independent Regulars. His unit was stationed at Fort Prince George, S.C., on the edge of the Lower Cherokee country, during 1762 and 1763, and he took advantage of the excellent opportunity to learn the Cherokee country and become acquainted with the natives. His acceptance by the Indians was no doubt enhanced by his marriage to a Cherokee girl. He came to be known among the Cherokees and the Creeks by the sobriquet of endearment "Scotchie."

After his demobilization, Cameron took up the two thousand acres of land to which he was entitled by his military service record. At about the same time he entered the service of the British Indian Department in the South. He received the appointment in part because of his frontier experience and in part because he was an acquaintance, if not a kinsman, of his countryman John Stuart, just appointed superintendent. Commissioned as principal agent for the Cherokees and then given a titular promotion to deputy superintendent in 1768, Cameron lived among or near his wife's people until 1776. He came to have great influence with the Cherokees, who deeded land to his sons, but he still could not stop wily whites from cheating the tribe of lands or prohibit illegal transactions like the Henderson Purchase of 1775.

When the rumblings of discontent arose between England and America in 1775, Cameron assured the Cherokees that they need not fear, for their lands and people were not threatened. Despite his pacific directions to the tribe, the pro-American frontiersmen viewed Cameron as an enemy; when revolutionary turmoil reached upcountry South Carolina, Cameron fled his plantation near the present Abbeville, S.C., moved deeper into the Indian country, and took up residence among the Overhill Cherokees.

From his new headquarters, Cameron strove to implement the superintendent's advice by urging the Cherokees to remain neutral. Such advice was hard to follow, however, since the tribe was faced with daily encroachment by white trespassers. In the spring of 1776, Cameron was joined in the Cherokee country by Henry Stuart, the superintendent's brother, who had come with instructions and ammunition. Shortly after Stuart's arrival, a band of Northern Indians reached the Cherokee country, intent on persuading the Cherokees to go to war. When the Cherokees heard of the insults to their brethren in the north, they would wait no longer; they determined to drive out the hated white settlers. Cameron tried to direct the attacks in such a way as to limit bloodshed, but it was largely impossible for him to do so.

In response to the Cherokee invasion came a series of punitive raids by the southern states, which leveled many of the towns and destroyed the supplies cached for the winter. Cameron was forced to flee into the Creek country to avoid capture by the Americans. For a time he lived with David Taitt, the British deputy for the Creek; then a band of pro-American Creeks plotted to assassinate the two whites, so they fled to the safety of Pensacola in the fall of 1777.

For the next eighteen months, Cameron attempted to carry out his duties from a distance. In addition to his normal responsibilities, he was assisting Superintendent Stuart, whose age and physical condition made him less and less effective. Then, in the spring of 1779, John Stuart died, leaving the post of superintendent vacant. Cameron and another of Stuart's deputies, Charles Stuart, assumed joint control pending the appointment of a successor.

To their great dismay, the decision made in London was to appoint not a successor but successors. That decision alone would have been disappointing, but far worse was the instruction that Cameron would superintend the western division of the department, which would give him jurisdiction over the Choctaws and Chickasaws, two tribes with whom he had had only incidental contact.

In truth, Cameron never recovered from the trauma produced by this situation. He tried to carry out his duties by sending messages from Pensacola to the tribes, but it proved an ineffective method. Both Governor Peter Chester of West Florida and General John Campbell of the Pensacola garrison believed that Cameron had no intention of taking up residence among the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The question became an academic one, however, for the Spanish capture of Mobile in 1780 and Pensacola in 1781 forced the British away from the Gulf Coast. Cameron traveled through the Indian country and reached the relative safety of Savannah, where he died.

References:

John Richard Alden, John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier (1944).

John P. Brown, Old Frontiers (1938).

David H. Corkran, The Cherokee (1962), and The Creek Frontier (1967).

Robert L. Ganyard, "Threat from the West," North Carolina Historical Review 45 (1968).

James H. O'Donnell III, Southern Indians in the American Revolution (1973).

Additional Resources:

Mielnik, Tara Mitchell. "Alexander Cameron." The Tennesee Encyclopedia of History and Culture version 2.0. Tennessee Historical Society. 2009. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=175 (accessed August 2, 2013).

Nichols, John L. "Alexander Cameron, British Agent among the Cherokee, 1764-1781." The South Carolina Historical Magazine 97, no. 2 (April 1996). 94-114. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27570150 (accessed August 2, 2013).

Speech of the Cherokee Chief Kittagusta to Indian Agent Alexander Cameron and Ensign George Price. Fort Prince George, [South Carolina]; May 8, 1766. Great Britain Indian Department Collection. Native American History at the Clements Library. University of Michigan. http://www.clements.umich.edu/exhibits/online/american-encounters/a... (accessed August 2, 2013).

Neufeld, Rob. "Alexander Cameron, the Cherokee, and the generation before the Revolution." The Read on WNC (blog). December 17, 2012. http://thereadonwnc.ning.com/forum/topics/alexander-cameron-the-che... (accessed August 2, 2013).

O'Brien, Greg, editor. Pre-removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths. University of Oklahoma Press. 2008. 124, 128-131, 133-138, 141-142. http://books.google.com/books?id=jGFmNPevedUC&pg=PA124#v=onepage&q&... (accessed August 2, 2013).

"CSR Documents by Cameron, Alexander." Colonial and State Records of North Carolina. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. http://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/creators/csr10476 (accessed August 2, 2013).

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Alexander Cameron

http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=175

By Tara Mitchell Mielnik , Middle Tennessee State University

Alexander Cameron, British Indian agent among the Cherokees, was a native of Scotland who emigrated to Georgia in the 1730s and enlisted in the British army during the Seven Years' War. In 1764 the British appointed him commissary to Chota in the Cherokee territory, and he lived among the Tennessee Cherokees for the next fifteen years. In early 1776 Cameron attempted to mediate between white settlers who had moved into disputed territory at Watauga and Nolichucky and the Cherokees, who demanded their removal. When the settlers refused to leave, the Cherokees attacked, and the settlers blamed the unrest on Cameron, accusing him of inciting the Indians.

Cameron denied that he had encouraged the Cherokee attack, but as the Revolutionary War commenced, British Indian agents sought the support of Native Americans throughout North America. John Stuart, head superintendent of Indian Affairs, died in early 1779, and in August Cameron was appointed superintendent for the Southwest in an attempt to gain Cherokee loyalty. Cameron also tried unsuccessfully to gain the support of the Creeks and Choctaws in Florida.

During his fifteen years among the Cherokees, Cameron became influential in tribal decisions and fathered three children. In 1780 an illness prevented his plans to travel through the Indian territories, and he died in Savannah in December 1781.

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http://www.genealogy.com/forum/surnames/topics/cameron/5864/

Alexander Cameron was probably the son of Donald Cameron, brother of Ewen Cameron of Erracht in Lochaber, Scotland. This is surmised because Lorraine Maclean of Dochgorrach in her book INDOMITABLE COLONEL about Sir Alan Cameron of Erracht, son of Ewen of Erracht, quotes Sir Alan as having said that this Alexander, Indian Agent , was his close kinsman. It is known that Sir Alan Cameron's uncle, Donald, had emigrated to America. Apparently Alexander had at least one brother, because he is said in an obituary to have been the great uncle of Catherine Cameron Bate, a Grande Dame of her era, who died in Ottawa, ON in 1904.

His plantation, called "Lochaber," was near present day Greenville, S. C.

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http://thereadonwnc.ning.com/forum/topics/alexander-cameron-the-che...

Alexander Cameron, the Cherokee, and the generation before the Revolution

Posted by Rob Neufeld on December 17, 2012

Alexander Cameron, British agent, stuck by the Cherokee

by Rob Neufeld

“I have been threatened hear by Severals of the Cracking Traders for taking a halfwitted pack horseman into Custody,” Alexander Cameron, British agent to the Cherokee, reported on Feb. 3, 1765.

He was talking about the white settlers who crossed boundaries to con or steal goods and land from Indians around his headquarters in Toqua (the Cherokee town now under Tellico Lake in Tennessee).

The term “cracker,” applied by the British and Cherokee to a criminal class of bandits in the colonies, had just become popular. It referred to the hustlers’ “use of whips with a piece of buckskin at the end”; or, to their boasting; or to their way of eating corn, various early dictionaries ascribed.

In any case, the British government feared that the outlaws would mess up their friendly relations with the Cherokee, whom they needed to maintain good trade and regional security.

After the French and Indian War, John Stuart, British Superintendent of the Southern District of the British Indian Department, tapped Cameron as his chief agent. It was a residential job.

“This Gentleman,” Stuart wrote British Commander-in-Chief Gen. Thomas Gage about Cameron, “was some years upon Command at Fort Prince George where he acquired considerable influence among the Indians.”

Cameron had quite a balancing act to perform on a daily basis. One time, while he was in his cabin, sick with fever, yet providing lodging to white fur traders, a party of Cherokees forced their way in, demanding retribution for the killing of some of their people on a Virginia outing.

“I was,” Cameron wrote George Price, commander at Fort Prince George, “very loath to get out of my bed, but the Dread of Their Tomahawks obliged me to rise” and prevent the executions. “Some of the Traders had Blows & Knocks but were obliged to put up with them.”

Cameron and Price were together at the fort in 1766 when Kittagusta, Cherokee chief, appealed to the need for peace and justice within his community during negotiations regarding a new boundary with the British.

“We might claim the land a great way beyond where we propose to Run the Line,” Kittagusta said, “but chuse much Rather to part with it than have any disputes concerning it; & that we are a poor People dependant upon the Woods for our Support, & without the means of redressing ourselves but by Violence which we do not choose to exercise against our Brothers.”

Cherokee wife

When Cameron had first arrived in Cherokee country, he married a Cherokee woman, whom he called “Molly.” The Cherokee called Cameron, “Scotchie.”

Molly and Scotchie had three children, the first a son, George, in 1762. When George was six, the Cherokee offered him a tract of land in western South Carolina about twelve square miles in size.

“Our beloved brother, Mr. Cameron, has got a son by a Cherokee woman,” Oconostota, a Cherokee Beloved Man, explained. “We are desirous that he may educate the boy like the white people…that he may resemble both white and red, and live among us when his father is dead.”

It was part of a strategy. In Kentucky, the Cherokee people had just agreed to a revised border to bargain for a more strictly enforced line, for the Virginians were overrunning boundaries with force and deception. The Creek and Cherokee distinguished between the small farmers who had arrived in the mountains first and the developers and land-grabbers who came later.

If treaties didn’t work, maybe large buffer zones owned by mixed blood British heirs would.

In Georgia, the 1773 Treaty of Augusta ceded two million acres of Cherokee and Creek territory to the British to relieve a large debt incurred when a diminishing fur trade couldn’t pay for necessary weapons and ammunition. With the British supplying competing Indian nations, each was dependent on the British to keep up in hunting and military superiority.

Tragic fate

Tribes were torn. One Creek warrior killed another, blamed a white settler, and then slaughtered that man’s household as payback.

Cherokee headmen went to Cameron to show him the white and red beads Creeks had brought them as signs of their desire for an alliance in war against white settlers. The headmen discarded the red beads.

As the Revolutionary War approached, Overmountain Men in the Watauga settlement forged a letter to show that John Stuart had written Cameron to instigate a Cherokee insurrection against colonists. Cameron became a hunted man, and he joined with the Cherokee war chief, Dragging Canoe, in a unwavering campaign against American rebels.

Cameron died in his Savannah home on Dec. 27, 1781, after resigning his British post, and after a long illness. His son George had already returned to England, never to return

SOURCES

The primary sources used for this article were:

• A just-published book: Dark and Bloody Ground: The American Revolution along the Southern Frontier (Westholme Publishing hardcover and e-book, Nov. 15, 2012, 336 pages)
• “Alexander Cameron, British Agent among the Cherokee, 1764-1781” by John L. Nichols, The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Apr., 1996
• The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Revolutionary Era by Tom Hatley (Oxford U. Pr., 1995)
• Native American History archives in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan (online)

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Cameron, Alexander by James H. O'Donnell III, 1979 d. 27 Dec. 1781 Alexander Cameron, British Indian agent, was born in Scotland during the early eighteenth century and emigrated to the Southern colonies with a number of his countrymen in the 1730s and 1740s. It is not certain whether he engaged in planting or trading during his early years in the colonies, but his first recorded public service was as ensign in the British Independent Regulars. His unit was stationed at Fort Prince George, S.C., on the edge of the Lower Cherokee country, during 1762 and 1763, and he took advantage of the excellent opportunity to learn the Cherokee country and become acquainted with the natives. His acceptance by the Indians was no doubt enhanced by his marriage to a Cherokee girl. He came to be known among the Cherokees and the Creeks by the sobriquet of endearment "Scotchie."

After his demobilization, Cameron took up the two thousand acres of land to which he was entitled by his military service record. At about the same time he entered the service of the British Indian Department in the South. He received the appointment in part because of his frontier experience and in part because he was an acquaintance, if not a kinsman, of his countryman John Stuart, just appointed superintendent. Commissioned as principal agent for the Cherokees and then given a titular promotion to deputy superintendent in 1768, Cameron lived among or near his wife's people until 1776. He came to have great influence with the Cherokees, who deeded land to his sons, but he still could not stop wily whites from cheating the tribe of lands or prohibit illegal transactions like the Henderson Purchase of 1775.

When the rumblings of discontent arose between England and America in 1775, Cameron assured the Cherokees that they need not fear, for their lands and people were not threatened. Despite his pacific directions to the tribe, the pro-American frontiersmen viewed Cameron as an enemy; when revolutionary turmoil reached upcountry South Carolina, Cameron fled his plantation near the present Abbeville, S.C., moved deeper into the Indian country, and took up residence among the Overhill Cherokees.

From his new headquarters, Cameron strove to implement the superintendent's advice by urging the Cherokees to remain neutral. Such advice was hard to follow, however, since the tribe was faced with daily encroachment by white trespassers. In the spring of 1776, Cameron was joined in the Cherokee country by Henry Stuart, the superintendent's brother, who had come with instructions and ammunition. Shortly after Stuart's arrival, a band of Northern Indians reached the Cherokee country, intent on persuading the Cherokees to go to war. When the Cherokees heard of the insults to their brethren in the north, they would wait no longer; they determined to drive out the hated white settlers. Cameron tried to direct the attacks in such a way as to limit bloodshed, but it was largely impossible for him to do so.

In response to the Cherokee invasion came a series of punitive raids by the southern states, which leveled many of the towns and destroyed the supplies cached for the winter. Cameron was forced to flee into the Creek country to avoid capture by the Americans. For a time he lived with David Taitt, the British deputy for the Creek; then a band of pro-American Creeks plotted to assassinate the two whites, so they fled to the safety of Pensacola in the fall of 1777.

For the next eighteen months, Cameron attempted to carry out his duties from a distance. In addition to his normal responsibilities, he was assisting Superintendent Stuart, whose age and physical condition made him less and less effective. Then, in the spring of 1779, John Stuart died, leaving the post of superintendent vacant. Cameron and another of Stuart's deputies, Charles Stuart, assumed joint control pending the appointment of a successor.

To their great dismay, the decision made in London was to appoint not a successor but successors. That decision alone would have been disappointing, but far worse was the instruction that Cameron would superintend the western division of the department, which would give him jurisdiction over the Choctaws and Chickasaws, two tribes with whom he had had only incidental contact.

In truth, Cameron never recovered from the trauma produced by this situation. He tried to carry out his duties by sending messages from Pensacola to the tribes, but it proved an ineffective method. Both Governor Peter Chester of West Florida and General John Campbell of the Pensacola garrison believed that Cameron had no intention of taking up residence among the Choctaws and Chickasaws. The question became an academic one, however, for the Spanish capture of Mobile in 1780 and Pensacola in 1781 forced the British away from the Gulf Coast. Cameron traveled through the Indian country and reached the relative safety of Savannah, where he died.

References:

John Richard Alden, John Stuart and the Southern Colonial Frontier (1944).

John P. Brown, Old Frontiers (1938).

David H. Corkran, The Cherokee (1962), and The Creek Frontier (1967).

Robert L. Ganyard, "Threat from the West," North Carolina Historical Review 45 (1968).

James H. O'Donnell III, Southern Indians in the American Revolution (1973).

Additional Resources:

Mielnik, Tara Mitchell. "Alexander Cameron." The Tennesee Encyclopedia of History and Culture version 2.0. Tennessee Historical Society. 2009. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entry.php?rec=175 (accessed August 2, 2013).

Nichols, John L. "Alexander Cameron, British Agent among the Cherokee, 1764-1781." The South Carolina Historical Magazine 97, no. 2 (April 1996). 94-114. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27570150 (accessed August 2, 2013).

Speech of the Cherokee Chief Kittagusta to Indian Agent Alexander Cameron and Ensign George Price. Fort Prince George, [South Carolina]; May 8, 1766. Great Britain Indian Department Collection. Native American History at the Clements Library. University of Michigan. http://www.clements.umich.edu/exhibits/online/american-encounters/a... (accessed August 2, 2013).

Neufeld, Rob. "Alexander Cameron, the Cherokee, and the generation before the Revolution." The Read on WNC (blog). December 17, 2012. http://thereadonwnc.ning.com/forum/topics/alexander-cameron-the-che... (accessed August 2, 2013).

O'Brien, Greg, editor. Pre-removal Choctaw History: Exploring New Paths. University of Oklahoma Press. 2008. 124, 128-131, 133-138, 141-142. http://books.google.com/books?id=jGFmNPevedUC&pg=PA124#v=onepage&q&... (accessed August 2, 2013).

"CSR Documents by Cameron, Alexander." Colonial and State Records of North Carolina. Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. http://docsouth.unc.edu/csr/index.html/creators/csr10476 (accessed August 2, 2013). https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/cameron-alexander

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Main British Agent during the Revolutionary War http://www.genealogy.com/ftm/h/i/c/James-R-Hicks-VA/BOOK-0001/0021-...