Paddy Carr

Paddy Carr (March 1807–after 1847) was a Muscogee interpreter and diplomat, military officer and scout, slave owner, plantation owner, and real estate investor. Carr was mixed race and a fluent Muskogee-speaker, who lived in Alabama in the southeastern United States in the early 19th century. He was considered an "acculturated, accommodationist" Muscogee leader and a controversial figure.

In the 1820s, he served as an interpreter for the Muscogee at treaty negotiations with the U.S. government. Carr was also a wealthy planter who used labor from enslaved people to grow crops and had a marked interest in horses and horse trading. In the 1830s, he worked as a guide assisting U.S. Army officers, and as officer commanding Native fighters (on the side of the U.S. government) during the Second Creek and Second Seminole Wars. Before the pre-Removal treaties that granted land allotments to the tribe, he "worked with the land speculators to defraud less sophisticated Indians." He migrated from Alabama to the west in 1847, but reportedly returned to Alabama at an unknown date.

Early life Paddy Carr was born in March 1807 as the biological son of a Muscogee woman from Cusseta town and an Irish man, one of many "marriages and cohabitations between white men and Indian women [which] were common in areas of English settlement...and, even earlier, in areas of French settlement." He was raised by the Indian agent at Fort Mitchell, John Crowell. Growing up in Crowell's household he learned "how to gain wealth by farming Creek tribal lands, free of charge, with slave labor. He also learned how to gain access to Creek annuity payments, as every year he saw John Crowell and his brother, Tom Crowell, who operated a store near the agency, put the Creeks in debt and then take off a healthy cut of the government money as their compensation." Crowell also operated a racetrack at Coweta town, where plantation owners like James Jackson raced their thoroughbreds. Carr's allegiance, in adulthood at least, was to Coweta.

Carr was "handsome, well-built, and dark-skinned, with a face tattooed in ancient Creek fashion." As described by a U.S. Army surgeon, he was "very intelligent in conversation, and has no doubt received a good education. He speaks our language with fluency, is correct in his deportment, and rather polished in his manners." His bilingual fluency allowed him to conduct business in both English and Muskogee, "the lingua franca within the sprawling Creek Confederacy, which included non-Creek tribes."

Diplomacy He was an interpreter for the Creek delegation, led by Opothleyahola, in Washington, D.C. in 1826. According to one study of language in Alabama, "protocol sometimes demanded the presence of an interpreter, even when Indians knew English or French, as the case may be, so that Indians would not dishonor themselves by being forced to speak a different language when acting in an official capacity to represent the tribe." Carr was one of several bicultural Creeks who translated colonial languages (English, French, Spanish), into Muskogee and back again, some others of note being William Hambly, Galphin, Alexander Mayfield, George Lovett, Juan Antonio Sandoval, Juan Garzón, and Sam Moniac. In 1827, Carr interpreted for the elderly chief Little Prince in conversation with U.S. Army lieutenant John R. Vinton, who had been dispatched to Georgia by U.S. President John Quincy Adams to represent the federal government's defense of a strip of land in far western Georgia that the governor, George M. Troup, argued had already been ceded by Indigenous residents, which was not the position of the United States.

Land speculation

In the 1830s, Carr was a leader of the "McIntosh faction" in Alabama along with other surviving allies of Creek leader William McIntosh, including Benjamin Marshall, Joseph Marshall, and James Islands. According to historian John T. Ellisor, this group "represented a number of bicultural Creeks who remained in Alabama" when others had already migrated to the shortgrass prairies of Arkansas Territory and Indian Territory "either because they loved [the region] or, more likely, because they had substantial cattle herds and other property that they could not transport easily or afford to leave." In 1833 he was one of the "acculturated" planters among the Lower Creeks who received "considerable portions" of the Creek debt fund.

In 1836, "Working through their Creek interpreter, Paddy Carr—a shareholder in the Columbus Land Company—as well as a group of 'smart and active' Creek blacks, the speculators bribed, intimidated, and intoxicated the assembled Indians to get them to deny the existence of any land frauds" to the government investigator. John Hogan, the government agent responsible for investigating land fraud perpetrated on the Creeks discovered that Carr served as "interpreter and agent provocateur" for a group of land speculators (Daniel McDougald, Luther Blake, Dr. Columbus Mills, Capt. William Walker, and others) who had assembled at Watoolahawka (Neah Micco's town) for a "secret council with Neah Micco, Efau Emathla, Tuskenea, and other antiremoval chiefs...to put in place a scheme that would satisfy all present." With help from Georgian real-estate investors who had it out for the competing Alabamian real-estate investors, Hogan found that "The speculators had stolen about three-fourths of the Lower Creek land. The members of the Euchee town lost virtually all of their property to theft, as did the Creeks of Cusseta town. Hogan also uncovered a number of ingenious schemes the speculators used to get the Indians' land. At Cusseta, Paddy Carr bought the land of his tribespeople, then took back all the purchase money with a false promise. He told his fellow Creeks that he would use the money to send a delegation to Washington to get the president to reverse all the land sales and return all the allotments to the Creek Nation." He also worked as a purchaser for the land speculators Perry & Company, "whose underhanded tactics and success in stealing Creek reserves created resentment." Hogan's determination was that Carr was "as great a rogue as any in the nation." According to historian Christopher D. Haveman, "Neah Emathla, a prominent Hitchiti headman...claimed that Carr had personally stolen his reserve."

Second Creek War Carr worked with Thomas Sidney Jesup as an interpreter and guide during the Second Creek War in the 1830s. Property belonging to Carr and his foster father, Col. Crowell, was targeted during the conflict. Rebel Creeks "destroyed the plantation of Paddy Carr, the Creek who associated almost exclusively with whites and gave such valuable assistance to the land speculators. At night the inhabitants of Columbus could look across the river and see the fires burning. The rebels also took the slaves from the plantations they demolished. Paddy Carr alone lost seventy blacks." Carr joined with U.S. Army general Winfield Scott against the rebels, during which time, "He and his men wore buckskin leggings, calico hunting shirts, and scarlet turbans with strips of white cloth tied around the center" to mark them as a unified group of "friendlies."

Based on a far-fetched and unproven theory promulgated by Hogan, "Both Governor Clay and General Jesup suspected Judge Shorter and Paddy Carr of instigating the Creek war, and even those citizens who doubted Hogan's full account still blamed the speculators for causing the war and sought to censure them."

Second Seminole War Carr was one of the 776 Creeks recruited by the U.S. government to fight for them during the Second Seminole War in Florida. He served "under Captain John F. Lane. Of his service in Florida it was noted that he 'fought well—He has generally headed the scouting parties, and has performed those laborious and dangerous duties with great promptitude and cheerfulness.'"

When he returned from service in November 1837, he discovered "'no indians Left in The old Creek Nation'" but planned to remain in Russell County until he settled his business.

Emigration Carr left Russell County, Alabama, for the Indian Territory in February 1847, a decade later than most deported Creeks, leading a group "which included 11 Indians and eight blacks." According to 20th-century historian Grant Foreman, "He did not remain in the West but returned to Alabama."

Legacy and family In 2010, Ellisor described Carr as a representative figure of a troubled time:

Carr's portrait is plate 5 in volume 9 (P27746) of McKenney and Hall's History of the Indian Tribes of North America, based on a painting made around 1825. Shortly after the treaty negotiations in 1826, he "married the daughter of Colonel Lovett, a respectable half breed, with whom he received a portion which, with the property accumulated by himself, furnished a capital sufficient to enable him to go into trade. In a few years he amassed a considerable property, and is now, in 1837, possessed of from seventy to eighty slaves, besides landed property, and a large stock of horses and cattle."

He had three wives, one of whom was Jane Hawkins, kin to Benjamin Hawkins (an influential Indian agent) and a daughter of William McIntosh (an important Creek leader who was sentenced to death in 1825 by fellow Creeks for his role in land cessions). Jane Hawkins Carr eventually granted herself a de facto divorce and "moved to the Indian Territory in the late 1820s or early 1830s. Jane Carr self-emigrated and paid for the transportation and rations of 49 members of her family."

Carr had twin daughters Ariadon and Areanne. He had a brother called Tom Carr.