| February 1763 | The Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years’ War (French and Indian War); France cedes West Florida to Britain and western Louisiana to Spain. |
| April 1775 | The American Revolutionary War begins with the battles of Lexington and Concord. |
| June 1779 | Spain declares war on Britain. |
| May 1781 | After a two-month siege of the town of Pensacola, the British surrender the colony of West Florida to Spain. |
| October 1781 | British General Charles Cornwallis surrenders to the Americans and French at Yorktown, Virginia. |
| September 1783 | The United States and Britain sign the Treaty of Paris, and Britain signs separate peace agreements with Spain, France, and the Netherlands. |
| May and June 1784 | Congresses at Pensacola and Mobile seal alliances between the Spanish and the Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws. |
| July 1784 | Southern Indian delegates meet in the Ohio Valley with Northern Confederacy to discuss forming a Grand Confederacy, but tensions between tribes prevent it. |
| July 1785 | In New York City, Spanish envoy Diego de Gardoqui and U.S. Secretary of Foreign Affairs John Jay begin negotiating the border between the United States and the Spanish colonies in North America. |
| July 1785 | Creek, Chickasaw, and Cherokee delegates meet to form a Southern Confederacy. |
| January 1786 | The United States signs treaties at Hopewell with the Chickasaws and Choctaws. |
| June 1786 | Representatives of the Northern Confederacy meet with the Creeks at Little Tallassee; the Creeks agree to join efforts. |
| September 1786 | The entire Creek Nation declares war on Georgia. |
During the American Revolution, American Indians living east of the Mississippi River had to decide whether to join the war and, if so, on which side. While most American Indians stayed out of the war, the majority of those who did join fought on the side of Britain because its officials promised to protect British allies’ lands from settlement, whereas the American colonists seemed to be the problem.
Alexander McGillivray felt the pressures of the American Revolution acutely, as his father was a Scottish merchant loyal to the British. However, when the American Revolution reached McGillivray and his father in Georgia, McGillivray decided to return to his mother’s family in the Creek Indian territory. By McGillivray’s return in the late 1700s, the Creek Indians were organized as a confederacy composed of nearly one hundred towns, most of which ruled themselves. The towns were in two clusters: McGillivray’s family’s Upper Creeks, located in what is now central Alabama, and the Lower Creeks that were near the present-day border between Alabama and Georgia. Because of his family’s history with the British, McGillivray decided to support their efforts by becoming a British Indian Affairs agent among the Creeks. In this role, McGillivray raised Creek troops to defend the British colony of West Florida against Spanish invasion and to drive back American settlements coming west from the Georgia towns of Savannah and Augusta. Despite the Creek helping Britain, the Spanish were able to defeat the British and expand their North American colonies into West Florida (now the coast of Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida).
In addition to the loss to Spain, the British loss in the Revolutionary War greatly surprised southeastern Indians. With the British gone and Georgians and Carolinians determined to expand westward, the Creeks needed to find new allies. McGillivray led the effort to form alliances with former native enemies and with Spain. Other Indians who faced the same threats wanted alliances too, as did the Spanish, whose wartime victories left them spread thinly from South America to California in the northwest and the new lands in the east. As McGillivray worked on these alliances, his ambitions grew for himself and for the Creeks. He came to believe that the Creek Confederacy would operate more effectively if it centralized into a Creek Nation that would join the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws to form a united Southern Confederacy to counter American expansion.
In the twenty-first century, it may seem that U.S. expansion across the North American continent was inevitable, yet it is important to remember that the United States was a new and disorganized country. Indeed, it was unclear whether the nation would survive at all. In the 1780s, the future of the continent was not yet determined; however, it was clear to McGillivray and many other American Indians that the men and women coming west from the United States were a dangerous force.