To defray the
expenses of the troops, the Cumberland court raised taxes. Exactly as
the Franklin people had taken peltries as the basis for their currency,
so those of the Cumberland, in arranging for payment in kind, chose the
necessaries of life as the best medium of exchange. They enacted that
the tax should be paid one quarter in corn, one half in beef, pork, bear
meat, and venison, one eighth in salt, and one eighth in money.
[Footnote: Ramsey, p. 504.] It was still as easy to shoot bear and deer
as to raise hogs and oxen.
McGillivray's Letter to Robertson.
Robertson wrote several times to McGillivray, alone or in conjunction
with another veteran frontier leader, Col. Anthony Bledsoe. Various
other men of note on the border, both from Virginia and North Carolina,
wrote likewise. To these letters McGillivray responded promptly in a
style rather more polished though less frank than that of his
correspondents. His tone was distinctly more warlike and less
conciliatory than theirs. He avowed, without hesitation, that the Creeks
and not the Americans had been the original aggressors, saying that "my
nation has waged war against your people for several years past; but
that we had no motive of revenge, nor did it proceed from any sense of
injuries sustained from your people, but being warmly attached to the
British and being under their influence our operations were directed by
them against you in common with other Americans.
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