The Communist Confederacy
Before the Confederacy, the South was Controlled by a Red Empire
Deep within the early American frontier, a generation before the Revolutionary War and the ‘discovery’ of Cumberland Gap, a German legal scholar was acting as Secretary of State for a communist empire covering more than 120,000 square miles, claiming parts of five current southern US states, including the entire states of Kentucky and Tennessee. Within this empire, there were thousands of Cherokee warriors, native people from other tribes, runaway slaves and European criminals living communally, sharing property, wives and children in an egalitarian society free of slavery and most gender inequality. The story of Christian Gottlieb Priber is a story about a story about the empire of love and the empire of fear.
From Germany to Charles-Town
Nearly all 19th century sources, as well as some of the contemporary accounts of Christian Priber mistakenly claim that he was French, or at least working for the French. Christian Gottlieb Priber, however, was a German scholar with a doctorate in law, having written his doctoral dissertation The Use of the Study of Roman Law and the Ignorance of that Law in the Public Life of Germany for Erfurt University in 1722. Although little is written about the contents of the dissertation itself, one can already see his distrust of the European culture of his day from the title alone. We know his parents were Friedrich Priber, a linen merchant and bar owner, and Anna Dorothea Bergmann. Whatever the case, eight years later, at the age of 33, we find him again in the historical record en route to Charles-Town, now Charleston, South Carolina. We know this because, by sheer coincidence, he shared the voyage with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s nephew, Gabriel Bernard who was working as an engineer for the colonies. This is fascinatingly synchronistic because Rousseau is often attributed as the origin of the Noble Savage archetype in the Western mind, even though he never used the term himself. Some have reported that Priber then opened a shop in Charles-Town, but this seems to be because of a confusing ad that Priber had published in the South Carolina Gazette in 1735:
To be sold by Mr. Priber near Mr. Laurans the Sadler, ready made mens cloaths, wiggs, spaterdashes of fine holland, shoes, boots, guns, pistols, powder, a silver repeating watch, a sword with a silver gilt hilt, English seeds, beds, & a fine chest of drawers very reasonable for ready Money, he intend- ing to stay but a few weeks in this Town
According to Bonnefoy, who was a prisoner of the empire Priber would later form, Priber’s reasons for leaving were because he could not find a suitable way of implementing his Republican ideas in the colonial town, which had already been corrupted too much be European ideals and Priber was finding opposition among local authorities. Regardless, having little left but ink and books, he set off into the frontier which was populated mostly by Native Americans, European hunters, runaway slaves and criminals fleeing justice. In this virgin land, he would manifest his kingdom.
Tanasi Vols
In another strange coincidence, Priber landed in Charles-Town within a few months of the arrival of another European eccentric, Sir Alexander Cuming. Cuming had been driven to the Appalachians by a vision his wife had experienced, in Scotland, in which he would achieve greatness among the Cherokee in the mountains of the New World. Within 3 months of arriving in Charles-Town, the enthusiastic Cuming had found the Cherokee living on the western slopes of the Great Smoky Mountains of what would become Tennessee. It is important to note that there was a well established path to the mountains from Charles-Town. There, Cuming befriended Chief Moytoy who was actually the chief of Great Tellico, an important Cherokee town at the time, being an active commercial center and hub for travel in the early frontier.
Driven by prophetic impulse and having quickly gained Moytoy’s trust, Cuming convinced Moytoy to persuade other Cherokee towns to crown Moytoy King of the Cherokee, using a legendary headdress known as the Crown of Tanasi, a revered relic whose contemporary significance is not now understood, which was made primarily of dyed opossum hair. Tanasi, which was also an important town nearby, was historically the center of power to the Cherokee but the coronation transferred and consolidated tribal government 16 miles south to Great Tellico, not far from the city of Knoxville today. It is from this village of Tanasi, that we get the word Tennessee. By the time Priber arrived in the area 6 years later, Cuming would be in debtors prison in London, having lead a delegation of Cherokee chiefs there, himself being one of them, only to be locked up by the system on allegations of debt in the colonies.
Since Charles-Town at the time was not a large city, but more of a bustling town, we can assume Priber heard of the entire Cuming affair since it made quite the headlines around the world, particularly in England. It is interesting to speculate that Priber may have had this newly minted Native American kingdom in mind when he was selling off his possessions and trying to find a direction for his idealism. Regardless, we know that Priber did indeed find Chief Moytoy, still King of the Cherokee, and upon this rock, he would build his Empire.
The Empire of Paradise
We sometimes get the impression that communism is a relatively new idea. This is, however, not the case. It could be argued that communistic notions of communal property were the default assumption among native tribes before the advent of private property via the European ethos. In fact, some of people Priber came across commented on that very association. Regardless, even in the West, millennia before Marx, arguments for communism flourished in the ancient world, chief among them the utopia outlined in Plato’s Republic. Sir Thomas Moore would pick this idea up when outlining his own utopia, who penned its founder as the companion of Amerigo Vespucci, welding the ideas of the New World and utopia deeply into the enlightenment zeitgeist.
In Books 5 and 6 of Plato’s Republic, the ideal polis, or the just city, is outlined. It is a community of essentially three classes, the producer class, the warrior class and the philosopher-king class. Education is universal to all genders and slavery is abolished. Property is held in common and the only trade is for common goods. There are no traditional marriages. Free love is the norm, except when it comes to reproduction, which are arranged pregnancies through selective breeding, a la eugenics.
What we know of Priber’s manifestation of the Republic in Great Tellico is from only a handful of sources. His original writings, which were by all accounts significant in every way, have been lost to history. Depending on which source you check, they were either burned in a magazine explosion or were smuggled away via private connections to the Spanish and French, possibly ending up on the shelves of a Spanish library. What we do know is that they contained many interesting works. First among them, in measurement as a loss to humanity, was the world’s first Cherokee-French dictionary, making it one of the first glimpses into the language and mind of the Cherokee ever written. We also lost his writings about the experiment itself, which makes it very difficult to reconstruct how exactly he implemented Plato’s Republic in the mountains of East Tennessee.
What we can assume is that Priber, finding a king already, grafted on as much of the Republic as possible to the 6 year old Kingdom of Tanasi, appointing himself Secretary of State to interface with European governments as a diplomat and voice of the Empire. It is then that he lays claim to all land from the Ohio River south between the colonies to the East and the other tribes to the West. One estimate puts the land claimed at 122,000 square miles. Over time, the Empire was to grow westward as peace was made with other Native American tribes until it reached land under French control.
Smallpox Hits Charles-Town
In the second year of the Empire, a slave ship from the Caribbean arrived in Charles-Town with a crew carrying small pox and the city was savaged. In a city of less than 10,000 people at the time of the outbreak, deaths were measured in the thousands.
The notion of vaccination, or inoculation as it was called at the time, was understood but it was not anything like what we would think of today as a vaccine. It was unregulated entirely and was done most often by oneself, crudely dosing oneself with infected material, often leading to a self-inflicted and full blown case of the disease. This led the mayor of Charles-Town to issue an order forbidding any inoculations within two miles of the city in 1639. Naturally, this only helped to compound the severity plague, pushing it out into the wilderness and down all the paths leading from Charles-Town, where it swept across the neighboring Empire of Paradise, killing one third of its population that year alone.
It is during this year that Priber sends a letter to the governor of South Carolina, in Charles-Town, claiming that the English should return to England because the land belonged to Native Americans and others willing to protect it. It was signed Prime Minister Christian Priber. On March 2, 1739 a price was placed on his head by the same governor. The first person to try to capture was Ludovick Grant, a frontiersman who would become quite the enemy of Priber, probably due to their encounter on this occasion. According to Grant’s Relations:
I sometime after went up into the Townhouse to try what could be done: but I found that he was well apprized of my design and laughed at me, desiring me to try it, in so insolent a manner that I could hardly bear it.
-Relations
That strategy not having worked, an envoy containing a Colonel Fox and two soldiers was sent up the mountain path to capture Priber in Great Tellico. After several attempts at tempting Priber to come out of the town and meet with them, Colonel Fox gave in and tried to arrest him in the Townhouse. Upon outlining his plans, Colonel Fox was met with resistance by the Cherokee tribe members, explaining that Priber had taught them to use weights and measures and was helping them become more efficient in trade. Indeed, Priber had taught the Cherokee the British system of weights and measures so they could be more savvy in their transactions with them. During this time, Priber was also corresponding with an English hunter named James Adair. Adair’s account of Priber would be our most complete picture of Priber by a contemporary. According to Adair:
Though it was reckoned our Agent’s strength was far greater in his arms than in his head, he readily desisted, for, as it is too hard to struggle with the Pope in Rome, a stranger could not miss to find it equally difficult to enter abruptly into a new emperor’s court, and there seize his prime minister by a foreign authority, especially when he could not support any charge of guilt against him.
— History of the Native Americans
Another strange bit of confusion surrounding Priber was his association with the French government. He was thought to be French by Adair, a French Jesuit, in fact, touching on anti-catholic sentiment in the early southern colonial era. Although modern scholarship has cast speculation on any relationship with the Jesuit order, he would hold catholicism in higher esteem than protestantism in interrogations after being captured later. His writings were also intended to be published in Paris, a strange fact for a man of German origin, speaking Cherokee, English, French, German, Spanish and even Latin fluently. There’s also the matter of his capture. It is more likely, however, that Priber had perceived France as a better ally than the English, who had recently had a spate of soldiers raping Cherokee women while their husbands were off on hunting parties in towns near English settlements.
Capture and Collapse
Around this time, a French man by the name of Antoine Bonnefoy was captured by the Cherokee near the Ohio river and, along with several companions, was brought back to the empire. Fortunately, Bonnefoy left behind his journal, the only things we actually know about his life, which contains our most accurate glimpse of Priber during the empire. For some reason, Bonnefoy refers to Priber as Priver Albert or Pierre Albert, in some translations. It seems that Bonnefoy was using his surname to make that connection, but the reasons for the Albert are not clear. According to Bonnefoy:
I began to ask him where he had learned French, which he spoke quite fluently. He told me that, being of a good family, he had been instructed in all that a man ought to know; that after having completed his studies, he had learned English and French; that he spoke these two languages with a little difficulty so far as the pronunciation was concerned, but that he wrote German, Latin, English and French with equal correctness; that for twenty years he had been working to put into execution the plan about which he had talked to us; that seven or eight years before he had been obliged to flee from his country, where they wished to arrest him for having desired to put his project into execution; that he had gone over to England, and from there to Carolina, and had also been obliged to depart thence for the same reason, 18 months after having arrived there; that having found among the Cherakis a sure refuge he had been working there for four years upon the establishment which he had been planning for twenty; that the Governor of Carolina having discovered the place of his retreat had sent a commissioner to demand him of the savages there, but that then he was adopted into the nation, and that the savages, rejecting the presents of the English, had refused to give him up; that he had 100 English traders belonging to his society who had just set out for Carolina, whence they were to return the next autumn, after having got together a considerable number of recruits, men and women, of all conditions and occupations, and the things necessary for laying the first foundations of his republic, under the name of the Kingdom of Paradise; that then he would buy us from the savages, of whom a large number were already instructed in the form of his republic and determined to join it; that the nation in general urged him to establish himself upon their lands, but that he was determined to locate himself half way between them and the Alibamons, where the lands appeared to him of better quality than those of the Cherakis, and there he would be disposed to open a trade with the English and French; that in his republic there would be no superiority; that all should be equal there; that he would take the superintendence of it only for the honor of establishing it; that otherwise his condition would not be different from that of the others; that the lodging, furniture and clothing should be equal and uniform as well as the life; that all goods should be held in common, and that each should work according to his talents for the good of the republic; that the women should live there with the same freedom as the men; that there should be no marriage contract, and that they should be free to change husbands every day; that the children who should be born should belong to the republic, and be cared for and instructed in all things that their genius might be capable of acquiring; that the law of nature should be established for the sole law, and that transgressions should be punished by their contrast, as in the case of the taillon.
-Travels in the American Colonies — Journal of Antoine Bonnefoy
Priber had been petitioning the Cherokee to move west, to Alabama where the Cherokee had a village by the name of Coosawattee, in ancient times. Although much modern scholarship has downplayed Priber’s French connections, by all firsthand accounts, it was central to the strategy of his empire. By moving to a location with French access via rivers, the empire could secure a line of trade with the French, at the very least. In Adair’s account, as well as that of Ludovick Grant, this strategy was central to Adair’s thinking and communications, which were often delivered personally via Mobile, an important French colonial town at the time.
According to Adair with whom Priber had corresponded frequently, Priber’s goal was:
to bring about a confederation of all the Southern Indians ; to inspire them with industry ; to instruct them in the arts necessary to the commodities of social life, and, in short, to enable them to throw off the yoke of their European allies of all nations.
— History of the Native Americans
It was, in fact, this very correspondence with Adair that may have lead to Priber’s ultimate capture. The Cherokee discovered that Priber had been corresponding with Adair, an Englishman they viewed as their enemy at the time. Priber tried to explain this away by saying that in the same way that Priber was the voice of good for the empire, Adair was the devil’s secretary and their correspondence was necessary for diplomacy. Not trusting Priber, the tribal leadership prohibited him from sending any further correspondence to Adair. This may be one of the reasons that Priber was en route with his documents when he is captured.
Prior to Priber making this journey, the English were having trouble trading with the local Creek tribe, because they had become more cautious and savvy traders themselves. According to reports from nearby Fort Augusta, there was a “remarkable intractibility in the Creek Indians, in matters of trade.” After asking around to figure out why their trade patterns had changed, they discovered that “a white man, who had resided some time in the upper towns, after having been many years among the Cherokees, who always shewed him the utmost deference.” An officer by the name of Captain Kent was sent to arrest Priber and he was thus sent off to prison in Frederica in Georgia, where he would spend the rest of his life. Upon reaching Priber, one of the freed slaves who had become an equal member of the tribe was shot when trying to swim across the creek.
While in prison, Priber attracted quite a bit of attention from people passing through the area, frequently entertaining visitors. By all accounts, he had adopted the dress of the Cherokee, which at the time of his imprisonment was a shirt and loin cloth. Everyone who spoke with him, at this time, and left their comments to history talked of his intellect and kindness. A writer going by the name Americus had this to say about his visit with Priber:
Preber, as to his person, was a short dapper man, with a pleasing, open countenance, and a most penetrating look. His dress was a deerskin jacket, a flap before and behind his privities, and moccasins, or deer-skin pumps, or sandals, which were laced, in the Indian manner, on his feet and ancles. the place of his confinement was the barracks, where he had a room, and a centry at his door, day and night. the philosophical cafe, with which he bore his confinement, the communicative disposition he seemed possessed of, and his politeness, which dress or imprisonment could not disguise, attracted the notice of every gentleman at Frederica, and gained him the favour of many visits and conversations.
Boston Evening-Post September 26, 1763
Apparently, Priber thrived in prison, rather than languished away. He found time to reflect and to contemplate his purpose, even if it had been stripped away from him. He was fed primarily bread, which he would save so that he could indulge when he felt the need. One of our only direct quotes, thanks to Americus, from Priber proves poignant here:
My mind soars above misfortune; — in this cell I can enjoy more real happiness, than it is possible to do in the busy scenes of life. Reflections upon past events, digesting former studies, keep me fully employed, while health and abundant spirits allow me no anxious, no uneasy moments; __ I suffer — though a friend to the natural rights of mankind, — though an enemy to tyranny, usurpation and oppression; — and what is more, — I can forgive and pray for those that injure me; — I am a christian, — and christian principles always promote internal felicity.
Boston Evening-Post September 26, 1763
His papers were confiscated and only descriptions of them survive. We know there was a very detailed account of the experiment itself, as well as correspondence with various governments, and his dictionary. It is not clear if any of these writings have survived. Some reports indicate they were burned up in a fire at a separate building and others indicate they were smuggled away by loyalists of the empire and preserved. So far, none of surfaced.
While being held in Federica on March 22, 1744, there was a chain explosion in a magazine holding bombs and gunpowder. The explosion sent everyone running and one of the officers released all of the prisoners to fend for themselves as shrapnel and wood rained down all around. Priber, however, remained in his cell as everyone ran for cover. His quote, again via Americus, gives us another glimpse into his psyche:
“Gentlemen, I suppose all’s over; — for my part, I reasoned thus; the bombs will rise perpendicularly, and, if the force fails, fall again in the same direction, but the splinters will fly off horizontally; therefore, with this truly convering, I had better stand the storm here, than hazard a knock in the pate by flying further.” This was said with the same ease that he would have expressed himself at a banquet, and he continued the conversation, with his usual vein of pleasantry, to the end of an explosion, that was enough to strike terror to the firmest breast.
Boston Evening-Post September 26, 1763
After years of imprisonment, Priber died in captivity and his empire collapsed. We know very little about how quickly this happened. By the time of the chief Doublehead affair, the only remnants we are left with are reports of modern building techniques and European customs among the Cherokee towns, from which we have very few reports. According to Adair, some of the towns had already broken away from Tellico, before the end of the empire itself. The overarching governmental structure that Cuming and Priber tried to create was not as easily cast into the Native American mindset as they had hoped. There was also the issue of moving west, to the ancient site of Coosawattee, which would have been a significant cultural change.
Naturally, Priber’s death was interpreted differently by different people:
Thus ended the famous Pryber …. a most Notorious Rogue & inniquitous fellow who if he had been permitted to have lived much longer in that Country would un- doubtedly have drawn that nation over to the French Interest.
-Ludovick Grant
It is interesting to speculate what might have happened, had Priber not been captured. Adair commented on as much in his writings: “The new red empire which he had formed by slow but sure degrees, to the great danger of our southern colonies,” was on the point “of rising into a far greater state of puissance by the acquisition of the Muskohge, Choktah, and the western Mississippi Indians.”
In 1919, a historian from the University of Michigan by the name of Verner Crane wrote an essay for the Sewanee Review entitled A Lost Utopia of the First American Frontier, which remains one of the most important works on Priber. In it he sums up Priber’s life and its meaning as follows:
He deserved, no doubt, a better fate than the oblivion which has befallen him. Philosopher, Utopian, linguist, scholar, friend of peace, of progress, of the Indian, his was a solitary figure among the ruder folk who peopled the outer fringe of European civilization in America. Chimerical his enterprise must seem. By reason of it, however, the first American frontier became, for a few years, the first frontier of eighteenth-century social idealism.
-A Lost Utopia of the First American Frontier
We will never know what Priber’s utopia may have become in its evolution toward the impending collision with capitalism sweeping across the continent. The Red Empire, ironically named after its Native American composition rather than its later Marxist associations, might have challenged the colonies had Priber formed good relationships with the French, who controlled the Mississippi at the time, and the tribes between the Cherokee and the those French settlements. It was perhaps history’s most complete attempt at implementing the Republic, as envisioned two millenia prior by Plato. What we do know is that it paints a much more complex history of the American South. After all, before it was a confederacy, it was an enlightenment hippie empire, perhaps the largest in the history of the world, a full century before the Confederacy, and it lasted longer.
