Silas Dinsmoor

Dinsmoor was offered the appointment of United States Agent to the Cherokee by President George Washington, a job that would last the next four years.

Returning to the states, President Thomas Jefferson appointed Dinsmoor as Agent to the Choctaw, and he proceeded to the tiny outpost of Washington, Mississippi Territory, located at the southern end of the Natchez Trace.

It was presumed Dinsmoor would carry out a similar set of tasks as before, expecting to encourage the Choctaw to cede large sections of their land to the U.S. government.

The controversy began with reports from the Natchez region that enslaved people were being encouraged to run away by traders from Tennessee.

Dinsmoor was asked to protect the property of the local planters, and he began instituting an often-ignored requirement that anyone traveling the Natchez Trace carry papers with them proving their ownership of any enslaved people they claimed.

[1] Dinsmoor moved with his wife, Mary Gordon, and children to St. Stephens, the capital of the Alabama Territory, and then to Mobile.

Suffering financially from unpaid wages and a debt he had incurred as security for a friend, he was forced to go to Washington, D.C. in 1826 to plead for money.

While he was away from Mobile, he learned of the death of a son and the burning of the bank where he had stored his valuable surveying journals, business papers, and a silver sword Washington had presented to him during a visit to Mount Vernon in 1798.

Pate, James P. (Editor), The Reminiscences of George Strother Gaines: Pioneer and Statesman of Early Alabama and Mississippi, 1805-1843.