During the American Revolution Galphin sided with the Continental Congress, serving as one of its Indian Commissioners for the South. On May 1, 1776, the Creek Nation met as a whole with Galphin, who convinced the Creeks to remain neutral in the burgeoning conflict between the British and the revolutionaries. Galphin owed much of his importance to his Creek wife Metawney of Coweta, who ushered Galphin into the Creek world and facilitated his relationships with her clansmen like Escotchaby and Sempoyaffee, two of the primary headmen of the Lower Creeks during the mid to late eighteenth-century.Galphin’s family and friends testified after his death that he “had a considerable and decided control and influence over the Indians … That this influence arose as well from his extensive and honorable trade amongst them, his connexion with one of their women of Indian family distinction, and by whom he had children, as for his kindness and hospitality toward the Indians, always receiving them with good humor and furnishing them amply with such necessaries, as they stood in need of at his hospitable dwelling at Silver Bluff as at his trading houses in the Indian nation.” “Bonds, Bills of Sale & Deeds of Gift,” October 27, 1809, Le Conte Genealogical Collection, 1900-1943, MS #71, Book D, Box 6, Folder 9: Galphin, Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Georgia, Athens GA, 270-272. This successfully frustrated the efforts of the British to enlist sufficient Native American support throughout the South to overpower the comparatively small colonist population. Henry Laurens credited Galphin for helping to secure both Georgia and South Carolina for the Revolution. Joshua Reed Giddings, contemporary abolitionist and one of the founders of the Republican party, took a dimmer view in light of his legacy: "the term “Galphin” has since become synonymous with “peculation” upon the public Treasury”.From: Joshua R. Giddings. “The Exiles of Florida / or, The crimes committed by our government against the Maroons, who fled from South Carolina and other slave states, seeking protection under Spanish laws." Footnote #5
