Creek society was matrilineal. Children were born into their mother's clan and took their status from her. Fathers had little direct role in raising their children, although they did continue to love and provide for them. The main responsibility for warrior training would have lain with Alexander's mother's brothers, among them a Creek leader known as Red Shoes. Alexander could speak English as well as read and write, but his primary allegiance was to his mother's people. When the Revolutionary War broke out, he offered his services to the British, becoming a colonel in the British army. A better diplomat than warrior, he helped broker an alliance between local British forces and his mother's powerful family and tribe. After the death of Emistico, Alexander was elected Principal Chief of the Upper Creek towns. As such, he had as many as 5,000-10,000 warriors under him at any given time. 
He opposed the Treaty of Augusta, of 1783, in which two Lower Creek chiefs had ceded several thousand acres of Creek land to the state of Georgia. In 1784, he negotiated with Spain the Treaty of Pensacola, which gave the Creek title to over 3 million acres of land claimed by Georgia, and granted a monopoly on trade to the company of Panton, Leslie & Co. McGillivray became a representative of Spain, owned stock in the company, and used his power over their deerskin trade in the area to gain concessions for his people. Meanwhile, he worked to consolidate his power as Principal Chief over earlier village leadership systems. There are several reasons for this, the primary one being to create greater leverage with which he could negotiate with the new United States. Settlers were increasingly encroaching on Creek land and he often had to command raiding parties to deal with these trespassers. Diplomacy was a better way to prevent such incidents, to the extent they could be prevented. He also forged an alliance with the Cherokee, sending warriors to fight with them during their ongoing conflicts with American settlers. Being pro-British, he disliked the Americans but was wise enough to pick his battles. For this reason, he became an important spokesman for all the tribes living along the Southern frontier. Alexander dealt with the fallout of the Yazoo Land Scandal, discussed earlier, trying to keep the frontier from flaming into all out war when the Natives learned of the fraudulent disposal of their land. Reluctantly, he met with Secretary of War Henry Knox in New York in 1790, and helped negotiate the Treaty of New York, which provided the boundary between U.S. settlement and Creek land at the Altamaha and Oconee Rivers. The United States undertook to remove squatters off Native land and the Creeks agreed to return any fugitive slaves. This angered the Seminoles in Florida, who welcomed fugitive slaves into their ranks and became more alienated from their Creek heritage, though for the time being they remained in alliance with the Creek.
The United States commission Alexander a Brigadier General and granted him a salary. He bought three plantations, and did own slaves, seeing nothing wrong with doing so. While continuing to keep the lines of communication open with American officials, he was still negotiating with Spanish officials who reclaimed Florida and parts of Louisiana, to protect Creek sovereignty in contested territory owned or claimed by Spain. At one point, he was the Superintendent of the Creek Nation for Spain, an Indian Agent of the United States, and a senior partner in the trading company of Panton, Leslie, acclaimed a leader by both the Creek and some Seminole. He later moved to Pensacola, where he died and was reburied in Choctaw Bluff, Alabama. Two of his nephews, William Weatherford and William McIntosh, were on opposite sides of the Creek War in 1814, showing just how polarized Creek life had become without Alexander's steady leadership.
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