Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America by Jonathan Todd Hancock

Abstract

Reviewed by: Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early Americaby Jonathan Todd Hancock Matthew Mulcahy (bio) Earthquakes, New Madrid earthquakes, Tenskwatawa, Ohio Valley, Creek, Shawnee, Cherokee, Religion Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America. By Jonathan Todd Hancock. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 186. Cloth, $95.00, paper, $27.50, e-book $22.99.) In the winter of 1807-08 the Shawnee leader Tenskwatawa predicted that the Great Spirit would "change the course of nature" in four years if Native people did not fight back against Euro American expansion. Tenskwatawa lost his military efforts to halt that expansion at the battle of Tippecanoe in early November 1811, but he regained some influence and standing just a few weeks later when the earth began to rattle violently across much of the eastern half of North America and the Mississippi River ran backwards in some places, his prediction seemingly fulfilled. Religion and prophecy are at the center of Jonathan Todd Hancock's engaging and well-written analysis of the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-12. The specific focus makes the book a nice complement to Con-every Bolton Valencius's larger study of the earthquakes that appeared in 2013. Hancock is less concerned with the physical effects of the earthquakes or scientific investigations about them (past and present), although he touches briefly on those topics. Instead, he is focused on how people made sense of the earthquakes and employed those interpretations as means to various political ends. Hancock's central thesis is that responses to earthquakes formed part of larger process of state-building among both Euro Americans and Native Americans across the trans Appalachian west. More specifically, he argues the earthquakes "stoked disputes about the relationship between religious authority and political authority" (2) in an era when political boundaries remained in flux and during a year in which an array of unusual events coincided, including the appearance of a comet, a major hurricane in the Southeast, a disastrous fire in Richmond, the threat of war with Britain, and then the earthquakes. In Massachusetts and Virginia, Prophetstown and Tuckabatchee, the earthquakes raised questions about the natural world and who had the authority to interpret such events. While all groups saw some sort of divine power at work, the boundaries and meanings of that power remained contested, and answers about the meaning and significance of the tremors varied, reflecting an array of complex social, political, and religious factors among different groups. As scholars of disasters have long [End Page 138]noted, attention to earthquakes and other such events can reveal underlying social structures, institutions, and relationships. Hancock clearly shows that to be in the case in the early 1810s. The book is divided into five chapters, each of which is divided into subsections that explore the earthquakes in three general regions: the new United States, Creek and Cherokee territories in the South, and the Ohio Valley. Doing so allows Hancock to compare and contrast how different groups responded to the earthquake. He notes, for example, that leaders of the Red Sticks resistance movement used the earthquakes to bolster their claims about divine displeasure with "impurities" in Creek communities and to challenge existing authorities. In part their claims to political authority rested on their spiritual power to control natural forces. Prophets decrying cultural loss existed among the Cherokee as well, but the earthquakes caused less intense internal divisions in part because spiritual and political power was more clearly differentiated. So too "a nationalized system of kinship" (92) provided the Cherokee a means of countering breakaway individuals or groups. In the Ohio Valley, the Shawnee leaders Tenskwatawa and his brother Tecumseh employed earthquake prophecy to rally others to their call for an "intertribal nationhood" (95) to resist Euro American expansion, but with only limited success. Instead, diverse groups in the region, including the Delaware and other Shawnees, "confronted the tremors . . . with established rituals rather than radical reform" (84). Religious revivals and calls for reform also shaped Euro American interpretations of the earthquake. Hancock provides terrific detail on the earthquakes' impact on church membership in western territories, the growth of which he argues was even more...