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 America by Jonathan Todd Hancock Adam Jortner Convulsed States: Earthquakes, Prophecy, and the Remaking of Early America. By Jonathan Todd Hancock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. 208 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. By any measure, 1811 was a bad year. It had itinerant prophets predicting doom, comets in the sky, a theater fire, a November war in the Old Northwest, and the shattering New Madrid earthquakes in December that tossed the Mississippi River around the Missouri bootheel. No wonder one nineteenth-century commentator called it an “Annus Mirabilis” (12)—year of miracles. But 1811 has yet to receive the microscopic examination of other critical years; in popular and political histories, 1776, 1861, and 1968 still crowd out 1811. Jonathan Todd Hancock aims to change that with Convulsed States, a monograph that centers the quakes among associated contemporary disasters as a way of generating “a continental, cross-cultural perspective on prophecy and revivalism, state formations, and understandings of environmental change across Native American, African American, and Euro American societies” (3). How did the quakes, once drafted into religion, politics, and culture, he asks, change the peoples of the Americas? Did this bad year shift America from a Jeffersonian to a Jacksonian persuasion? And how did literally unstable land affect a metaphorically unstable U.S. land policy? Hancock tackles these big questions in a series of thematic chapters, beginning with an exploration of how different communities experienced the earthquakes and concluding with an examination of how the federal response to the quakes both initiated a flood of land speculation and shaped Indian policy. Hancock does not dwell on the many dramatic contemporary accounts of the earthquakes themselves. As the book points out, some of the most popular stories about the quakes were likely “fable and burlesque” (15); contemporaries (and historians) recognized that U.S. newspapers at the time did not diligently pursue accuracy but reprinted whatever they could get their hands on.1 The oft-repeated claim that the New Madrid quakes caused church bells to ring in Boston, Hancock notes, probably derives from a misreading of “Charlestown” (Massachusetts) for “Charleston” (South Carolina). As for the Mississippi River running backwards? It could have happened, Hancock notes, but only in certain places, not along the whole river. [End Page 662] The quakes unquestionably did desolate New Madrid, however, prompting a variety of governmental responses. In 1815, for the first time, Congress appropriated relief funds for Americans. These took the form of free public lands, which in turn initiated “decades of speculation, fraud, and legal wrangling” (111) that ultimately forced the Quapaw nation off their land in Arkansas. Hancock also points to the federal government’s conflicts with the region’s Native American prophets, some of whom, he suggests—especially the Red Stick prophets—drafted the earthquake into their preaching. Moreover, the Red Sticks’ defeat in 1814 led directly to Andrew Jackson’s mass appropriation of Creek land in Alabama. The fear and uncertainty provoked by the quakes, Hancock argues, resulted in the seizure of Indigenous land. In between describing the quakes and the land policy that followed them, Convulsed States takes readers through contemporary earthquake explanations and associated phenomena—the wonders that made 1811 the Annus Mirabilis. The perspectives on such phenomena articulated in the political and religious preaching of Native American prophets receive much attention. Along with the rise of the Red Sticks in Creek territory, Hancock devotes most of his attention to the Shawnee Prophet, Tenskwatawa, who received credit for predicting the earthquake, while noting that other Native American prophets may have adopted ideas about earthquakes as divine punishment. Christian evangelists also sought to make hay from the earthquakes. Convulsed States focuses on Nimrod Hughes and others who declared that the End Was Nigh, words that may have gained added urgency in the wake of New Madrid. From there, Hancock launches into a condensed overview of religious responses to a host of other troubles in the Annus Mirabilis—northern lights, comets, local intrigues, and rumors of war with Britain. The book allots a good amount of space to these religious upheavals, but it never quite identifies what (if...