The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America by Joshua Piker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America by Joshua Piker Geoff Hamilton The Four Deaths of Acorn Whistler: Telling Stories in Colonial America. By Joshua Piker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2013. Four Deaths is a meticulously researched, compellingly argued, grippingly narrated account of the mid–eighteenth century mass murder of a group of Cherokee men and the subsequent execution of the crime’s ostensible mastermind, a modestly influential (and most likely innocent) Creek chieftain named Acorn Whistler. The “four deaths” of the title are the rival accounts—from imperial, national, local, and colonial perspectives—which condemned Whistler. In assessing the stakes involved in the rhetorical maneuvering over one man’s culpability, Joshua Piker ultimately provides a brilliant sketch of colonial America’s complex and explosive political dynamics, the “macroscale realities” of “international war and intranational rivalries, imperial reform and national consolidation, cross-cultural disagreements and transatlantic arguments, colonial intrigues and metropolitan politics” (10). The motives and machinations of the key storytellers are rendered vividly in Four Deaths, from the nervous diplomacy of Governor James Glen, who needed to prove his efficacy as a colonial administrator in bringing someone to justice for a horrific crime committed not simply in the middle of British South Carolina, but in earshot of the gubernatorial mansion; to the crafty politicking of Thomas Bosomworth and his mixed-race wife Mary, ambitious provincials in desperate financial straits who sought to secure lucrative land claims by establishing their value as cultural mediators between Native American and colonial worlds; to the subtle balancing of allegiances carried out by Malatchi, the Creek leader at war with the Cherokees who saw his own authority threatened by struggles between and within different local powers. The extraordinary contingency of political agency in the region emerges vividly here, along with the desperation (and mendacity) of those who felt that “in times of flux and chaos, telling the right story was more important than getting the story right” (11). Piker’s commentary on the available documentary evidence is unfailingly incisive, and his speculations, where that evidence is thin or absent, always informed and revealing. Among the most fascinating themes he develops is the striking incongruity between European and Native models of authority—the former’s centralizing logic and concern for top-down order clashing with the latter’s inveterate polycentrism and dispersed networks of influence—and the difficulties this presented for cooperation on the investigation and prosecution of a sensational crime. As Piker notes in a memorable analysis of the Creeks’ conceptual divergence from Euro-Americans, “Malatchi’s people had […] ‘no words to express despotic power, arbitrary kings, [End Page 180] oppressed or obedient subjects’ [. …] If Malatchi was to emerge as the emperor of a united Creek nation, he would do so despite the Muskogee language, not because of it” (101). The selection of Acorn Whistler as the scapegoat for a politically incendiary mass murder was prompted, Piker concludes, by “the intersection of his past and the needs of various storytellers” (26), and Four Deaths persuasively illustrates, at last, “the fluidity and uncertainty of the early modern world” and “the ordinariness of crisis in colonial America” (255). Geoff Hamilton York University, Canada Copyright © 2014 Mid-America American Studies Association