Creek Indians Research Articles

Taking Account of Property: Stratification among the Creek Indians in the Early Nineteenth Century

J N late June i814, Andrew Jackson, brigadier general in the United States army and future president, set out from Nashville, Tennessee, for Fort Jackson, a post recently built at the confluence of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers. The region would soon become central Alabama, and the state's capital city Montgomery would be established just south of the fort, but in i814, the land belonged to the Creek, or Muskogee, Indians. Their hunting grounds still covered nearly all of present-day Alabama, stretched across roughly half of Georgia, and reached down into north-central Florida. As Jackson neared his destination, he entered a country bearing the scars of war. Skeletons of livestock littered the landscape, and charred remains of burned houses and fields lined the riverbanks. Gaunt and desperate for food, the survivors of the conflict crowded around the feedbags of Jackson's horses, scavenging for kernels of corn trodden into the earth by the general's wellfed animals. I know your humanity would feel for them, Jackson wrote his wife, Rachel, after witnessing this scene, notwithstanding all the causes you have to feel hatred and revenge.1 Revenge was ostensibly Jackson's motivation for leading troops into the area nearly a year earlier, razing cornfields and houses, and killing hundreds of local residents. In April i813, the Creek Indians had erupted in a violent civil war. On one side, Redsticks, as they called themselves, opposed the recent emergence of a powerful and privileged Creek elite. Inspired by Tecumseh and by a number of Muskogee prophets, they sought to restore a time when their communities were not riven by political and economic inequalities, when the produce of a woman's farm and the labor of a man's hunt sustained every Creek household. On the other side, Creek leaders and their adherents defended the seductive wealth and power that came from adopting Euroamerican traditions such as slavery, market exchange, and coercive government.2 Some of these

A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816

A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816

A new order of things: property, power, and the transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816

The story told here is a critical yet unknown chapter in the creation of the American Republic. Claudio Saunt vividly depicts a dramatic transformation in the eighteenth century that overturned the world of the powerful and numerous Creek Indians and forever changed the Deep South. By 1800, some Creeks, whose most valuable belongings had once been deerskins, owned hundreds of African-American slaves and thousands of cattle. Their leaders, who formerly strove for consensus, now ruled by force. New property fostered a new possessiveness, and government by coercion bred confrontation. A New Order of Things was the first book to chronicle this decisive transformation in America's early history, a transformation that left deep divisions between the wealthy and poor, powerful and powerless.

Indian Policy in the Age of Jefferson

Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. By Anthony F. C. Wallace. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 394. Documents, illustrations, maps. $29.95) Conspiracy of Interests: Iroquois Dispossession and the Rise of New York State. By Laurence M. Hauptman. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998. Pp. xix, 304. Illustrations, maps, tables. $34.95.) Seeds of Empire: The Revolutionary Conquest of the Iroquois. By Max Mintz. The World of War. (New York: New York University Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 232. Illustrations, maps. $28.95.) The Iroquois in the War of 1812. By Carl Benn. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 272. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $21.95.) A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816. By Claudio Saunt. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 298. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $17.95.) Playing Indian. By Philip J. Deloria. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Pp. 249. Illustrations. Cloth, $30.00; paper, $13.95.) The British Museum Encyclopedia of Native North America. By Rayna Green with Melanie Fernandez. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Pp. ix, 213. Illustrations. Cloth, $39.95; paper, $27.95.) Thomas Jefferson has received a series of bad raps recently for his racial policies, and Anthony F. C. Wallace's critique of his various contributions to Indian removal does nothing to revive what is left of Jefferson's reputation as a disinterested inquirer and philanthropist. Analogizing segregation, removal, and the assumptions underlying them to more recent essays in ethnic cleansing, Wallace argues that Jefferson, though an occasional scholarly admirer of Indian character, language, and mounds, could be a real shape-shifter when it came to policy. In the end, he played his part in one of the great tragedies of recent world history . . . the dispossession and decimation of the First (viii). Jefferson was born into a family and a class of land speculators interested in acquiring claims in the Ohio Country. His bellicose remarks when the Cherokees attacked the Wataugans in 1776 nearly matched his agreement with George Rogers Clark in 1780 that the Shawnees ought to be exterminated. Once he became president, Jefferson prodded agents like Benjamin Hawkins in Georgia and William Henry Harrison in Indiana to acquire land by persuasion, bribery, and intimidation at prices that would not burden the taxpayer. His commitment to laissez-faire and low-priced government reduced the military protection the United States offered Indians whose treaties guaranteed them against intrusion. His purchase of Louisiana offered, as he saw it, an opportunity to extend the segregation several tribal hunting bands had already sought west of the Mississippi to the whole of the Indians east of the river. To be fair, he also proposed to move several thousand white Louisianans east to make the separation complete. American politics and St. Louis fur traders prevented that effort; Indian opposition temporarily frustrated removal. Yet Jefferson continued to press Harrison to an 1809 treaty that drove the followers of nativist prophet Tenskwatawa and his warrior brother Tecumseh to a course that landed them on the British, or in this case, the losing side in the War of 1812. Jefferson's philanthropic alternative was civilization, the policy that gifts of farm animals, tools, and education would transform native Americans into make-believe white men who would need less land and make more acceptable neighbors than the hunters they supposedly were. Although he pressed the American Philosophical Society into the study of Indian languages and even became convinced that Indian antiquities were the real thing, Jefferson's observations of living Indian communities were scant and careless. From childhood through the presidency, he met traveling Indian leaders, but his own travels never took him west of Staunton, Virginia. …

A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816

Journal Article A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816 Get access A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733–1816. By Saunt Claudio. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. xiv + 298 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $49.95, cloth; $17.95, paper.) Joshua Piker Joshua Piker University of Oklahoma Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 31, Issue 4, Winter 2000, Pages 508–509, https://doi.org/10.2307/970126 Published: 01 November 2000

:Florida's Indians from Ancient Times to the Present

Florida's Indians tells the story of the native societies that have lived in Florida for twelve millennia, from the early hunters at the end of the Ice Age to the modern Seminole, Miccosukee, and Creek Indians. When the first Indians arrived in what is now Florida, they wrested their livelihood from a land far different from the modern countryside, one that was cooler, drier, and almost twice the size. Thousands of years later European explorers encountered literally hundreds of different Indian groups living in every part of the state. (Today every Florida country contains an Indian archaeological site.) The arrival of colonists brought the native peoples a new world and great changes took place - by the mid-1700s, through warfare, slave raids, and especially epidemics, the population was almost annihilated. Other Indians soon moved into the state, including Creeks from Georgia and Alabama, who were the ancestors of the modern Seminole and Miccosukee Indians. Written for a general audience, this book is lavishly illustrated with full-color drawings and photographs.

Retelling U.S. Religious History ed. by Thomas A. Tweed

146BOOK REVIEWS vantages, and the British offered such advantages, the Indians, or the majority, were gone. But I would suggest that it is a faUacy to confuse primary motivation and the Umit of human endurance, neither of which are scientificaUy measurable with a proton magnetometer.This reviewer found particularly helpful the assumptions set forth by RocheUe Marrinan concerning mission architecture (pp. 283-286), and saddening the mortuary evidence presented by Clark Spencer Larsen of the effects on the native population of disease, dietary changes, forced settlement, relocation, forced labor, and general stress (pp. 322-356). Each report is clearly outlined and accompanied by a bibUography Included are ninety figures and forty-six tables.A Ust of contributors indicates theU affiliations and addresses.The volume is weU indexed. Conrad L. Harkins, O.F.M. Franciscan University Steubenville, Ohio Retelling U S. Religious History. Edited byThomas A.Tweed. (Berkeley: University of CaHfornia Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 302. $40.00 clothbound $1395 paperback .) In this creatively provocative set of essays plus an introduction, nine American reUgious historians offer examples of what many of us have longed for and worked at for several decades: narratives about reUgion in America that make use of new topics and new participants, new angles and perspectives, and new ways to think about relationships among multiple reUgious communities in American history. In his introduction.Thomas A.Tweed states the goal ofthe volume as the effort to be "suggestive, not exhaustive," and to demonstrate, as Catherine Albanese does at length Ui the concludUig essay, that the ongoing reality of contact and combination ofreligious groups has fostered a constant and dynamic, not always easy, remaking of reUgious traditions.The related motifs of the volume, saysTweed, are contact, boundary, and exchange. Trie volume is divided mto two sections.The first,"Meanmg and Power at Social Sites," mcludes essays by AnnTaves on sexuality;Tamar Frankiel on ritual; Ann Braude on women in American religious history from the perspective of women's presence rather than men's absence; and Roger FUike on "supply-side" interpretations of church growth and decline."Bodies, laws, and churches," says Tweed, are the prominent social sites of this section. In the second section, "Contact and Exchange at Geographic Sites," Laurie Maffly-Kipp writes a west-to-east religious history from the Pacific Rim. Joel Martin grounds a narrative of contact, colonialization, and combination among the Muskogee Creek Indians and concludes with an outline for a postcolonial narrative ofIndian reUgionsWUUamWestfaU, a Canadian historian, elaborates on BOOK REVIEWS147 insights that can be gained from the Canadian border, a site that both separates and joinstwonationsand makes possible a"paraUel historical discourse"from an outsider's perspective. Catherine Albanese speaks of contact and combination over the course ofAmerican religious history Ui terms of a gift economy; she deemphasizes ideology but does not faU to point out that gift-giving is never free of conflict and the covering over of compUcated interactions and innovations. As interesting as the essays themselves is the background Tweed suppUes about the construction of the volume. It was a coUaborative effort instigated by Tweed that demanded "much more contact with each other than usuaUy is the case" in edited coUections. The enterprise also requUed a seU-consciousness about method that is helpfuUy but not doggedly apparent and a wUlingness to let some disagreements stand about such matters as whether metanarratives are possible or desirable and the extent to which fictional and historical narratives resemble each other. There is a strong presence of the underlying question , "How should we think about these things?"—both history and American reUgious history.There is also evidence in these essays that the writing of history can be highly pleasurable as well as arduous, and I do not consider this a negUgible contribution of the volume. For those of us interested in American Catholic history, Retelling U.S. Religious History demonstrates that Catholicism can be more creatively tategrated tato historical accounts of religion in America than has often been the case Ui the past. AU the essays include references to Roman CathoUcism and its frequent and complex participation in the issues and themes that make up this volume. Mary Farrell Bednarowski United Theological Seminary ofthe...

Environmental Influences on Dress: Creek Nation, 1885–1900

Women's daydressfrom the Creek Indian Nation (1885–1900) was studied to ascertain the degree to which it paralleled dress being promulgated as fashionable in eastern U.S. newspapers and reprinted as fashion news in Creek Nation newspapers. The results indicated that dresses actually worn in the Creek Nation contained (a) more ease, (b) simpler construction, (c) garment components requiring less fabric yardage, and (d) more durable trims than those dresses publicized as beingfashionable. The investigators concluded that these differences reflected the rigorous Creek Nation environment. The results substantiated that the mere promotion of a fashion product to a targeted market does not ensure consumer acquisition or purchase behavior if that product is not congruent with the environmental conditions, needs, and values of the targeted population.

The Meaning of Alcohol to Traditional Muscogee Creek Indians

The purpose of this study was to learn the meaning of alcohol to the traditional Muscogee Creek Indians of eastern Oklahoma. Using Leininger's theory of culture care diversity and universality as the theoretical base, the authors conducted interviews of 24 traditional people to elicit both emic and etic meanings of alcohol. The conceptualization of alcohol as a dichotomy of power to do both good and evil emerged as the central theme. Other meanings of alcohol were explicated in relation to five social structure dimensions. The findings suggest culturally competent nursing implications for preserving, accommodating, and repatterning the meaning of alcohol.

Town Creek Indian Mound: a Native American legacy

The temple mound and mortuary at Town Creek, in Montgomery County, is one of the few surviving earthen mounds built by prehistoric Native Americans in North Carolina. It has been recognized as an important archaeological site for almost sixty years and, as a state historic site, has become a popular destination for the public. This book is Joffre Coe's illustrated chronicle of the archaeological research conducted at Town Creek, a project with which Coe has been intimately involved for more than fifty years, since its inception as a WPA program in 1937. Written for visitors as well as for scholars, Town Creek Indian Mound provides an overview of the site and the archaeological techniques pioneered there, surveys the history of the excavations, and features more than 200 photographs and maps. The book carefully reconstructs the archaeological record, including plant and animal remains, pottery sherds, stone tools, and clay ornaments. In a concluding interpretive section, Coe reflects on what Town Creek and its artifacts tell us about this prehistoric Native American society. Originally published in 1995. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

"Hedged in, Shut up and Hidden from the World": Unveiling the Native and the Landscape in Alex Posey's Poetry

Thoreau's life-long recordings of Indian cultures are his attempts to situate himself within the American landscape as a means to achieve some understanding of self. He recognizes the Indians' oneness with nature. In March 1842, records in his journal as he walks the fields of Concord that he is traversing where Native Americans once walked: Where ever I go, I tread in the tracks of the Indians. I pick up the bolt which he has but just dropped at my feet. And if I consider I am on his trail. I scatter his hearthstones with my feet, and pick out of the embers of his fire the simple but enduring implements of the wigwam and the chase. In planting my corn in the same furrow which yielded its increase to his support so long, I some memorial of him. (Journal I 337) records Indian cultures in order to understand the self. As he scatters the hearthstones, he scatters the very heart, the home, of the Indian to displace him ultimately. Yet unlike that of the Indians whom he meticulously studies, Thoreau's destiny is that of the Euro-American, and he is bound to them. Thoreau's own excursions into the Maine woods and his sojourn at Walden Pond are efforts to achieve a renewed, transcendent self. But his jaunts into the woods did not prevent him from accepting the Euro-American notion of progress. Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond, after all, was just a short jump from the railroad tracks. Situating in his place and time, in his ambivalence about the values of Indian as compared to Euro-American culture, will help the reader to understand the complicated position of Alexander (Alex) Posey (1873-1908), a Creek Indian who not only read Thoreau, but imitated his journal notes. Posey wrote poems about eminent Indian leaders such as Crazy Snake and Sequoyah and Creeks like Hotgun and Yadeka Harjo and about Creek ball game festivities. Like Thoreau, Posey was inspired by the natural landscape; images from the surrounding countryside of his home in Indian Territory appear in his various poems. Posey may have been influenced by Thoreau--he, at least, admired Thoreau--and, like him, often perceived the Indian romantically, as one with and, lamentably, as a vanishing breed. Posey thus views Indians as if he too is a Euro-American. On the other hand, Posey wanted to keep alive his Indian heritage as he wrote about Creek traditions and the Indians' ability to outlast the Euro-American. Posey's Euro-American education and his Indian roots often seem to create conflict for him as a Creek writer. In his poetry, Posey struggles with his heritage, sometimes celebrating his Indian identity and at other times distancing himself from his culture, in an effort to find his poetic voice. Posey, living approximately fifty years after Thoreau, parallels Thoreau's mystical and reverent regard for nature. Like Thoreau, Posey loved nature. Posey himself is quick to note the resemblance with Thoreau. In 1903, he writes in a letter to acquaintance Frederick S. Barde, correspondent for the Kansas City Star: Thoreau was a man after my own heart, because, perhaps, there is so much Indian in him. I carry a pocket edition of Walden in my jeans constantly, mainly just to have it near me (Hays and Boylan 79). Posey avidly read Thoreau's prolific journal writings(1) and Walden from which he imbibes Thoreau's view of nature and his particular way of writing about it. Posey imitates by writing his own field notes, making detailed notes about various trees, birds, flowers, and other wildlife. One early spring day, for example, Posey observes an abundance of wood violets; on another day he writes that the wind changed direction, blowing north and harder than on any other day; he also notes a black-capped chickadee, a cardinal, and a mocking bird, the new foliage of several fruit trees, and a full-fledged war between a black wasp and a leaf worm (Notes Afield). …

William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians

William Bartram traveled throughout the American from 1773 to 1776. He occupies a unique place as an American Enlightenment explorer, naturalist, writer, and artist whose work was widely admired in his time and thereafter. Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and other leading romantics found inspiration in his pages. Bartram's most famous work, Travels has remained in print since the first publication of the book in 1791. However, his writings on Indians have received less attention than they deserve. This volume contains all of Bartram's known writings on Native Americans: a new version of on the Creek and Cherokee originally edited by E. G. Squier and first published in 1853; a previously unpublished essay, Some Hints and Observations Concerning the Civilization of the Indians, or Aborigines of America; and extensive excerpts from Travels. These documents are among the most valuable accounts we have of the Creeks and Seminoles in the last half of the eighteenth century. Several illustrations by Bartram are also included in this title. The editors provide information on the history of these documents and supply extensive annotations. The book opens with a biographical essay on Bartram and concludes with a thorough evaluation of his contributions to southeastern Indian ethnohistory, anthropology, and archaeology. The editors have identified and corrected a number of errors found in the extant literature concerning Bartram and his writings. Gregory A. Waselkov, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of South Alabama, is coeditor with Peter H. Wood and M. Thomas Hatley of Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Nebraska 1989). Kathryn E. Holland Braund is an independent scholar and author of Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1865-1815 (Nebraska 1993).

Review: Deerskins and Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815, by Kathryn E. Holland Braund

Book Review| November 01 1995 Review: Deerskins and Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815, by Kathryn E. Holland Braund Deerskins and Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815Kathryn E. Holland Braund Edward J. Cashin Edward J. Cashin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1995) 64 (4): 606–607. https://doi.org/10.2307/3640565 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Edward J. Cashin; Review: Deerskins and Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815, by Kathryn E. Holland Braund. Pacific Historical Review 1 November 1995; 64 (4): 606–607. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3640565 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1995 The Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Art of the Florida Seminole and Miccosukee Indians

The artistic tradition that in the past sustained Florida Indians helps identify them today as possessing a resilient, modern culture. In this account of the arts and crafts of the Florida Seminole and Miccosukee Indians, the author shows how artistic expression reflects and inspires history. Approximately 2000 Seminoles and 500 Miccosukee (recognised as a separate tribe in 1962) now live in Florida, primarily on reservations in the southern part of the state and particularly along the edge of the Everglades. Their elders say, We're not from here, a poignant allusion to their years of geographic relocation and social upheaval. While their heritage includes the Mississippi Culture of the Indians of the Eastern Woodlands of North America, for the most part the Indians who lived in Florida and greeted the early explorers were annihilated by 1710. The ancestors of today's Seminole and Miccosukee are the Creek Indians from Georgia and Alabama, who were joined by runaway African slaves and free blacks. Emphasising the influence of drastic cultural changes on their artistic traditions, Downs traces Seminole and Miccosukee art from the 18th century. Retaining only the most persistent designs from prehistoric Southeastern Indian culture, their primary art form of dress reflects the materials, techniques and design elements they encountered during their contact with Europeans. In addition to clothing and finger-woven or bead-embroidered accessories, their arts and crafts - most often practiced by the women - include pottery, basketry, and doll making. Their most powerful artistic expression is found in the colourful and intricate patchwork patterns that have become their 20th-century signature. The black-and-white photographs of these articles, along with examples of the men's work of silver and wood crafts and chickee building, should interest both scholars and the general public.

Deerskins and Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815

Deerskins and Duffels: Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815

Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815

'Will stand as a prominent landmark in the study of southeastern Indians during the colonial era. This book captures the importance and complexity of Creek trade with Anglo-America, shedding new light on the operation of the deerskin market and on its impact upon Indian society' - William and Mary Quarterly. 'An important contribution to our understanding of the influence of the deerskin trade on Creek and Anglo-American relations in the eighteenth-century Southeast' - Journal of Southern History. 'This well-written book is essential for understanding the mechanics and impact of European trade on the Creek and all Southeastern Indians' - Ethnohistory. Deerskins and Duffels documents the trading relationship between the Creek Indians in what is now the southeastern United States and the Anglo-American peoples who settled there.The Creeks were the largest native group in the Southeast, and through their trade alliance with the British colonies they became the dominant native power in the area. The deerskin trade became the economic lifeblood of the Creeks after European contact. This book is the first to examine extensively the Creek side of the trade, especially the impact of commercial hunting on all aspects of Indian society. British trade is detailed here, as well: the major traders and trading companies, how goods were taken to the Indians, how the traders lived, and how trade was used as a diplomatic tool. The author also discusses trade in Indian slaves, a Creek-Anglo cooperation that resulted in the virtual destruction of the native peoples of Florida. Kathryn E. Holland Braund is an independent scholar residing in Dadeville, Alabama.

Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815

Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo-America, 1685-1815

Book Review: A Naturalist in Indian Territory: The Journals of S. W. Woodhouse

Samuel Washington Woodhouse, a Philadelphia physician and avid ornithologist, was appointed surgeon-naturalist of two expeditions to survey the Creek-Cherokee boundary in Indian Territory. The Creek boundary expedition that Woodhouse was asked to join was a Corps of Topographical Engineers survey party sent to survey and mark the northern and western boundaries of the Creek Indian lands in Indian Territory to comply with the requirements of the Creek Treaty of 1845. The usual purpose of these surveys was to map the land, describe its topography, and learn about its native inhabitants. Later objectives were to establish roads and to set boundaries as the westward movement of settlers began, in addition to observing and gathering specimens of the animals, plants, and minerals of the West. Woodhouse served on both expeditions of the survey, the first in 1849 under Capt. Lorenzo Sitgreaves and the second under Lt. Israel Carle Woodruff in 1850.

From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880 , and: The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions, 1845-1871 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS343 Not surprisingly, the most illuminating of Fremont's letters are those covering the Civil War years. While John Fremont served in St. Louis as commander ofthe Union's Department ofthe West, "General Jessie," as she was known to critics, became her husband's "secretary and other self," participating in staff meetings, seeing visitors, and presiding over Fremont's headquarters in his absence. In August of 1861, John Fremont issued his controversial emancipation proclamation, freeing the slaves of Missouri Rebels; for the rest of the war, Jessie Fremont publicly defended her embattled husband, writing a novel and even meeting personally with President Lincoln to justify John Fremont's actions. At the same time, she contributed to wartime relief efforts, most notably the Western Sanitary Commission. Her wartime letters shed light not only on her and her husband's activities, but on the general conduct of the war in the West. When paired with editor Pamela Herr's fine biography ofJessie Benton Fremont , the new volume makes a strong case for the historical significance of a remarkable woman but leaves the reader wanting to learn more—about Fremont 's abolitionism, the 1856 campaign, her thoughts on women's suffrage and on Reconstruction, and her unusual marriage, among other subjects. Despite the extensive documentation of her life, Fremont proves surprisingly difficult to get to know; thanks to the efforts of Herr and Spence, she is no longer difficult to meet. Elizabeth R. Varón Yale University From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880. By Joseph P. Reidy. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Pp. 360. $45.00.) The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions, 18451871 . By Vicki Vaughn Johnson. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Pp. xii, 328. $39.95.) In each of these books the trauma of the Civil War serves as a central event that forced change upon the South. Reidy looks at the development of new economic and social relationships in the agrarian economy that emerged from the destruction of slavery. Johnson examines the South's commercial leaders as they formulated their vision for the region before and after the war. Reidy's study moves back and forth between a tightly focused case study of the five counties surrounding Macon in Central Georgia to a larger world stage on which we see the emancipation of slaves in the Americas and serfs in Russia. Though grounded in the particular events, places, and people of a local empirical study, Reidy grapples with big questions about the transforming experience the war imposed on slaves, planters, and yeomen. In the early chapters he traces the development of central Georgia, comparing it to 344CIVIL WAR HISTORY Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. No sooner were the Creek Indians dispossessed of the land than a swarm of land-hungry settlers transformed this backcounty first into a crude yeoman's economy of subsistence and trade and, then rapidly , into a prosperous cotton plantation economy in which the planters' wealth and power rested solidly on their command of land and slaves. "The Thomas Sutpens were coming, with the Will Varners close behind," Reidy tells us early on, summarizing much of the story that is to follow. (15) The so-called Old South, in this vivid picture of its expansion, was a young, dynamic society constructed within a generation of its frontier beginnings . Lines of authority that evolved among planters, slaves, and yeomen were all defined by ongoing struggles for power. The depression that followed the Panic of 1 837 allowed the planter class to consolidate its wealth and position . It was this class, Reidy contends, that imposed its ideals of social hierarchy and patriarchy over slaves and yeomen. Planters employed the power of the lash and political control of the state to enforce its will and advance its interests. Whatever tension remained in the contests of power between master and slave, planter and yeomen, the planters, Reidy argues, had "largely succeeded in constructing a patriarchal world" and, by the time of the secession crisis, were able, "politically and ideologically," to rally "both smallholders and nonslaveholders behind the essential principles of plantation slavery" (57, 56). This planter...

Creek Indian History: A Historical Narrative of the Genealogy, Traditions and Downfall of Ispocoga or Creek Indian Tribe of Indians

Creek Indian History: A Historical Narrative of the Genealogy, Traditions and Downfall of Ispocoga or Creek Indian Tribe of Indians