Reviewed by: Patrolling the Border: Theft and Violence on the Creek-Georgia Frontier, 1770–1796 by Joshua S. Haynes Taylor McGaughy Patrolling the Border: Theft and Violence on the Creek-Georgia Frontier, 1770–1796. By Joshua S. Haynes. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018. 310 pp. $29.95. ISBN 9–780–8203–6174–1. Historians of the colonial South have spent decades poring over treaty texts, ethnographic observations, and archeological inventories attempting to explain the structure and nature of the region’s indigenous polities. Sixty years ago, the historiographic consensus read much like eighteenth-century European sources in that it asserted that seminal chiefs largely guided affairs of state but recognized that these polities were at core loosely connected confederacies. Over the past thirty years, historians upended these notions by emphasizing varied loci of political power. Some have demonstrated how the hierarchical, stratified polities of the Mississippian era segued into decentralized, egalitarian societies after contact that veered again towards consolidation in the face of an expansive early American republic, and others respectively centered clans, towns, and regional blocs as the keys to understanding Native American politics. Still others recast confederacies as budding nations, with identities crystalizing and collective action materializing in response to external pressures. Patrolling the Border represents a novel, critical contribution to this long-running discourse on indigenous state-hood. Haynes presents late-eighteenth-century Creek raiding as a mechanism of policy enforcement which arose at the town level as a reaction to Georgians’ disregard for established boundaries. Though local in origin, these border patrols gradually evolved into a standard polity-wide practice, a common foreign policy to counter encroachment which facilitated coalescence across Creek society. Haynes’s groundbreaking research thus casts these border patrols as an utterly convincing, much-needed bridge between the decentralized network of autonomous towns and villages of the mid-eighteenth century and an early-nineteenth-century National Council which issued laws and directives binding on all Creeks. Thorough analysis underpins Haynes’s conclusions about the border patrols; he applies quantitative and geographic methodology [End Page 332] to nearly one thousand raids that occurred over a thirty-year span to deduce some central truths. Mapping the incidents reveals that the majority of them (seventy-six percent) occurred in a long, narrow tract known as the Oconee Strip. Events which followed the land cessions of the late British colonial period are better explained by the geographic concentration of the raiding; the 1773 New Purchase commenced Georgia’s push into this territory, and a series of treaties outlined the terms and limits of occupancy, which a barrage of squatters and backcountry settlers always violated. The White-Sherrill murders, an episode depicted by previous historians as an isolated, violent incident orchestrated by renegades dissatisfied with the cession, is repositioned by Haynes as both the manifestation of widely held sentiments that the Georgians had transgressed the agreed-upon boundary and the commencement of decades worth of raiding aimed at protecting invaluable hunting lands along the Oconee. Though thepatrols combed the entire Creek periphery, targeting encroachment in the Tensaw District near Mobile, the Franklin settlements of present-day northeastern Tennessee, and the vicinity of the St. Mary’s River along the present-day border of Georgia and Florida, the sheer volume of raids in the Oconee district reinforce Haynes’s primary contention: that Georgia represented the clearest danger to Creek territorial sovereignty and that Oconee raiding embodied a deliberate policy embraced by a coalescing indigenous nation to counter that threat. Quantitative consideration of the raids demonstrates their temporal concentration. Haynes discovers that the patrols spiked in the direct aftermath of controversial treaties consented to by rump Creek headmen. These treaties ceded lands on the east bank of the Oconee to Georgia (and frequently included concessions allowing Creeks hunting privileges on the Georgia side), but were approved by groups of chiefs that fell short of representing collective Creek will. Dissatisfaction with these agreements and the demographic surge engulfing the lands in question prompted raids emanating from many towns aimed at protecting Creek territorial integrity. Haynes’s juxtaposition of the raiding spikes alongside the treaties clarifies the [End Page 333] differences of opinion which existed across time throughout Creek nation; some...
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Jan 1, 2023
Jonathan Quint 
Open Access