“the obituary of nations”

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“The Obituary of Nations”Ethnic Cleansing, Memory, and the Origins of theOld South

by James Taylor Carson

....................

“What is history but the

obituary of nations?”

U.S. Representative

Richard H. Wilde of

Georgia asked, as he

added Cherokees and

Choctaws to a roster

of nations—Babylon,

Nineveh, Tyre, and

Carthage—that

Providence had wiped

from the face of the earth.

Sadayi (“Annie Ax”), in

1888, a Cherokee whose

people—along with the

Creek, Choctaw, and

Chickasaw nations—

were expelled and forced



6

westward in the 1830s.Photograph by James

Mooney, Bureau of

American Ethnology,

courtesy of the National

Anthropological Archives

in the Smithsonian

Museum Support Center.

In the late winter and early spring of 8 0 members of the United

States Congress debated a bill to enable the federal government toundertake the expulsion of thousands of people from their ances-tral homes and to resettle them in what came to be called IndianTerritory (present-day Oklahoma). At the same time, the govern-

ments of three states—Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi—endeavored, in defi-ance of federal treaties, to dissolve the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasawnations which existed within their borders in efforts to hasten their departure. Theinterlocking program that president Andrew Jackson’s supporters at the federaland state levels sought to put in place appalled some congress members. BothTheodore Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and William Ellsworth of Connecticut,for example, identified the states’ abrogation of the federal treaty rights as con-trary to the spirit of the Constitution and found the Removal bill itself to be con-trary to the word of God. Others worried over how the legislation might reflecton the republic’s honor.

Among the several men who spoke out in favor of the measure, U.S. Represen-tative Richard H. Wilde of Georgia drew together popular notions about progress,history, and civil society to support the proposed bill. History, Wilde argued,flowed from the guiding hand of Providence, and, to his mind, those who hadtaken the time to study the “experience of ages” could not help but notice that theprogress of civilization had proceeded apace with the creation of private property.To Wilde, “ignorant and brutal barbarians” who failed to invest the land with their



The Obituary of Nations

labor could not own it. “Do not resist the order of Providence,” he answered toEllsworth, Frelinghuysen, and other critics of the Removal bill, for “when [theIndian] is gone, a civilized man will step into his place.” Science, the arts, industry,and human happiness were inexorable processes that Wilde believed had doomedthe South’s First Peoples to extinction. But this was not to be mourned, he assuredhis audience, for just as history taught that progress was inevitable, so too was thedisappearance of entire peoples. “What is history but the obituary of nations?”Wilde asked, as he added Cherokees and Choctaws to a roster of nations—Baby-lon, Nineveh, Tyre, and Carthage—that Providence had wiped from the face ofthe earth.

Indeed, Wilde’s justification and explanation for the expulsion of the South’sFirst Peoples and his open faith in the power of Progress remain as cornerstonesof the Old South’s history. Central themes in southern history abound—fromslavery to sectionalism and agrarianism to the Celtic hangover—but such themes,in practice, capture only the barest sliver of the South’s deep history, effectivelyignoring its antiquity and tending to find the region’s origins in the early nine-teenth century. Whichever motif one prefers for the South’s core narrative, nonewould have been possible without the expulsion of the South’s First Peoples.2

Literary scholar George B. Handley has likened such narrative strategies to a



Whichever motif one prefers for the South’s core narrative, none would have been possible without the expulsion of

the South’s First Peoples. Choctaw girls, part of a delegation sent to Washington, D.C., thirty-eight years after

their nation’s expulsion, photographed by Antonio Zeno Shindler, Bureau of American Ethnology, courtesy of the

National Anthropological Archives in the Smithsonian Museum Support Center.

“politics of oblivion,” whereby what has been forgotten shapes the writing of his-tory every bit as much as what has been remembered. This is not to say that stu-dents and scholars of southern history have not explored the region’s indigenouspast. They have, and their work constitutes some of the most inventive and impor-tant work in the history of native North America. Nevertheless, the history of theSouth’s First Peoples has remained on the margins of the mainstream antebellumnarratives of westward migration, white freedom, and black slavery—narrativesthat also continue to reproduce, almost as asides, age-old assumptions about theconflict between whites and Indians. In a way, then, in order to remember obliv-



The Obituary of Nations 9

ion it is essential to forget all that has happened since, for, as Wilde showed, thedisappearance of nations has a funny way of enabling a skewed vision of the pastthat supplants tragedy with triumph.

The descendants of the first southerners are a part of our society today. Chero-kees in North Carolina have managed to do an end-run around the Baptists andopen casinos, all the while teaching their children their natal tongue. The Lum-bees are the largest nation in the United States but still have trouble convincingfederal and state governments that they exist. Seminoles have parlayed cement,cattle, and smokes into commercial enterprises that belie the fact they are still atwar with the federal government, while Choctaws, too, have seen the productionof auto parts and greeting cards underwrite golf courses, resorts, casinos and theiremergence as one of Mississippi’s leading economic engines. And it won’t be longuntil Chickasaws announce “We’re back” as archaeological work knits togetherplaces in Mississippi with people in Oklahoma. Houmas in Louisiana fight Texacofor access to oil profits, while a group calling themselves the Cherokees of NorthAlabama clamor for recognition from someone, anyone, with an official voice.

When Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin that made upland cotton a viablecash crop for thousands of small farmers, Georgia and the territory that becamethe states of Mississippi and Alabama were home to 2,800 “Indians,” 5 , 00“whites,” and 0,000 “blacks” (largely unreliable racial designations all). Almosta half-century later, when the first post-Removal censuses were taken in 8 0, thesame region was home to 922,000 “whites” and ,000 “blacks.” Census takersfailed to note the presence of any remaining Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, andChickasaws, though some remained, hiding and waiting until they could safelyreassert their public identities once more. Something more than the expansion ofthe western frontier was at play in the depopulation of the Old South. Between8 0 and 8 0 the federal and state governments expelled an indigenous popula-tion that had grown to nearly 50,000 people. It is tempting to simply say that iswhat happens when civilization meets Indians. But those “Indians” were mothers,fathers, children, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, slave owners, cotton farmers,basket weavers, market vendors, cowboys, preachers, and colonels. They weresoutherners. And their families had inhabited the land for thousands of years.



0 southern cultures, Winter 2008 : James Taylor Carson

To call their expulsion a removal is to sanitize it, to banalize it, to avoid con-fronting it, for what the citizens of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi in factundertook was nothing less than the complete dismemberment, the ethnic cleans-ing, of the society and the place they inhabited. Indeed, the hallmarks of southernhistoriography follow fairly closely what might be called the model historiogra-phy of an ethnic cleanser in which scholars consign victims to an almost primor-dial past beyond reason, allow them no rightful place in contemporary society,and, in the most extreme cases, sacrifice such people to the fulfillment of a divinemandate. In the South this allowed the expansion of slavery and the defense of theslaveholders’ freedom and property. “Progress” underwrote the process, leavinggovernors, congress members, land speculators, and slave owners to disavow theirrole in the affair and to load it all onto a set of providential shoulders broad enoughto bear the horror.5

The rise of the cotton kingdom led a number of southern politicians to identifythe acquisition of land and the expulsion of First Peoples as essential componentsof the state-building projects that occurred in the Old South in the early nineteenthcentury. In 820 Mississippi governor Thomas Holmes put to the state assemblythat because the state depended on land tax revenues to fund internal improve-ments, the vast stretch of untaxed land under Choctaw and Chickasaw occupationhad to be acquired, emptied, opened for sale, repopulated, and assessed. Without

By 1840, when the first post-Removal censuses were taken, the region was home to 922,000 “whites” and 737,000

“blacks.” Census takers failed to note the presence of any remaining Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, and

Chickasaws. This adapted 1990 U.S. Census Bureau map depicts the lasting effects of Removal on the region,

showing most of the Southeast’s indigenous peoples still residing in Oklahoma, the former Indian Territory, one

hundred sixty years later.



Page 6

a new parcel of taxable land, he concluded, the state would be forced to levy op-pressive taxes on citizens residing within its current bounds, which would bothstifle the state’s growth and turn away prospective settlers. Holmes’s successor,George Poindexter, added that further land cessions would open interstate com-merce with Tennessee and Alabama. With the free and easy movement of cotton,Poindexter predicted that the state’s population would not only increase but wouldalso become more prosperous, more industrious, and, in the end, more virtuous.By establishing a close relationship between land cessions, expulsion, and thesettlers’ moral and economic prosperity, the two governors articulated a cogentand powerful set of conditions that required federal action.6

In October 820 Secretary of War John C. Calhoun dispatched Andrew Jacksonand General Thomas Hinds of the Mississippi state militia to negotiate the cessionof five million acres of Choctaw land in Mississippi. Two years after the resultingTreaty of Doak’s Stand the state legislature met for the first time in its new capital,

The people expelled during Removal were mothers, fathers, children, Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, slave owners,

cotton farmers, basket weavers, market vendors, cowboys, preachers, and colonels. They were southerners. And

their families had inhabited the land for thousands of years. At the annual ballgame on the Qualla Boundary, a

Cherokee reservation in North Carolina, in 1888, photographed by the Bureau of American Ethnology, courtesy

of the National Anthropological Archives in the Smithsonian Museum Support Center.




Jackson, in a new county, Hinds, that the legislature had carved out of the latecession. Against the allegedly impermanent and wandering ways of the Choctaws,the new capital sat on the land as proof of the triumph of the property rights and

Page 7

In October 1820 Secretary of War John C. Calhoun (here) dispatched Andrew Jackson and General Thomas

Hinds of the Mississippi state militia to negotiate the cession of five million acres of Choctaw land in Mississippi.

Calhoun feared opponents would use the “Indian question” as a springboard for politicizing slavery and drawing

other southern politicians into a proslavery party that would destabilize national politics. He did not worry idly.




republican government that were the hallmarks of Anglo-American civilization—and a testament to the triumph of Providence’s chosen people. Where Choctawshad, according to the logic of the day, failed to make use of the land and therebysurrendered all claim to it, the architect and his team of free and enslaved builderscrafted the new capitol from local supplies of timber, brick, clay, and limestone.When Governor Walter Leake opened the building’s first legislative session hetraced for the assembled legislators the arc of progress that had brought them

Photograph courtesy of the Brady-Handy Collection at the Library of Congress.

Page 8

together in the new council chamber. “This town was,” he boasted, “but a shorttime since, entirely in the woods, in the midst of a wilderness, the former abodeof untutored savages.”

The presence of “savages” alarmed Georgia governor George M. Troup, too,and he explained to Secretary Calhoun that if the Cherokees remained in the state“public opinion would . . . fix them in a middle status between the negro and thewhite man, and that as long as they survive this degradation, without the possi-bility of attaining the elevation of the latter, they would gradually sink to the con-ditions of the former.” Troup dedicated himself to driving Creeks and Cherokeesout of the state, but the inability of the Adams administration to keep apace withhis plans frustrated him. “There is such a radical difference of opinion betweenthe authorities of Georgia and of the United States,” Troup argued, “that the har-mony and tranquility of the two Governments . . . can never be maintained . . .until those Indians have been removed.”8

Questions of state and federal jurisdiction over Indians slid easily into con-cerns about the security of slavery. As the editor of the Augusta Constitutionalistasked, “Are we the slaves of the United States Government, and therefore boundto close our lips against her taunts?” For Troup there was no question about therelationship between masters and slaves, and he acted accordingly. Orders issuedfrom his desk forbidding federal marshals from serving process on trespassers onCreek land, and he called the militia to a state of alarm to forestall any attempts bythe federal government to assert its authority in the matter. “This looks like civilwar!!” worried one U.S. Army officer who was on the scene. In the end, state andfederal officials averted conflict when the Adams administration secured the finalremoval of the Creeks from Georgia in 82 , but the rumblings about slavery and




Indian policy that had emerged from the dispute caused concern in Washington.Secretary Calhoun, who had deplored Troup’s states’ rights agitation, worried thatthe governor was but a proxy for “others, much more deep and designing, whocare but little about the Indian lands.” Who those others were Calhoun did notsay, but he feared that “the Georgia movement” would use the “Indian question”as a springboard for politicizing slavery and drawing other southern politiciansinto a proslavery party that would destabilize national politics.9

Calhoun did not worry idly. Troup’s counterpart in Alabama, John Murphy,likewise used Creeks to link citizenship and slavery to whiteness and blackness andto tie jurisdiction over Indian affairs to state sovereignty. He argued that Creeks, asfree yet inferior people, had no place in Alabama society. To allow them to remainin the state, surrounded by a society to which they could never belong, would,Murphy offered, “neither comport with the justice, generosity, or humanity, of aliberal and Christian people.” Representative Dixon Lewis struck a special statehouse committee to investigate the relationship between state and federal Indianpolicy, and the resulting report worried that “if the General government has the

Page 9

Andrew Jackson had advocated the expulsion of First Peoples since his days as the commander of the Tennessee

militia in the Creek Civil War, and after his election to the presidency he made their conquest an administration



southern cultures, Winter 2008 : James Taylor Carson

power to supersede the rights of a sovereign state . . . it has the same power toannul any provision of the constitution.” In the end, Lewis asked, “If Congresscan invade the jurisdiction of a state, and in any way extend or abridge the rightsof individuals, what is to prevent its interference with the slave population of thesouthern states?” Lewis’s questions over jurisdiction involving First Peoples were,just as Calhoun anticipated, pretexts for setting precedents involving slavery,property rights, and freedom. If the federal government intervened and deniedAlabama’s right to extend its laws over the First Peoples living within its bound-aries, Lewis reasoned that “it can by a similar exercise of municipal power . . . saythat Negroes shall not be slaves.” 0

Such arguments struck a popular chord with citizens critical of the Adams ad-ministration and drew thousands of voters to the Old Hero. Andrew Jackson hadadvocated the expulsion of First Peoples since his days as the commander of theTennessee militia in the Creek Civil War, and after his election to the presidencyhe made their conquest an administration priority, which only emboldened thegovernments of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to take matters into their ownhands and extend state laws over the nations. Jackson endorsed the measures be-cause the Constitution expressly forbade the erection of sovereign states like theCherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations within the chartered bound-

priority. This satirist’s “THE GRAND NATIONAL CARAVAN MOVING EAST,” an 1833 cartoon,parodied Jackson leading a democratic parade that drew along a wagon of caged Indians under a banner reading

“RIGHTS of MAN.” Courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Page 10

Joseph Glover Baldwin’s 1853 book, The Flush

Times of Alabama and Mississippi,

lamented First Peoples’ helplessness in a

swirling world of fraud and inhumanity. To his

mind, “the very mention [of the expulsions] is

suggestive of the poetry of theft—the romance

of a wild and weird larceny! What sublime

conceptions of super-Spartan roguery! Swindling

Indians by the nation! . . . Stealing their land

by the township! . . .” Title-page image courtesy

of Documenting the American South, the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.




aries of original sovereign states like Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, nevermind native leaders’ arguments that their claims predated state sovereignty.

Jackson also hoped to segregate First Peoples in order to save them from whathe and others believed was their imminent extinction. “Surrounded by the whites,”the president declared, “with their arts of civilization, which, by destroying theresources of the savage, doom him to weakness,” he asserted that the fate of theMohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware was fast overtaking the nations ofthe South. Rather than await their disappearance, the president believed that thefederal government had to remove them to the West where they could “raise upan interesting commonwealth, destined to perpetuate the race.” While the statespursued law extension with the president’s tacit approval, Senator Hugh LawsonWhite laid the Indian Removal bill before Congress, and Frelinghuysen, Ells-worth, and Wilde began their debate. Despite considerable opposition to the pro-posal in both houses, Jackson garnered enough support to see the measure pass,and he signed it into law on May 29, 8 0. 2

The federal government expelled the Choctaws between 8 0 and 8 , and sub-sequent treaties with the Creeks in 8 2, the Chickasaws in 8 , and the Cherokeesin 8 5 secured their expulsion, too. Federal agents kept no systematic records of

Page 11

the expulsions, so it is difficult to ascertain how many people died on the Trail ofTears. Historian Donna Akers has proposed that nearly a third of removed Choc-taws, a total of perhaps five thousand people, perished, while demographer RussellThornton has accepted the tally of four thousand Cherokee deaths, one quarter ofthe total number of Cherokees expelled. Thornton also posed two important ques-




tions: How many people might have lived had Removal not happened? And howmany babies were not born because their potential parents had either perishedon the Trail or were never born because of their own parents’ deaths? In terms ofthis total Cherokee population loss, Thornton arrived at a figure of ten thousandmen and women who would have lived or been born in the first generation hadRemoval not occurred. Many thousands of Cherokees are not standing today be-cause of the dark days of the Trail. Such death tolls, Akers has argued, must alsobe understood in the context of the loss of land. Indeed, for Choctaws, Akers hasdemonstrated that separation from their homeland “meant death,” and Choctawconceptions of the West as a place “where spirits unable to reach the afterworldroamed forever” only compounded their misery, sense of loss, and despair for thefuture.

For the Mississippi House Indian Committee, however, the expulsions, thedeaths, and the despair augured a new beginning for the state. As the authorsof one memorial put it, it was “the dawn of an era . . . when . . . this state wouldemerge from obscurity, and justifiably assume an equal character with her sisterstates of the Union.” In addition to the hard-fought equality with the older stateswon by newer states like Alabama and Mississippi and the full possession of theirchartered limits that they now enjoyed, the expulsions had also ensured that free-dom and slavery were, at least in principle, predicated on the differences betweenwhiteness and blackness. No longer would Indians challenge the racial veritiesand providential designs that were so dear to Troup, Murphy, and most southernpoliticians and citizens. Such achievements, however, had come at a steep humanprice, and the challenge for those who had benefited from the expulsions was toinvent a past that could comport with the future they were making for themselvesand the people they enslaved.

Perhaps more than anyone at the time, William Gilmore Simms, the OldSouth’s leading literary light, possessed the skill and interest to braid togetherthe destruction of the South’s first nations with the birth of plantation society. Ifhis florid prose, contrived plots, and archetypal characters placed him squarely inthe Romantic tradition, his embrace of manifest destiny and the literary creed ofYoung America allowed him to craft a nationalistic aesthetic on the ruins of thepost-expulsion world. No matter the time nor place, he argued, the constant tri-umph of the invaders over the “savages” gave proof to Providence’s grand designand lent substance to the progress that lay at the heart of American civilization. InRichard Hurdis: A Romance of Alabama he pitied the first wave of settlers who, like

Page 12



“Indians,” were “diseased by the license of the wilderness.” Only through theirstruggle to conquer the West could they transcend brute savagery and achievewhat he foresaw as “the final and complete conversion to the purposes of civilizedman, of that vast wild tract . . . spreading away from the Altamaha to the RioBravo.” 5

Simms typically positioned his Indian characters to speak as solemn remindersof the South’s noble yet lost past and, at the same time, to suffer the recurrenttriumph of Anglo-American civilization. His 8 5 novel, The Yemassee: A Romanceof Early Carolina, for example, chronicled the war between the Yamasees and theCarolina colony in but read like a dress rehearsal for the expulsions that wereoccurring as he wrote. The gallant Captain Harrison stood as an archetypal Jack-sonian frontiersman, savvy in the ways of the woods but nonetheless born of acivilization that no reader doubted would triumph in the end. His nemesis, Rev-erend Matthews, a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospeland the father of Harrison’s love interest, channeled John Quincy Adams’s prig-gish piety, and his conflict with Harrison over the fate of the Yamasees projectedthe debates between Frelinghuysen, Ellsworth, and Wilde back onto Carolina’searly history. Sanutee, who belonged at the time to “a powerful and gallant race,”was doomed from the start. In the opening scene he spies a party of settlers but isunable to see, the narrator warns, “his own approaching subjection.” No matterthe tears readers might shed over noble Sanutee’s defeat, they could be assured that

In his essay “The Significance of the Frontier

in American History,” historian Frederick

Jackson Turner (here) looked back on his

childhood and saw the First People he had

known in Wisconsin, in the words of one

biographer, as “part of the wildlife” rather than

as part of the community. Photograph courtesy

of Wikimedia Commons.




Page 13

it was all bound to happen, for Sanutee was out of both time and place, or, as onecharacter put it, he was a “miserable red nager.” 6

But where Simms’s characters exposed the grim but glorious unfolding ofprogress and nationhood, Whiggish humorists skewered the romance of the Ageof Jackson. Alabama journalist Johnson Jones Hooper situated his protagonistSimon Suggs “on public land on the Tallapoosa river, in the midst of that highlyrespectable town of Indians known as the Oakfuskees [where] he was as jolly asBacchus.” Suggs was wild, in part, because he lived among people whom Hooper

Two Bureau of American Ethnology ethnographers, John R. Swanton and James Mooney, devoted much of their

careers to interviewing elders about their past practices and beliefs and matching informant reports with historical

documents in attempts to reconstruct an image of traditional native cultures. Their anthropology pointed to a deep

regional history of continuity and perseverance. Mooney’s field notes (1890) on carvings in old Cherokee country

(Track Rock Gap, Union County, Georgia), recorded for the Bureau of American Ethnology, courtesy of the





had deemed to be wild. And because such authors constructed them as wild, theywere accordingly naīve and unprepared for the complications that had come withthe unfolding of Jacksonian Democracy. Taking on contemporary truisms abouteconomic progress and the self-made man, Suggs made his living by separat-ing people from their money. Among his many marks were census takers, camp-meeting Christians, land speculators, and Creeks who lost to the wily captain a bag

Page 14

of silver coins they had wagered on the outcome of a ballgame between two towns.Suggs may have inhabited the same country as the Oakfuskees, but his sharp eyessaw through their simple schemes. Certain that the ballplayers were working ascam that threatened to upset his own, Suggs preemptively stole the money alongwith a Creek leader’s horse, and, as he galloped away, commanded his militia tofire a volley into “the inemies of my country.”

The courthouses of Joseph Glover Baldwin’s 85 book, The Flush Times of Ala-bama and Mississippi, were likewise full of Suggs-like characters. But where Hooperexposed the Democrats’ cynicism through Suggs’s rough treatment of his Creekneighbors, Baldwin lamented First Peoples’ helplessness in a swirling world offraud and inhumanity. To his mind, “the very mention [of the expulsions] is sug-gestive of the poetry of theft—the romance of a wild and weird larceny! Whatsublime conceptions of super-Spartan roguery! Swindling Indians by the nation!. . . Stealing their land by the township! . . . Conducting the nation to the Missis-sippi river, stripping them to the flap, and bidding them God speed as they wenthowling into the Western wilderness to the friendly agency of some shelteringSuggs duly empowered to receive their coming annuities and back rations.” Bald-win’s and Hooper’s burlesques never proposed a positive alternative to the worldthey critiqued but rather dismantled certain easy targets, leaving readers to pondertheir own culpability in the horror. Hooper and Baldwin made it hard to sympa-thize with a settler. 8

For the rest of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century histo-rians perpetuated the debates that had divided states’ rightists from federalistsand Simms from his humorist counterparts and continued to link the history ofRemoval to the almighty unfolding of providential will. Any number of writersshared Simms’s conclusions about “the inevitable fate of the Anglo-Norman”against “the inevitable fate of the Indian,” while historian Frederick JacksonTurner completed the transformation of “Young America” into a scholarly para-digm in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Turner




himself had witnessed the displacement of Winnebagos by the stream of immi-grants who poured into his hometown of Portage, Wisconsin, in the years afterthe Civil War. When he looked back on his childhood he saw the First Peoples hehad known, one biographer has noted, as “part of the wildlife” rather than as partof the community. Mississippi historian J. F. H. Claiborne saw Choctaws in muchthe same way: “They suffered and they died,” he regretted, “those noble nativesof our soil.” In spite of the tragedy, however, he knew it could not have gone anyother way. “The submission and departure of the Indians,” Claiborne conceded,“had become inevitable.” Eron Rowland, an early historian of Alabama, likewiseexplained Andrew Jackson’s victories over the Creeks in the War of 8 2 as onestep in the certain triumph of the “pale face,” while U. B. Phillips, in his studyof states’ rights in Georgia, concluded that “while not savage,” most Cherokees

Page 15

were nevertheless “heavy and stupid.” What made them so “stupid” for Phillipswas their alleged willingness to live “from hand to mouth, with little ambition tobetter themselves,” sentiments not unlike those expressed by Congressman Wilde

More recently we often have retained the

notion that the West was a blank slate, a

wild frontier rather than peoples’ homeland

on which the aspirations of a new people and

a new nation could be written. After the West

Feliciana’s charter in 1831, this westward rail

line (here, courtesy of the Library of Congress)

later would join Mississippi and Louisiana

at a time when—according to the L.O.C.’s

own description of the archival photograph—

“Mississippi was still a frontier, with

approximately one-half the land in the state

still owned by Indian nations.”




so many years before. 9

Others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, kept alivethe tradition of Whiggish criticism that had originated with the humorists. Ratherthan training it against the expulsions, however, they turned it toward policies putin place by the federal government in the 880s and 890s to allot reservations, dis-mantle tribal governments, and assimilate First Peoples. Horatio B. Cushman usedthe insights he had gained from growing up as the son of missionaries who workedamong the Mississippi Choctaws in the 8 0s to take on popular notions of native“savagery” and of First Peoples’ inability to adapt to the “civilization” of GildedAge America. His History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians located theirstories somewhere between the two extremes that had framed nineteenth-centurythinking about First Peoples—what Cushman called “Conquest or Progress.” Hebelieved that contact was full of nothing but danger for First Peoples, but he sawmore in the dismal story of contact, decline, and conquest than either extinctionor assimilation. He saw people who had persisted and survived, and who hadmaintained their dignity and their honor.20

So, too, did the employees of the Bureau of American Ethnology, who under-took a program known as salvage ethnography—the counterpoint to federal poli-cies of allotment and assimilation—which sought to capture through fieldwork

Page 16

analysis traditional cultures that scholars believed were on the cusp of disappear-ance. Two bureau ethnographers, John R. Swanton and James Mooney, devotedmuch of their careers to interviewing elders about their past practices and beliefsand matching informant reports with historical documents in attempts to recon-struct an image of traditional native cultures. Their anthropology, like Cushman’sautobiography, pointed to a deep regional history of continuity and perseverance,and with the later historical work of Grant Foreman and Angie Debo, a seriouscohort of academics began to call into question the racial and economic impera-tives that had driven federal Indian policy, as well as historical writing, since the8 0s. At the same time, it should be noted, such scholars shared popular notionsof the inevitable assimilation and disappearance of Native peoples.2

To Debo the settlers were “savage” as they “drove the Indians from their homes,burned their houses, stole their livestock, and destroyed their crops.” TurningTurner’s thesis on its head, she raised questions about the impact the expulsionshad on the invaders, for while the government had cleared Creeks “from the path




of the white man,” she worried that “the eager settlers who plowed their fertilefields and built rich cities along their streams never understood the cost of theirexpulsion.” Scholars have yet to fully engage Debo’s query about the expulsions’impact on the invaders, but her work has made it possible for later scholars likeMary E. Young, Arthur H. DeRosier Jr., and Ronald Satz to pick up where JosephGlover Baldwin had left off and expose the chicanery of federal Indian policy.22

Others have looked more closely at the nations themselves. Beginning withCharles Hudson’s canonical The Southeastern Indiansin 9 6, Theda Perdue’s study ofCherokee slavery, J. Leitch Wright Jr.’s multicultural synthesis of southern history,and Michael D. Green’s exploration of the Creeks’ side of the politics of IndianRemoval brought an ethnohistorical tradition of historiography to the study of theSouth. By using anthropological theories of culture to interpret archival sources,these scholars explicated the rhyme and reason of Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, andChickasaw lives and depicted them as complex peoples rather than red-skinnedsavages or pitiable relics.2

In spite of such work, writers of the region’s invader history have remainedfixed in the arguments and interpretations pioneered by Wilde, Old Hickory, andSimms. Progressive historian Thomas Perkins Abernethy set the tone when hedepicted the opening of the Old South as a time when “the Indians were no longerto be feared, a vast expanse of new territory had been cleared of the native title,cotton was in great demand, and a spirit of adventure and speculation took holdupon the country.” Likewise, in 988, historian John Hebron Moore compared theremoval of the Choctaws and the Chickasaws from Mississippi to an emigration,calling it “a bloodless but final victory over the red men.”2

While more recent scholarship has avoided Abernethy’s unguarded optimism,likening early invader life to something out of Hobbes—nasty, brutish, and

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Anthropologist Robbie Ethridge’s recent work on the Creek landscape has shown that the wilderness settlers

thought they were entering was in fact a landscape created and managed by the First Peoples. Attributing Creeks’

or Cherokees’ loss of land to a lack of technology, vitality, or strength of numbers—or to their “ultimate fate”—

extends the reach of Providence into the present. A young Creek man, part of a delegation sent to Washington,

D.C., in 1868, photographed by Antonio Zeno Shindler, Bureau of American Ethnology, courtesy of the National

Anthropological Archives in the Smithsonian Museum Support Center.

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short—we have retained the notion that the West was a blank slate on which theaspirations of a new people and a new nation could be written. “Faced at everyturn by the vagaries of the backcountry,” one historian of Mississippi recently ar-gued, “residents formulated concepts of good citizenship and a good republic thatcelebrate[d] as liberty-loving and virtuous the rough-and-tumble pioneers whocarved from the wilderness a homogenous society of independent like-mindedwhite folk.” Another student of Mississippi’s antebellum history concurred, con-cluding that “men’s pride in their physical conquest of such a savage land im-bued their culture with reverence for personal independence and ferocity but alsofor loyalty to neighbors and kin.” Calling the land a wild frontier rather than apeople’s homeland in effect denies that the pioneers were invaders and that theChoctaws and Chickasaws were humans.25

Anthropologist Robbie Ethridge’s recent book on the Creek landscape hasshown that the wilderness settlers thought they were entering was in fact a land-scape created and managed by the First Peoples. To ensure supplies of the mast

From raising cotton and maize to owning slaves to marketing goods to picking cotton on plantations to taking

inspiration from the New Testament, First Peoples, invaders, and enslaved people lived as neighbors. Seventy

years after expulsion, whites and Native Americans still were attending Sunday school together (here)—but

in the Indian Territory. Photograph by the U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of the Secretary, courtesy

of Wikimedia Commons.



Page 19

that was such an important part of their and their hogs’ diets, native people hadtended for centuries the great stands of oak and hickory that settlers took to beincidental markers of the soil’s fertility. They had placed logs at river fords to easetheir crossing and had blazed the trails and paths that enabled invaders to enterthe “back country.” And hunters’ regular burning of the landscape and women’stending of plants yielded the rich grassy fields, brambles of berries, and clear for-est floors that showed the invaders where they could establish the best farms. Inshort, the invaders did not conquer a savage land; rather, they destroyed commu-nities of people whom they had deemed savage. Attributing Creeks’ or Cherokees’loss of land to their lack of technology, vitality, or strength of numbers, or towhat historian Daniel Dupre called their “ultimate fate,” only extends the reachof Providence further into the historiography of the present and recasts scholar-ship as nationalism. Such apologia cast a divine certainty over the jagged facts ofa revolutionary act of fear, hubris, and violence—the ethnic cleansing of the OldSouth.26

In the recent historiography of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, what often getslost in the division of people into Serbs and Croats or Christians and Muslimsis that, as one scholar has concluded, “the victimization of neighbors is a con-stant element.” Southern historiography is premised on basic social categories likewhite, black, and Indian, and if their use highlights the horrible iniquities of racismand slavery they likewise obscure other social relationships. To think of Indiansas neighbors is difficult given “Indian”’s powerful connotations of otherness, andto see such people as neighbors requires remembering how integrated they werein the region’s life. There were innumerable ties of trade, kinship, violence, andfaith that, before the expulsions, bound First Peoples, invaders, and enslavedpeople into a larger southern society. As Ethridge has argued, the South “wasnot a purely Indian world, nor had it been for almost 00 years. Creek life at theturn of the nineteenth century was so seamlessly stitched to that of frontier whitesand blacks that it is difficult to separate Indian life from the life of others on thefrontier.” From raising cotton and maize to owning slaves to marketing goodsto picking cotton on plantations to taking inspiration from the New Testament,First Peoples, invaders, and enslaved people lived as neighbors in any number ofways that worked against—and, indeed, undermined—the socially constructedidentities of race and civilization that prevailed during the Age of Jackson. Ourmodern commitment to identities like white, black, and Indian may mask the factthat the expulsions were perpetrated against southerners every bit as much as theywere against Indians. Indeed, the language of race sustained the logic behind theexpulsions and still today sustains the ways in which we write about the South’spast.2




“What good man,” President Jackson asked in the address that opened his sec-ond term as president, two years after the Trail of Tears had begun, “would prefer

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“What good man,” President Jackson (here) asked in the address that opened his second term as president, two

years after the Trail of Tears had begun, “would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand

savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the

improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled

with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?” Without a doubt Jackson’s vision held a powerful

appeal in its day, but we have found it equally hard to resist Old Hickory’s reading of the South’s past and future.

Photograph courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Page 21

a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our exten-sive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished withall the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by morethan 2,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civiliza-tion, and religion?” Without a doubt Jackson’s vision held a powerful appeal in itsday. Candidates for office in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi made Removalan electoral issue, proto-Democrat and proto-Whig factions formed around theissue, and citizens responded by putting governors like George Troup, John Mur-phy, and Gerard Brandon, who favored the expulsion of the region’s First Peoples,into positions of power. But, as has been shown, we have found it equally hard toresist Old Hickory’s reading of the South’s past and future.28

A historiography that has constructed First Peoples as either natural obstaclesor as others—neither of which embraces them in the normal flow of the region’shistory and social life—bespeaks the final terrible achievement of the ethniccleansing of the Old South—the cleansing of memory. Students of the South’sNative past have labored long and hard to recover their subjects’ past lives andtheir meaning to the region, but so long as southern history is pitched in terms ofpeople who, by definition, lived beyond the margins of normal southern life andhistory, it will be difficult to make inroads into the historiography of the invaderstates in which white freedom and black slavery operated as the mutually exclusivemodern categories that underpinned the emerging social order. As long as theexclusion of the First Peoples, which such terms sustain, continues to inform thestudy of the Old South, it will always be possible to exclude First Peoples fromany kind of meaningful role in the creation of southern society and to hold to thegreatest lie of Jackson’s day: that the expulsions were a well-intentioned, if at times




harshly executed, attempt to save the South’s First Peoples from their inevitableextinction. As one Choctaw put it, “We shall all die with sheer kindness.”29

The Trail of Tears was neither a natural outcome of the flow of progress nor aregrettable artifact of the Old South’s prehistory when brave men first tamed theland. Removal was an act of ethnic cleansing that, when considered in this way,lays bare what theorist and social critic Dominick LaCapra has described as the“narcissistic investments and desired self-images” that are necessary to perpetu-ate such myths. Put another way, and in words scholar Alain Finkielkraut usedto describe the Holocaust, “A whole people was destroyed, a collectivity disap-peared, and there is no compensation, nor any remedy, for this permanent im-poverishment of human diversity.” 0 Yet, the recovery of the history and memoryof peoples whom anthropologist Charles Hudson once described as “victims ofa virtual amnesia in our historical consciousness” is within reach if we recognizethat the expulsions of the 8 0s did more than save doomed Indians and fulfillGod’s immanent design. They drove neighbors out of their homes, farmers fromtheir fields, Christians from their churches, and elders from their ancestors and,

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The recovery of the history and memory of peoples who have been “victims of a virtual amnesia in our historical

consciousness” is within reach if we recognize that the expulsions of the 1830s did more than save doomed Indians

and fulfill God’s immanent design. They drove neighbors out of their homes, farmers from their fields, Christians

from their churches, and elders from their ancestors and, in the process, laid waste to a multicultural society that

had been in the making since Hernando de Soto first journeyed through the region in the 1540s. Walini, at the

Qualla Boundary in 1888, photographed by James Mooney, Bureau of American Ethnology, courtesy of the


Page 23

in the process, laid waste to a multicultural society that had been in the makingsince Hernando de Soto first journeyed through the region in the 5 0s. Failure torecognize such “facts of New World oblivion,” Handley has suggested, runs therisk of reifying “existing memories of conquest, enslavement, and colonization asnaturally born from history itself, not as selected recollections that have emergedin the context of a struggle among competing powers of representation.”

When Progress stands for historical process a critical interrogation of the pastis impossible. Indeed, far from being an improved society, the South today is animpoverished one, “something left over, that [was] reached by elimination.” Byobliterating from our memory of the region’s past the humanity of the region’sFirst Peoples and their existence as people rather than as impediments to progress,we have become complicit in cultivating a logic of atemporality and inhumanity,




of locating the region’s—and, indeed, the nation’s—origins in a primordial natu-ral world, and of reproducing a history premised on elimination. Such are the hall-marks of how ethnic cleansing is remembered and written about by the societiesthat perpetrated it. However, we all have the capacity to invite the dead to speak,to engage them in the rewording of time, and to arbitrate the pasts they lived andthat we choose either to remember or to forget. 2

notes

The author would like to thank Daniel Feller, Tim Garrison, John Mack Faragher, CatherineDhavernas, and Edward Countryman for their comments and criticisms over the course of severalyears’ worth of rough drafts.

. Register of Debates in Congress, st Session, 2 st Congress, 829– 8 0 (Washington: Gales & Seaton,8 0), 05– , 082– , 0 ; ibid., 2nd Session, 2 st Congress, 8 0– 8 (Washington: Gales & Seaton,8 ), 99 , 02 , 0 0, 095; and The Natchez, 9 June 8 0.

2. U. B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 9 0);Frank L. Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008);Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa: University of AlabamaPress, 989); and Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 999).

. George B. Handley, “A New World Poetics of Oblivion,” in Look Away: The U.S. South in NewWorld Studies, ed. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (Durham: Duke University Press, 200 ), 2 ; andWalter Benjamin, “Philosophie,” Essais: 2 (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 98 ), 98.

. Peter H. Wood, “The Changing Population of the Colonial South: An Overview by Raceand Region, 685– 90,” in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, ed. Peter H. Wood,Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 989), 8;and Ben J. Wattenberg, ed., Statistical History of the United States from Colonial Times to the Present (NewYork: Basic Books, 9 6), 2 , 26, 0.

5. Cathie Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition(London: Routledge, 2002), – 2, , 2 ; Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing inTwentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 200 ), 2– , 0, 9 , 98; NormanCigar, Genocide in Bosnia: The Policy of “Ethnic Cleansing” (College Station: Texas A&M University

Page 24

Press, 995), 6; and W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Modern Library,200 ), .

6. Journal of the Senate of the State of Mississippi at Their Third Session of the General Assembly (Natchez:Richard Langdon, 820), 8, 8–9.

. Mississippi State Gazette, 28 October 820; Federal Writers’ Project, Mississippi: A Guide to theMagnolia State (New York: Hastings House, 9 6), 2 ; and Journal of the House of Representatives of theState of Mississippi at Their Sixth Session (Jackson: Peter Isler, 822), .




8. George Troup to John C. Calhoun, 28 February 82 , reel , Cherokee Agency, Letters Re-ceived, 82 – 88 , Series M2 , Correspondence of the Office of Indian Affairs, Record Group 5,Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, National Archives microfilm; Michael D. Green, Politicsof Indian Removal: Creek Government and Society in Crisis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 982),chs. , ; and Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Georgia (Milledgeville, GA: Camak &Ragland, 826), 0.

9. (Augusta) Constitutionalist, June 825, emphasis in original; “Journal of an Expedition fromWashington to Georgia and the Creek Nation– 82 ,” 9 February 82 , John Rogers Vinton Papers,Special Collections, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, NC, punctuation as inoriginal; John C. Calhoun to Samuel L. Southard, 6 August 825, in Papers of John C. Calhoun, vol.0, ed. Clyde N. Wilson and W. Edwin Hemphill (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,9 ), 8; and John C. Calhoun to Joseph G. Swift, 2 September 825, ibid., 0.

0. Journal of the Senate of the State of Alabama (Cahawba: William B. Allen, 826), 28; Journal of theHouse of Representatives of the State of Alabama (Tuscaloosa: Grantland & Robinson, 82 ), 8 ; andJournal of the House of Representatives of the State of Alabama (Tuscaloosa: McGuire, Henry & McGuire,829), 22 .

. Ronald Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 9 5), ; William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860(Tuscaloosa:University of Alabama Press, 200 [ 9 ]), 00, 2; Anthony Gene Carey, Politics, Slavery, and theUnion in Antebellum Georgia(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 99 ), 2 – ; J. Mills Thornton III,Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,9 8), 22– ; Christopher Olsen, Political Culture and Secession in Mississippi: Masculinity, Honor, and theAntiparty Tradition, 1830–1860 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2; “An act to add the terri-tory lying within the limits of this state, and occupied by the Cherokee Indians, to the countiesof Carroll, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Hall and Habersham; and to extend the laws of this state over thesame, and for other purposes,” Acts of the General Assembly of the State of Georgia(Milledgeville: Camakand Ragland, 829), 88–9; “An act to extend the jurisdiction of the state of Alabama over the Creeknation,” Acts Passed at the Tenth Annual Session of the General Assembly of the State of Alabama (Tuscaloosa:McGuire, Henry and McGuire, 829); and “An act to extend legal process into that part of this state,now occupied by the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes of Indians,” Laws of the State of Mississippi Passedat the Twelfth Session of the General Assembly (Jackson: Peter Isler, 829), 8 – .

2. Register of Debates in Congress, st Session, 2 st Congress, appendix, – 6; and ibid., 2nd Session,2 st Congress, appendix, 9.

. Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 98 ), 222, 226; Robert Remini, The Legacy of Andrew Jack-son: Essays on Democracy, Indian Removal, and Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,988), 5; James Taylor Carson, Searching for the Bright Path: The Mississippi Choctaws from Prehistory toRemoval (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 999), 2 ; Russell Thornton, “The Demographyof the Trail of Tears Period: A New Estimate of Cherokee Population Losses,” in Cherokee Removal:Before and After, ed. William L. Anderson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 99 ), 86, 9 – ; and

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Donna L. Akers, “Removing the Heart of the Choctaw People: Indian Removal from a NativePerspective,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 2 ( 999): 66– , 69, 2.

. Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Mississippi, at Their Sixteenth Session, Held in theTown of Jackson (Jackson: Peter Isler, 8 ), .

5. Charles Hudson, “William Gilmore Simms and the Portrayal of the American Indian: AnEthnohistorical View,” in An Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms,ed. John Caldwell Guilds and Charles Hudson (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,200 ), xli–xlii; Lucy Maddux, Removals: Nineteenth Century American Literature and the Politics of IndianAffairs (New York: Oxford University Press, 99 ), 6, , 2 , 69– 0; Mark David Spence, Dispos-sessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks(New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 999), –5; Charles S. Watson, From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of WilliamGilmore Simms(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 99 ), –5, 55; Sebald, Natural History of Destruction,2; William Gilmore Simms, Richard Hurdis: A Romance of Alabama (Chicago: Belford, Clarke andCompany, 885 [ 8 8]), 65; and ibid., Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction, ed.C. Hugh Holman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 962 [ 8 5]), –6, 8 .

6. William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee: A Romance of Early Carolina (New York: Twayne Pub-lishers, 96 [ 8 5]), 28– 0, 2 0.

. Kenneth Schuyler Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor(Boston, Little and Brown, 960),5 , 58, 65, 8 ; and Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the TallapoosaVolunteers; Together with “Taking the Census” and Other Alabama Sketches, intro. Johanna Nicol Shields(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 99 [ 858]), –5, 6.

8. Joseph Glover Baldwin, The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi: A Series of Sketches, intro.James H. Justus (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 98 [ 85 ]), 2 8.

9. Simms, Views, 8 ; Wilbur R. Jacobs, On Turner’s Trail: 100 Years of Writing Western History (Law-rence: University Press of Kansas, 99 ), 2 ; J. F. H. Claiborne, Mississippi, as a Province, Territoryand State, with Biographical Notices of Eminent Citizens, vol. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 96 [ 880]), 5 0, 50 ; Eron Rowland, Andrew Jackson’s Campaign against the British, or the Mis-sissippi Territory in the War of 1812 (New York: Macmillan Company, 926), 0; and Ulrich B. Phillips,Georgia and State Rights (Macon: Mercer University Press, 98 [ 902]), 0, 50.

20. Horatio B. Cushman, History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians, ed. Angie Debo,intro. Clara Sue Kidwell (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 999 [ 899]), 5 .

2 . Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Lincoln:University of Nebraska, 98 ), 29– ; Regna Darnell, Invisible Genealogies: A History of AmericanistAnthropology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 200 ), –9; John R. Swanton, Early History ofthe Creek Indians & Their Neighbors (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 998); James Mooney,History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees, intro. George Ellison (Asheville, NC: Histori-cal Images, 992); Grant Foreman, Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 989[ 9 2]); Angie Debo, The Road to Disappearance: A History of the Creek Indians (Norman: University ofOklahoma Press, 989 [ 9 ]); and Donna L. Akers, Living in the Land of Death: The Choctaw Nation,1830–1860 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 200 ), xiv–xv.

22. Debo, Road to Disappearance, 00, 0 ; Mary E. Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts and Rednecks (Nor-man: University of Oklahoma Press, 96 ); Arthur H. DeRosier Jr., Removal of the Choctaw Indians(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 9 0); and Satz, American Indian Policy.

2 . Charles Hudson, The Southeastern Indians (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 9 6);Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866 (Knoxville: University of Tennes-see Press, 9 9); J. Leitch Wright, The Only Land They Knew: American Indians in the Old South (NewYork: Free Press, 98 ); and Green, Politics.



Page 26

2 . Thomas Perkins Abernethy, The Formative Period in Alabama, 1815–1828(Tuscaloosa: Universityof Alabama Press, 990 [ 965]), 25; John Hebron Moore, The Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom: Missis-sippi, 1770–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 988), 5.

25. Étienne Balibar, “Algeria, France: One Nation or Two?” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Pro-pinquity, ed. Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (New York: Verson, 999), 66; Bradley Bond, PoliticalCulture in the Nineteenth-Century South: Mississippi, 1830–1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UniversityPress, 995), 5; and Olsen, Political Culture and Secession, .

26. Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 200 ), –5 , 60, 22–2 ; William Warren Rogers, Robert David Ward, LeahRawls Atkins, and Wayne Flint, Alabama: The History of a Deep South State (Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 99 ), ; Daniel Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama,1800–1840 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 99 ), 8; and Walter Benjamin, The Ar-cades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLoughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,999), , 6.

2 . Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing, 9; Bernard S. Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians andOther Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 98 ), ; Ethridge, Creek Country, ; William G.McLoughlin, The Cherokee Ghost Dance(Macon: Mercer University Press, 98 ); ibid., Cherokee Rena-scence in the New Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 986); James Merrell, The Indians’New World: Catawbas and Their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 989); Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, & Slaves in a FrontierExchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 992); Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the CreekIndians, 1733–1816 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 999); Carson, Searching for the BrightPath; ibid., “Greenwood LeFlore: Southern Creole and Choctaw Chief,” Journal of Mississippi His-tory 65 (200 ): 55– ; Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 2002); Cynthia Cumfer, “Local Origins of National Indian Policy: Cherokee andTennessean Ideas about Sovereignty and Nationhood,” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (200 ): 2 – 6;and Joshua Piker, “Colonists and Creeks: Rethinking the Pre-Revolutionary Southern Backcoun-try,” Journal of Southern History 0 (200 ): 50 –5 0.

28. As quoted, Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 98 ), 202; see Mary Young, “The Exercise ofSovereignty in Cherokee Georgia,” Journal of the Early Republic 0 ( 990): –6 ; Fred S. Rolater,“The American Indian and the Origin of the Second American Party System,” Wisconsin Magazineof History 6 ( 99 ): 80–20 ; James Taylor Carson, “State Rights and Indian Removal in Missis-sippi, 8 – 8 5,” Journal of Mississippi History 5 (February 995): 25– 2; and Thornton, Politics andPower, .

29. Carmichael, Ethnic Cleansing, ; and The Natchez, February 8 2.0. Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide (Lincoln: Uni-

versity of Nebraska Press, 998), 90.. Handley, “New World Poetics,” 28.2. Finkielkraut, Future of a Negation, 90; Catherine Dhavernas, Le destinataire ā venir: culture et




planéité ā l’ére du refus (Montréal: XYZ Press, 2005), 20; Derek Walcott, Omeros (London: Faber &Faber, 990), 95; and Benjamin, Arcades Project, 8 .

“the obituary of nations”

Documents

antonio zeno shindler

matching informant reports

hernando de soto

national anthropological archives

james taylor carson

traditional native cultures

joseph glover baldwin

north carolina press