Alabama S Frontiers And The Rise Of The Old South

“A well-written, nicely comprehensive, and inclusive social history of Alabama before and immediately after statehood.”—H-AmIndian Alabama endured warfare, slave trading, squatting, and speculating on its path to becoming America’s twenty-second state, and Daniel S. Dupre brings its captivating frontier history to life in Alabama’s Frontiers and the Rise of the Old South. Dupre’s vivid narrative begins when Hernando de Soto first led hundreds of armed Europeans into the region during the fall of 1540. Although this early invasion was defeated, Spain, France, and England would each vie for control over the area’s natural resources, struggling to conquer it with the same intensity and ferocity that the Native Americans showed in defending their homeland. Although early frontiersmen and Native Americans eventually established an uneasy truce, the region spiraled back into war in the nineteenth century, as the newly formed American nation demanded more and more land for settlers. Dupre captures the riveting saga of the forgotten struggles and savagery in Alabama’s—and America’s—frontier days. “An introduction to the interaction of European powers, the United States, and Indian tribes in Alabama and the Southeast.”—Western Historical Quarterly

The evolution of the United States from a late-18th century coalition of rebel British colonies to a 21st century global superpower was shaped by several forces. As the nation expanded its boundaries after the Treaty of Paris confirmed independence from Great Britain in 1783, it acquired a rich variety of resources – coal, fertile soils, forests, iron ore, oil, precious metals, space, and varied climates as well as extensive tracts of territory. Technological innovations, such as the cotton gin and steam power, enabled entrepreneurs to exploit those resources and create wealth. Federal and state legislators provided environments in which the economy could flourish, and military strategists kept the country safe from external attack. Diplomats negotiated commercial agreements with foreign governments and cultivated multinational alliances that strengthened freedoms. Through its focus on the people and places that shaped the country’s economic and political development and its detailed accounts of the processes that enabled the U.S. to expand across the continent Historical Dictionary of the United States contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 400 cross-referenced entries on important personalities as well as aspects of the country’s politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the United States.

“The compelling story of a colony besieged by meteorological, epidemiological, economic, and manmade catastrophes only to arise like the phoenix.” —Orville Vernon Burton, author of The Age of Lincoln During South Carolina’s settlement, a cadre of men rose to political and economic prominence, while ordinary colonists, enslaved Africans, and indigenous groups became trapped in a web of violence and oppression. John J. Navin explains how eight English aristocrats, the Lords Proprietors, came to possess the vast Carolina grant and then enacted elaborate plans to recruit and control colonists as part of a grand moneymaking scheme. But those plans went awry, and the mainstays of the economy became hog and cattle ranching, lumber products, naval stores, deerskin exports, and the calamitous Indian slave trade. The settlers’ relentless pursuit of wealth set the colony on a path toward prosperity but also toward a fatal dependency on slave labor. Rice would produce immense fortunes in South Carolina, but not during the colony’s first fifty years. Religious and political turmoil instigated by settlers from Barbados eventually led to a total rejection of proprietary authority. Using a variety of primary sources, Navin describes challenges that colonists faced, setbacks they experienced, and the effects of policies and practices initiated by elites and proprietors. Storms, fires, epidemics, and armed conflicts destroyed property, lives, and dreams. Threatened by the Native Americans they exploited, by the Africans they enslaved, and by their French and Spanish rivals, South Carolinians lived in continual fear. For some it was the price they paid for financial success. But for most there were no riches, and the possibility of a sudden, violent death was overshadowed by the misery of their day-to-day existence.

Although the Creeks constitute a sovereign nation today, the concept of the nation meant little to their ancestors in the Native South. Rather, as Steven Peach contends in Rivers of Power, the Creeks of present-day Georgia and Alabama conceptualized rivers as the basis of power, leadership, and governance in early America. An original work of Indigenous ethnohistory, Peach’s book explores the implications of this river-oriented approach to power, in which rivers were a metaphor for the subregional provinces that defined the political textures of Creek country. The provinces nurtured leaders who worked to mitigate dangers across the Native South, including intertribal war, trade dependence, settler intrusion, and land erosion. Rivers of Power describes a system in which these headmen forged remarkably malleable coalitions within and across provinces to safeguard Creek country from harm—but were in turn directed, approved, and contested by local townspeople and kin groups. Taking a unique bottom-up approach to the study of Native Americans, Peach reveals how local actors guided and thwarted Indigenous headmen far more frequently and creatively than has been assumed. He also shows that although the Creeks traced descent through the maternal line, some became more comfortable with bilateral kinship, giving weight to both the paternal and maternal lineages. Fathers and sons thus played greater roles in Creek governance than Indigenous scholarship has acknowledged. Weaving a new narrative of the Creeks and outlining the contours of their riverine mode of governance, this work unpacks the fraught dimensions of political power in the Native South—and, indeed, Native North America—in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By privileging Indigenous thought and intertribal history, it also advances the larger project of Native American history.

"The book documents the maritime history and the 2018/2019 archaeological fieldwork and laboratory and historical research to identify the wreck of notorious schooner Clotilda in Mobile Bay. Clotilda was owned by Alabama businessman Thomas Meaher, who, on a dare, equipped it to carry captured Africans from what is now Benin and bring them to Alabama in 1860, some fifty years after the import of the enslaved was banned. The boat carried perhaps 110 Africans, and, on approaching Mobile Bay, the captives were unloaded and dispersed by river steamer/s to plantations upriver. To hide the evidence, Clotilda was set afire and sunk. Apparently, the site of the wreck was an open secret but lost from memory for a time. Various surveys through the years failed to locate the ship. In 2018, Al.com reporter Ben Raines identified a shipwreck near Twelvemile Island, and the story attracted international attention. Researcher partners, including Delgado and coauthors in the crew, determined that this was not the Clotilda. In 2019, on another investigative mission to locate the Clotilda, Delgado and crew compared the remains of a schooner and determined that it was the Clotilda. The Alabama Historical Commission and the descendent community of Africatown, where survivors of the Clotilda made their lives post-Emancipation, are making plans for commemoration of the site and the remains of the ship, if it is possible to salvage and preserve out of water. The book takes two tacks. First it serves as a nautical biography of Clotilda. After reviewing the maritime trade in and out of Mobile Bay, it places the Clotilda within the larger landscape of American and Gulf of Mexico schooners and covers its career before being used as a slave ship. Delgado et al. reconstruct Clotilda's likely appearance and characteristics. The second tack is the archaeological assessment of the wreck. The book also places the wreck within the context of a ship's graveyard in a "back water" of the Mobile River. Delgado et al. discuss the various searches for Clotilda. Detailing of the forensic and other analyses shows how those involved concluded that this wreck was indeed the Clotilda"--

Ill-Fated Frontier is at once a pioneer adventure and a compelling narrative of the frictions that emerged among entrepreneurial pioneers and their sixty slaves, Indians fighting to preserve their land, and Spanish colonials with their own agenda. Here is a lively and visceral portrait of the wild and enduring American frontier in 1789. The melting pot America would become was barely simmering when an ill-fated attempt to settle land near Natchez in brought together a volatile mix of ambitious Northern pioneers and their slaves, Spanish colonists, and Native Americans who had claimed the land as theirs for hundreds of years. This illuminating episode in American history comes to life in this account of an expedition gone wrong. It began with an optimistic plan to settle and expand in the new territory. It ended ignominiously, with the body of one of the expedition’s leaders returning to New Jersey stored in a pickle barrel. What happened in between—a cautionary tale of greed, incompetence, and hubris—lies at the center of this fascinating account by Harvard historian Samuel A. Forman. Endorsed by New York Times best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick, it is a startling and frank portrait of a young America that examines the dream of an inclusive American experience and its reality—a debate that continues today. Imperious General David Forman, a terror to his Monmouth County, New Jersey, Loyalist neighbors, during the Revolutionary War obtained a large land grant in Natchez, then part of Spanish West Florida. His charge was to establish a plantation that would lure settlers and establish a new American presence. Staying behind in New Jersey David Forman appointed his rotund and gouty older brother Ezekiel as leader of the expedition, his young cousin Samuel S. Forman as its business manager, and a former military aide as overseer of the enslaved African Americans who accompanied them. It did not go well. When the expedition finally reached the new territory it found waiting Spanish colonials who felt the land was theirs and Native Americans who still maintained their sovereignty over the contested lands. When Ezekiel Forman died unexpectedly, David Forman stormed from New Jersey into Natchez to take control of the unraveling situation. He would find on his arrival that those awaiting him had other ideas about who the land actually belonged to. He would return to New Jersey quite dead and pickled in a barrel of rum. Lively, impeccably researched, and rich in details that have escaped the usual tales of American growth and enterprise, Ill-Fated Frontier shines new and entertaining light on what it means to be an American.

War presents the most degraded moral environment humanity creates. It is an arena where individuality is subsumed in collective violence and humanity is obscured as a faceless, merciless enemy pitted against its reflection in an elemental struggle for survival. A barbaric logic has guided the conduct of war throughout history. Yet as Cathal Nolan reveals in this gripping, poignant, and powerful book, even as war can obliterate hope and decency at the grand level it simultaneously produces conditions that permit astonishing exceptions of mercy and shared dignity. Pulling the trigger is usually both the expedient thing and required by war's grim and remorseless calculus. Yet somehow the trigger is not always pulled. A different choice is made. Restraint triumphs. Humanity is rediscovered and honored in a flash of recognition. This book gathers and explores acts of singular mercy, giving them form and substance--across wars, causes, and opposing uniforms. These acts demand our attention not only for the moral uplift they supply but because they challenge assumptions about humanity itself. Rising above ordinary courage, they may ultimately transcend our understanding, entering the realm of the ineffable. Nevertheless, as Nolan shows, acts of mercy in war are not the provenance of saints but of ordinary men and women who perform them at great personal risk. As much or more than the normal war hero stories, we must recognize the extraordinary courage of the merciful in war. Mercy is an exceptional book about exceptions, challenging myths and heroic fabrications, refuting claims to exclusive moral virtue. It reminds us that decency in warfare is also universal, offering a haunting and compellingly humane counternarrative to war's usual inhumane logic.

How the 1863 elections in Perry County changed the course of Alabama's role in the Civil War In his fascinating, in-depth study, Bertis D. English analyzes why Perry county, situated in the heart of a violence-prone subregion, enjoyed more peaceful race relations and less bloodshed than several neighboring counties. Choosing an atypical locality as central to his study, English raises questions about factors affecting ethnic disturbances in the Black Belt and elsewhere in Alabama. He also uses Perry County, which he deems an anomalous county, to caution against the tendency of some scholars to make sweeping generalizations about entire regions and subregions. English contends Perry County was a relatively tranquil place with a set of extremely influential African American businessmen, clergy, politicians, and other leaders during Reconstruction. Together with egalitarian or opportunistic white citizens, they headed a successful campaign for black agency and biracial cooperation that few counties in Alabama matched. English also illustrates how a significant number of educational institutions, a high density of African American residents, and an unusually organized and informed African American population were essential factors in forming Perry's character. He likewise traces the development of religion in Perry, the nineteenth-century Baptist capital of Alabama, and the emergence of civil rights in Perry, an underemphasized center of activism during the twentieth century. This well-researched and comprehensive volume illuminates Perry County's history from the various perspectives of its black, interracial, and white inhabitants, amplifying their own voices in a novel way. The narrative includes rich personal details about ordinary and affluent people, both free and unfree, creating a distinctive resource that will be useful to scholars as well as a reference that will serve the needs of students and general readers.