Book Description

"In 1823, Tennessee historian John Haywood encapsulated a foundational sentiment among the white citizenry of Tennessee when he wrote of a 'long continued course of aggression and sufferings' between whites and Native Americans. According to F. Evan Nooe, 'aggression' and 'sufferings' are broad categories that can be used to represent the framework of factors contributing to the coalescence of the white South. Traditionally, the concept of coalescence is an anthropological model used to examine the transformation of Indigenous communities in the eastern woodlands from chieftaincies to Native tribes, confederacies, and nations in response to colonialism. Applying this concept to white Southerners, Nooe argues that through the experiences and selective memory of settlers in the antebellum South, white Southerners incorporated their aggression against and suffering at the hands of the Indigenous peoples of the Southeast in the coalescence of a regional identity built upon the violent dispossession of the Native South.This, in turn, formed the development of Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century. Geographically, 'Aggression and Sufferings' prioritizes events in the frontier territories of Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama. Nooe considers how divergent systems of violence and justice between Native Americans and white settlers (such as blood revenge and concepts of honor) functioned in the emergent region and examines the involved societies' conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Nooe then investigates the contemporary and historically interconnected consequences of a series of murders of encroaching white settlers by a faction of the Creek nation known as the 'Red Sticks' in the years preceding the 1813 Creek War. Each episode was connected to immediate grievances by Native Southerners against white colonialism, while white Southerners looked upon the incidents as confirmation of Native savagery. Nooe considers the effort by the burgeoning white population to combat the Red Sticks in the Creek War of 1813-1814 and explains how chroniclers of the white South's past memorialized the 1813 Creek War as a regional conflict. Next, Nooe explores the events between the August 1814 Treaty of Fort Jackson to the September 1823 Treaty of Moultrie Creek to evaluate the implications of persistent low-level white-Native conflict in a period traditionally interpreted as the end to the Creek War. He then examines how the Florida Indians' resistance to their expulsion from the South sparked a unifying call to arms from white communities across the region. Finally, Nooe explores how white Southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as innocent victims in the violent expulsion of the region's Native peoples before concluding with notes on how this emerging sense of regional history and identity (which ignored the interests and agency of enslaved and free Black people in the early nineteenth century South) continued to flower into the Antebellum period, during Western expansion, and well into the twentieth century. Readers interested in Southern, Indigenous, and Early American history will find a thorough, scholarly examination of the tensions and violence between Natives and white settlers and the construction of a regional memory of white victimization by white Southerners during this period. 'Aggression and Sufferings' speaks to scholarship on settler-colonialism, violence, Native dispossession, white identity, historical memory and monuments, and Southern Studies"--