Reprint of the original, first published in 1859. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost.
Indian scout, friend of General Andrew Jackson, and a slave owner, General Thomas S. Woodward was an active participant in the Muskogee Creek Indian Wars. During a two-year period, 1857-1859, he submitted letters to J. J. Hooker, editor of the Montgomery, Alabama Mail correcting errors, misinformation and the romanticized versions of the history of the period he found in Colonel Albert James Pickett's History of Alabama. The editor, with his permission, published those letters periodically, and after Woodward's death in December 1859, as a collection of reminiscences. Gifted with a remarkable memory, he wrote letters filled with first-hand details of the period that ended with the Indian Removal Act, by which the United States Government, under President Andrew Jackson, expropriated the remainder of Muskogee lands in Georgia and Alabama. In his letters he shows himself both ironic and amused at his own role in those events and does not apologize for his life. He records his admiration for some of those on both sides of the conflicts, Creeks, Mixed-blood, and Whites. As an historian, he was honest and fair, but a man molded by his time and place.And, as he says in his last letter published during his lifetime: "Peace to the Good and Brave."
The book, Woodward'S Reminiscences Of The Creek Or Muscogee Indians: Contained In Letters To Friends In Georgia And Alabama, has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.
At its height the Creek Nation comprised a collection of multiethnic towns and villages with a domain stretching across large parts of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. By the 1830s, however, the Creeks had lost almost all this territory through treaties and by the unchecked intrusion of white settlers who illegally expropriated Native soil. With the Jackson administration unwilling to aid the Creeks, while at the same time demanding their emigration to Indian territory, the Creek people suffered from dispossession, starvation, and indebtedness. Between the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs and the arrival of detachment six in the West in late 1837, nearly twenty-three thousand Creek Indians were moved—voluntarily or involuntarily—to Indian territory. Rivers of Sand fills a substantial gap in scholarship by capturing the full breadth and depth of the Creeks’ collective tragedy during the marches westward, on the Creek home front, and during the first years of resettlement. Unlike the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which was conducted largely at the end of a bayonet, most Creeks were relocated through a combination of coercion and negotiation. Hopelessly outnumbered military personnel were forced to make concessions in order to gain the compliance of the headmen and their people. Christopher D. Haveman’s meticulous study uses previously unexamined documents to weave narratives of resistance and survival, making Rivers of Sand an essential addition to the ethnohistory of American Indian removal.
From the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, Georgia's racial order shifted from the somewhat fluid conception of race prevalent in the colonial era to the harsher understanding of racial difference prevalent in the antebellum era. In Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750--1860, Watson W. Jennison explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, arguing that long-term structural and demographic changes account for this transformation. Jennison traces the rise of rice cultivation and the plantation complex in low country Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century and charts the spread of slavery into the up country in the decades that followed. Cultivating Race examines the "cultivation" of race on two levels: race as a concept and reality that was created, and race as a distinct social order that emerged because of the specifics of crop cultivation. Using a variety of primary documents including newspapers, diaries, correspondence, and plantation records, Jennison offers an in-depth examination of the evolution of racism and racial ideology in the lower South.
!--StartFragment-- Examines a small part of slavery’s North American domain, the lower Chattahoochee river Valley between Alabama and Georgia In the New World, the buying and selling of slaves and of the commodities that they produced generated immense wealth, which reshaped existing societies and helped build new ones. From small beginnings, slavery in North America expanded until it furnished the foundation for two extraordinarily rich and powerful slave societies, the United States of America and then the Confederate States of America. The expansion and concentration of slavery into what became the Confederacy in 1861 was arguably the most momentous development after nationhood itself in the early history of the American republic. This book examines a relatively small part of slavery’s North American domain, the lower Chattahoochee river Valley between Alabama and Georgia. Although geographically at the heart of Dixie, the valley was among the youngest parts of the Old South; only thirty-seven years separate the founding of Columbus, Georgia, and the collapse of the Confederacy. In those years, the area was overrun by a slave society characterized by astonishing demographic, territorial, and economic expansion. Valley counties of Georgia and Alabama became places where everything had its price, and where property rights in enslaved persons formed the basis of economic activity. Sold Down the River examines a microcosm of slavery as it was experienced in an archetypical southern locale through its effect on individual people, as much as can be determined from primary sources. Published in cooperation with the Historic Chattahoochee Commission and the Troup County Historical Society. !--EndFragment--
Slavery existed in North America long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. For centuries, from the pre-Columbian era through the 1840s, Native Americans took prisoners of war and killed, adopted, or enslaved them. Christina Snyder's pathbreaking book takes a familiar setting for bondage, the American South, and places Native Americans at the center of her engrossing story. Indian warriors captured a wide range of enemies, including Africans, Europeans, and other Indians. Yet until the late eighteenth century, age and gender more than race affected the fate of captives. As economic and political crises mounted, however, Indians began to racialize slavery and target African Americans. Native people struggling to secure a separate space for themselves in America developed a shared language of race with white settlers. Although the Indians' captivity practices remained fluid long after their neighbors hardened racial lines, the Second Seminole War ultimately tore apart the inclusive communities that Native people had created through centuries of captivity. Snyder's rich and sweeping history of Indian slavery connects figures like Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe with little-known captives like Antonia Bonnelli, a white teenager from Spanish Florida, and David George, a black runaway from Virginia. Placing the experiences of these individuals within a complex system of captivity and Indians' relations with other peoples, Snyder demonstrates the profound role of Native American history in the American past.
The August 30, 1813, massacre at Fort Mims left hundreds dead and ultimately changed the course of American history. The Indian victory shocked and horrified a young America, ushering in a period of violence surrounded by racial and social confusion. Fort Mims became a rallying cry, calling Americans to fight their assailants and avenge the dead. In A Conquering Spirit, Waselkov thoroughly explicates the social climes surrounding this tumultuous moment in early American history with a comprehensive collection of illustrations, artifact photographs, and detailed accounts of every known participant in the attack on Fort Mims. These rich and extensive resources make A Conquering Spirit an invaluable collection for any reader interested in America's frontier era. * Winner of the Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year award by the Alabama Library Association* Winner of the Clinton Jackson Coley award from the Alabama Historical Association