A bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood, honor, and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity 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 a precursor to Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century. Geographically, Aggression and Sufferings prioritizes events in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, 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 region and examines the involved societies’ conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Finally, Nooe explores how white southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as both victims and heroes in the violent expulsion of the region’s Native peoples from their homelands. This constructed sense of regional history and identity continued to flower into the antebellum period, during western expansion, and well through the twentieth century.

In the mid-1840s, Warner McCary, an ex-slave from Mississippi, claimed a new identity for himself, traveling around the nation as Choctaw performer ""Okah Tubbee."" He soon married Lucy Stanton, a divorced white Mormon woman from New York, who likewise claimed to be an Indian and used the name ""Laah Ceil."" Together, they embarked on an astounding, sometimes scandalous journey across the United States and Canada, performing as American Indians for sectarian worshippers, theater audiences, and patent medicine seekers. Along the way, they used widespread notions of ""Indianness"" to disguise their backgrounds, justify their marriage, and make a living. In doing so, they reflected and shaped popular ideas about what it meant to be an American Indian in the mid-nineteenth century. Weaving together histories of slavery, Mormonism, popular culture, and American medicine, Angela Pulley Hudson offers a fascinating tale of ingenuity, imposture, and identity. While illuminating the complex relationship between race, religion, and gender in nineteenth-century North America, Hudson reveals how the idea of the ""Indian"" influenced many of the era's social movements. Through the remarkable lives of Tubbee and Ceil, Hudson uncovers both the complex and fluid nature of antebellum identities and the place of ""Indianness"" at the very heart of American culture.

This book uses travel as a lens to observe the Creek world turning into the Old South. In ""Creek Paths and Federal Roads"", Angela Pulley Hudson offers a new understanding of the development of the American South by examining travel within and between southeastern Indian nations and the southern states, from the founding of the United States until the forced removal of southeastern Indians in the 1830s. During the early national period, Hudson explains, settlers and slaves made their way along Indian trading paths and federal post roads, deep into the heart of the Creek Indians' world. Hudson focuses particularly on the creation and mapping of boundaries between Creek Indian lands and the states that grew up around them; the development of roads, canals, and other internal improvements within these territories; and the ways that Indians, settlers, and slaves understood, contested, and collaborated on these boundaries and transit networks. While she chronicles the experiences of these travelers - Native, newcomer, free, and enslaved - who encountered one another on the roads of Creek country, Hudson also places indigenous perspectives squarely at the center of southern history, shedding new light on the contingent emergence of the American South.

A bold reconceptualization of how settler expansion and narratives of victimhood, honor, and revenge drove the conquest and erasure of the Native South and fed the emergence of a distinct white southern identity 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 a precursor to Confederate identity and its later iterations in the long nineteenth century. Geographically, Aggression and Sufferings prioritizes events in South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia, 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 region and examines the involved societies’ conflicting standards on how to equitably resolve interpersonal violence. Finally, Nooe explores how white southerners constructed, propagated, and perpetuated harrowing tales of colonizers as both victims and heroes in the violent expulsion of the region’s Native peoples from their homelands. This constructed sense of regional history and identity continued to flower into the antebellum period, during western expansion, and well through the twentieth century.