Unsettling the South: War, Expansion, and Slavery in the Southern United States, 1780-1840

"Unsettling the South" is a history of the first half-century of US expansion in the southern interior. It traces how debt, land sales, road building, war making, and migration transformed the United States from an indebted former colony into an expanding empire dependent on plantation slavery. It tells this history not only from the point of view of US-Americans but also from the perspectives of American Indian polities and enslaved African Americans. "Unsettling the South" challenges narratives that assume US dominion spread inexorably across the southern interior. Drawing on methods from environmental history, the history of capitalism, settler colonial studies, Native studies, and the history of slavery, the dissertation reveals the contradictions and conflicts produced by settlement and shows how they fractured both US and American Indian polities. In particular, it argues that disorder and autonomy---attributes usually ascribed to American Indian polities and blamed for those polities' distresses---were actually characteristic of the United States and US-American settlers. The trick of US settler colonialism in the southern interior was that it demanded strong centralized governments of southern American Indian polities, while at the same time, allowing US settlers, statesmen, and armies high degrees of autonomy. Finally, "Unsettling the South" demonstrates how the worlds of slaveholders, aspiring planters, and enslaved people were intertwined with American Indians. Enslaved people, driven into the southern interior, often passed through Creek, Chickasaw, and Choctaw country. Their owners and traders rode along paths made during the US-Creek War and settled near US forts and former American Indian towns. The cotton kingdom and its master-slave relationships took shape within a changing American Indian South.